Shepherd's Bush Behind the Scenes is an affectionate compilation of 240 images from postcards and photographs of Shepherd's Bush at the beginning of the twentieth century. Edwardian and 1920s images blend to give a visual tour of London's Shepherd's Bush a hundred years ago, highlighting residents 'behind the scenes' with wonderful names. This book takes you from Shepherd's Bush Green to Askew Road and from Brook Green to Wood Lane and on to and what you might have seen during a day at the Franco-British Exhibition in 1908, at 'The Great White City'.
Publication date 28 April 2016.
128 pages
240 images
ISBN 9780955665967
£14.99
Available from all good bookshops
SHEPHERD"S BUSH BEHIND THE SCENES
If you had been wandering around London’s Shepherd’s Bush a hundred years ago, you might well have bumped into Miss Tiffin and Mrs Manners, Joseph Songest and Edward Doebedoe, Jane Evening and Helena Slipper, Mr Sherlock, Miss Watson and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. You might have come here to see Charlie Chaplin or Marie Lloyd perform at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, heard tales of highwaymen at The Wellington Arms, or cheered Queen’s Park Rangers at Loftus Road. You might have run around in the new Wormholt Park, ridden a tram along Askew Road, or travelled to Wood Lane on the Twopenny Tube.
If you had been here in 1908, you might also have been one of 8 million visitors to ‘The Great White City’, the name the public gave to the white palaces, pavilions and pagodas of the Franco-British Exhibition held that year in Shepherd’s Bush. You might have been here for the 1908 London Olympic Games as well and seen Dorando’s sensational Marathon Race.
If you had been here then, you would have bought postcards. This was the golden age of the postcard, when they were sent and delivered as frequently as you or I might send an email today. Postcard printers took photographs of your street so that you would send them around the country to family and friends to say “Look! This is where I live, where I work or where I visited today.” Postcards were often ‘Real Photo’ cards, a photograph on one side with the backing of a postcard which meant they were perfect for collecting in an album. Luckily for us, cards have survived and it has been a pleasure to go looking for them at auctions and online to collect them again.
This collection contains more than two hundred and forty images of Shepherd’s Bush, from the Edwardian era to the 1920s, and I have added a commentary to highlight the people who lived and worked in Shepherd’s Bush at the beginning of the twentieth century. Seeing familiar streets in postcards from all those years ago makes me wonder about the past overlapping with the present: how we may walk in someone else’s footsteps, turn the same street corner, pass the same shop and cross the same road, and do all this a century apart. It is a ghostly sense of history that holds a fascination for me and I hope for you too.
As a contributor to The Hill magazine, I wrote about some on Notting Hill’s most creative and eccentric inhabitants for the local history column. In the last ten years, the Edwardian residents of West London have featured in my books, the famous and more often the not-so-famous residents, the people dear to my heart, living behind the scenes.
Shepherd’s Bush became a centre for entertainment a century ago, with music hall, cinema, theatre, film studios and then television. The Shepherd’s Bush Empire is a proud reminder of that time. Events at the Franco-British Exhibition and the 1908 Olympics at ‘The Great White City’ today give us street names to remember them by: Dorando Close, White City Close, Exhibition Close and many more.
The challenge of this book has been the visual tour around Shepherd’s Bush, ordering scenes as they appear on the map. It has been great to find images which show more streets off the main roads so that today’s residents can feel involved. Looking through records at Hammersmith & Fulham Local Studies and Archives, the census records at the National Archives at Kew, old newspaper stories at the British Library and searching through beautiful postcard collections has been made happy by the discovery of each and every person and every image. Instead of an index, I have put names in bold type. I hope that the current and former residents of Shepherd’s Bush will see their grandparents or great grandparents in these photographs or find out who was living in their street a century ago.
SHEPHERD’S BUSH BEHIND THE SCENES was written for you. All that is left for me to say is that I really hope you enjoy this book and that if you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to contact Behindthescenespublishing.com
All good wishes!
Hermione Cameron
