Robert Longden photographs

[Saltduck]

Thee is an exhibition of Robert Longden's photographs of Life on the Coventry and Oxford canals at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry

 

An Inland Voyage

 

Life on the Coventry and Oxford canals.

 

Inland Voyage reveals the remarkable photographic archive of Coventry factory worker, Robert Longden. During the late 1940s and early 1950s he documented an intimate history of a working life now long gone.

The photographs record the narrow boat people he encountered on the waterways, including at Coventry's power station and at Sutton Stop canal junction near Hawkesbury. They catch forever the moment of transformation which saw canals change from being industrial thoroughfares to locations for leisure.

Longden's archive has been especially digitally restored and printed for this exhibition. Suitable for all ages, all children must be accompanied by an adult.

 

http://www.theherbert.org/index.php/home/w...n-inland-voyage

 

The exhibition was discussed in The Guardian

 

Photography exhibition reveals life on the canals in the 1940s and 50s

Robert Longden's evocative pictures of working life on Britain's inland waterways of the 1940s and 50s are being shown for the first time

 

guardian.co.uk

 

It seems fitting that the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry should be hosting an exhibition of Robert Longden's evocative pictures of working life on the inland waterways of the 1940s and 50s. Longden's employer was Sir Alfred Herbert, a local philanthropist who ran the biggest machine-tool company in the world from a factory that backed on to the Coventry canal. Both men died in 1957. Herbert bequeathed the gallery to the city and Longden's photographs are about to be shown there for the first time.

 

"They've gone the full circle," says his great-grandson Stephen Pochin, a London-based artist and photographer who has spent many months cleaning and digitally enhancing the lantern slides that were once Longden's props as he gave talks as president of the Coventry Amateur Photography Society. The 43 large prints capture a way of life that was coming to an end as Longden framed the boat people in the viewfinder of his Leica camera.

 

Two years before Longden's death, aged 78, councillors in Coventry were clamouring to fill in the waterways and cover them with Tarmac. Thankfully, a local canal preservation society was formed to fight the plans, and they won a reprieve. Today the Canal basin warehouses are full of artists' studios, and there are more than 30 pieces of public art along the five-mile stretch to Sutton Stop, where the Coventry and Oxford canals converge.

 

Full text at

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jun...s-1940s-longden

[Josher]

Hi Saltduck,

 

Thanks for that, but there is a thread in History and Heritage here.