Image detectives - Peckham Grove

London in Photographs - an online volunteer project at LMA

Our regular readers may remember that since 2020 we have been running a remote volunteer project which involves identifying and describing tens of thousands of images of nineteenth- and twentieth-century London. All of them are digitised and available on our London Picture Archive website. Originally known as the ‘LCC Photograph Project’ – since all the photographs were taken by the London County Council for administrative purposes – it has recently been rebranded as ‘London in Photographs’.

Three years on, with the involvement of over 50 volunteers as well as many staff members, the project is almost 80% complete: out of 695 boxes, each containing between 100 and 200 photographs, 550 have been researched and described, providing our users with a more informative and searchable visual resource for exploring the history of London.

One of the most satisfying aspects of the image researcher’s job is identifying and correcting originally mislabelled images. A case in point is image 56802 from one of the Camberwell boxes. Our volunteer Chaz Kinnear realised straightaway that the original laconic description - 40-46 Southampton Way - could not be correct, not least because the image shows a pair of semi-detached houses rather than a range of buildings. With no street sign or house numbers visible in the image and Google Maps street view offering no solution either, he could not work out where they were. In Chaz’s own words:

On closer inspection of image 56802, I could see the words 'Brit...' and 'Lau...' on the garage door so I guessed that it might have been 'British Laundry'. A lucky guess, as a search for 'British' and 'Laundry' threw up the following in the (fascinating) National Federation of Launderers Handbook 1929:

'Nicholl, J. (Nicholl Bros.), The British Lion Laundry, 52, Peckham Grove, S.E.'

I knew that Peckham Grove was off Southampton Way so I knew I was in the right area. Sure enough, houses at 40-46 Peckham Grove still exist and they match the buildings in the picture (and are Grade II listed).

I do love solving mysteries!

As a result of Chaz’s eye for detail, the image description could be changed from the misleading 40-46 Southampton Way to:

'View of a linked pair of villas at 44-46 Peckham Grove, Peckham. The houses are two storey with sash windows and a Doric prostyle porch entrance to number 46. At the left of the image is a partial view of 48-52 Peckham Grove with obscured signage on a garage door (reading 'British Lion Laundry', operated by Nicholl Bros.) An Austin A30 is parked in the left foreground with a Hillman Super Minx directly in front of it. Numbers 40-46, and railings attached to number 44, were Grade II listed in 1972; listing number 1385757.'

We are currently looking for more volunteers to help us with the London in Photographs project, so if you would like to offer your time and research skills, or just find out more about it, we would love to hear from you, email us at support@londonpicturearchive.org.uk