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Shop art in Brighton |
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Last week's pictures lamented the decline of traditional cafes, under attack by corporate coffee chains. A similar fate faces independent shops, but this week's feature celebrates the continuing vitality of individual retailing in at least one small part of England - Brighton's North Laine district. North Laine shop art shows how signs, murals and sculptures liven up streets that still - at least for the time being - avoid the dead hand of chain store blandness. All the pictures were taken in February 2007. |
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Last week's pictures were about cafes |
| There's been a lot of comment recently about the amazing growth of coffee shops. If you stand in London's Regent Street, apparently, you now have 166 branches of Starbucks within a five-mile radius. That chain only opened its first outlet here in 1998, but has been so successful it is annually adding 50 new prime locations where you can drink its over-priced and insipid lattes. People must like these places, though the demographics suggest they are not visited by either the poor or the old. The trouble is that the rise of Starbucks (and the other corporate coffee chains) means the closure of old-fashioned cafes that have for years served their local communities less glamorously but much cheaper. Last week's picture set focused on the disappearing world of caffs and cafes. They are about life not lifestyle and I suppose, sadly, that's why they are doomed. |
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Other recent pictures of the week |
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The picture set a fortnight ago took a look at horses. Wikipedia describes them as "odd-toed ungulates of the order Perissodactyla, a relatively ancient group of browsing and grazing animals that first arose less than 10 million years after the dinosaurs became extinct". So they'd been around a long time before we learnt to domesticate and use them for everything from ploughing fields to the 3.30 at Kempton Park. An English writer called Naomi Royde Smith, now otherwise entirely forgotten, wrote the couplet that went "I know two things about the horse, and one of them is rather coarse". She never said what it was, which is rather a shame. The subject three weeks ago was cows. They had been in the news - and none too favourably. First off, the Daily Mail ran a bovine scoop about the arrival in Britain of Dundee Paradise, a calf said to have been cloned from the ear of a champion Holstein in Wisconsin. The advantage of this, as might be expected, is entirely commercial. Cloning can create huge cows producing 70 pints of milk a day (30-40% above the norm). Then, if such monstrous and unnatural gushers were not enough, there's the alarming contribution of the world's cows to global warming and the end of civilisation as we (and the Daily Mail) know it. Because of their four-chambered stomachs, they can fart up to 600 litres of methane daily. That's enough, apparently, to fill 40 party balloons. What with all that milk and fart gas, it's going to be quite a party. A mad world, and we're not talking just about the cows. The pictures four weeks ago were about funny shop names. These can be intentional or unintentional and certain retail trades seem much more prone to them than others. Shoe shops and hairdressers, for some reason, are especially fond of puns. Clothes shops will often go for an amusing moniker to stand out from the crowd. Independents are more likely to risk a funny name than multiples, though that didn't stop Richard Branson with Virgin or Anita Roddick with Body Shop. Undertakers, obviously, are not going to want anyone laughing at their names. That was why, when the first Body Shop opened in Brighton in 1976, the undertaker opposite tried (unsuccessfully) to get it closed because he thought the name would upset his (living) customers. His building now sells army surplus clothing and the place next door is called Wai Kika Moo Kau. But that's another story - it's a restaurant. |
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About this site and picture library |
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There are now over 48000 images in the library and they can all be keyword searched from the picture search page. New or updated subjects include shop decoration, cafes, horses, cows, shop names, post boxes and wrecked cars. The site has several ways to help make relevant and fruitful searches, including index pages for both subjects and events & places. There is also a useful search guide and information page. A good showcase of the type and range of photography available can be explored in the pictures of the week series. Published on the site since December 2001, this now totals more than 2400 images. Every week there is a set of ten pictures about a particular place, event or theme. Almost all the library's pictures are available for personal or commercial reproduction. Digital files can be delivered by email or CD, prices start from as little as £8 and there is further information on the prices and terms & conditions pages. You can also contact David Gray for quotations and availability for new photography commissions. |
