London’s South Bank – the history, by Mireille Galinou

We receive many books about London into the LMA library and here Jeremy Smith highlights a new acquisition. Mireille Galinou’s new book about the South Bank (published by Your London Publishing) rather stands out from the crowd, refusing to sit in any obvious box. This weighty book (584 pages) takes the reader on a quest to identify, and then inhabit the spirit of the district it covers. It seeks to present London’s South Bank through the eyes of lived experience. This is unusual enough, but it is the close dialogue between illustrations and text that we seek to highlight.

There have always been books where the illustrations are the main event, with text providing a supporting role. Works such as Overton’s Prospects (1720) or West and Toms’ Ancient Churches of London (1736) consist of full- page engravings with little or no pretence of a narrative history or survey.

Mireille’s book is also image led but in a quite different way. She takes her cue from the images themselves – so they drive her text. As she puts it (but more succinctly) in her introduction, the idea of the images dragooned into use retrospectively, as mere illustration for the points made, would be completely anathema to her way of thinking.

This is an approach to delight any curator or archivist looking after a graphics collection. And this is surely no surprise given that Mireille herself was just such a person at the Museum of London for more than 20 years.

The book explores how different patches of the area we define (or sometimes ill-define) as the South Bank would have seemed to those living and working there at different points in history. What were the changes they would have noticed, the specific atmosphere, or the sense of relationship to London as a whole? This is an unusually subjective approach - and one for which the LMA is delighted to have provided many of the book’s generous quota images. More than 70 illustrations are sourced from LMA. Not just selected from our images database (the London Picture Archive) but also parish plans, manorial plans and previously unpublished prints and photographs.

The selection of images extended over many months and Mireille’s name made frequent appearances in the inboxes of the LMA Digital Services Team. Her choices were very precise, sometimes very small details from larger works, map details or tiny jigsaw pieces from massive panoramas which would interact with her text. Nothing was random.

On occasions new photography was needed to fulfil the author’s brief and Jakub and Steph of the photographic staff were alternately bemused and pleased by the specificity of her requests. The results of the care and skill of them all can be seen just by leafing the pages of London’s South Bank. Each section of description and historical explanation is preceded by a telling detail to let the reader enter the world that the chapter then considers.

Mireille Galinou reports being happy with this LMA’s reprographics services:

“the service was frankly first class” and “Collage (London Picture Archive) will always be my first port of call”

Her background in art history means that there are constant cultural diversions into the art, film, and photography that this area inspired.

London’s South Bank - the history, by Mireille Galinou is published by Your London Publishing at £35. It can be consulted in the LMA Information Area (new books shelves).