London History, Up Close
Blogs inspired by Cobble's audio walks
Julia Margaret Cameron at the V&A: The Woman Who Started Photography at 48 and Changed It Forever
Cameron picked up the camera late, and her 'out-of-focus portraits' drew ire. But the V&A own over 850 Cameron photos, and she's still a photography giant.
The Victoria and Albert Museum holds over 850 photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron in its collections. This is remarkable for several reasons, but perhaps the most striking is that Cameron didn’t touch a camera until she was 48 years old. She had less than two decades to create a body of work that established her as one of the most influential photographers in history. She did it by ignoring almost everything professional photographers told her. Cameron worked in a converted henhouse,...
moreBloomsbury’s Suffragette Street: Lady Constance Lytton and the Community of Duke’s Road
Lytton, who went under cover to show the women's suffrage debate was about class as well as gender, lived in Bloomsbury amongst sisters in the struggle.
Standing on Duke’s Road in Bloomsbury today, you’ll see St Pancras New Church and its caryatids on one side, and a pale-blue Premier Inn on the other. With apologies to the building’s architect and those running the day-to-day hotel operations, the Premier Inn appears functional and unremarkable. Nothing about it suggests that this site was once a terrace of modest flats where some of Britain’s most radical women planned their campaigns for the vote. Between 1910 and 1912,...
moreThe Bloomsbury Barrister Who Defended the Indefensible: Charles Phillips and the Ethics of Advocacy
Gordon Square was home to Charles Phillips, a firebrand barrister and anti-death penalty campaigner, who was defined by a controversial case and notorious execution.
Gordon Square sits at the heart of Bloomsbury, one of those elegant Georgian enclaves where the houses seem to breathe history. Number 39, with its pale brick façade and black number plate beneath the balcony, looks out over the central gardens. Its quiet, dignified, and, amidst many other beautiful Cubitt-style Bloomsbury dwellings, unremarkable at first glance. But Charles Phillips lived here from 1847 until his death in 1859, and by the time he arrived, he was already famous. Phillips...
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