This Saturday sees the opening of An Inland Voyage, an exhibition of 43 remarkable photographs by Robert Longden, at The Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry.
It runs until Aug 30th, and admission is free. Download now a free pdf leaflet describing the exhibition and its associated events during the summer.
These remarkable 1940s post-war pictures - of working boats and boat people in Coventry and at Hawkesbury Junction - are already well known from A Canal People, the 1997 book (with commentary by Sonia Rolt) which first brought them to light.
Yesterday's Guardian has a good article on the exhibition here, with a slideshow of some of the images here.
The exhibition is being curated by Stephen Pochin, the great-grandson of Robert Longden.
Appropriately, Stephen is a graphic design professional and picture restorer in his own right, and he's not only reprinted these remarkable images, but wandered the towpath and recorded his own images of the scene as it is today.
He's also persuaded Stoke Bruerne Canal Museum to loan a selection of original working boat artefacts, the better to give context to the pictures.
What surprised me was that the images aren't from conventional negatives as I'd expected, but 3 1/4" square glass lantern slide positives, taken on what was (by modern standards) very unwieldy equipment, and developed at home in his understairs cupboard.
And presumably that made them harder to restore, not least because the exhibition prints are 39" square.
There's also a great article about the show by Stephen in the forthcoming issue of Waterways World. (It's worth buying for that alone.)
This post is an opportunity for me to trot out some of my own photos of Hawkesbury Junction. Oh, all right, just the one, of Hawkesbury Junction at dusk. One's plenty.
You've seen this before, but I do love dusk.
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