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| A12, Leytonstone, January 16th 2024 |
Two years ago I made a series of posts about my photographs of the M11 Link Road, posting on the dates on which I had taken the original pictures in 1993 and 1994, thirty years on, but with comparison photographs I had taken of the same locations twenty years later, already ten years old. I took new photographs then as well, but, apart from a set of pictures taken in August, I didn't post those at the time. I recently came across the scans of some of the negatives from 2024, mislaid through switching desktop computers. I had taken colour photographs in January 1994 (and in 2014; the post 'SQUIBB' compares these), so did the same in January 2024; the 16th of the month, the date I had taken the original pictures, was a Monday, a working day in 2024, which meant a detour to take the photographs before going to work, and, being January, the first photographs were taken just before sunrise. I got the handful of photographs I had wanted; the day before, I'd also taken a set as security, of the same locations as well as some in Wanstead which felt like too far in the wrong direction to shoot before work.
The image at the top of this post looks across the A12 (known as the M11 Link Road during its construction) towards the remaining sections of Dyers Hall Road, replicating one of the shots from 1994; in 2024, I also waited for a train to cross the railway bridge (the rebuilding of which–the green section–had been one of the first visible signs of the coming of the road), something I'd photographed in black and white a couple of weeks earlier in 1994 (the colour photograph from 1994 is first below).
The most striking images from January 1994 were those taken on Claremont Road; Claremont Road was almost entirely swallowed up by the new road, and now exists as a very short dead-end stub. A few new houses have been squeezed into the space between the houses and gardens on Grove Green Road and the A12 itself, with its characteristic yellow and red brick wall. In the previous post, I had reckoned that my position in the picture of the new houses would overlap with that of the partially demolished house from 1994 at the top of that post; see the pairing below. I think the short driveway in the middle of the picture from 2024 should roughly match up with the two doorways to the left of the photograph from 1994.
What I didn't notice in 2014, when I took the photographs after a twenty year gap, is that there was a small section of the original houses on Claremont Road still surviving, like a remnant of Roman Wall sandwiched between contemporary buildings such as one might find in the City of London; I photographed this on the Sunday; the shot below (with detail) is taken to the left of that immediately above.
The rest of the photgraphs from Claremont Road are impossible to replicate: this would require levitating above the A12 (in August 2024, I used the strategy of taking some photographs across the A12 from the cemetary on the far side with a long lens, something that I didn't consider in January). The other photographs were from Colville Road, which lost all its houses on its eastern side, and a few facing these at the northern end, but was a little easier to replicate: after thirty years, the plane trees on the other side of the Central Line are still recognisable. My main difficulty in January 2024 was photographing into the rising sun above the wall of the A12 as below.
The final two images from 1994 were taken from the footbridge over Eastern Avenue in Wanstead; as previously explained, I shot these in 2024 on the 15th rather than the 16th. The pairing of the first two shots below suggests that the footbridge was rebuilt slightly further down the slope over Eastern Avenue from that of 1994.
Unlike the photographs taken in 2014, I didn't attempt to use the same lens design for the photographs in 2024: these were all shot with the Canon A-1. I did use the same film, Kodak Gold 100 (however similar it may be the Kodak Gold 100 of thirty years ago); the positions for the photographs in 2024 was, in the main, closer to the original photographs taken in 2014, as much as can be achieved within the built environment as it currently exists between Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead. Although not replicating a photograph from 1994 (I regret not taking more photographs then), I took a photograph from the footbridge in Wanstead looking up the A12 to where it enters the George Green tunnel, site of some of the early and visible resistance to the road scheme–with the occupation of a 400-year old tree–as this was to go thanks to the use of cut and cover, a less expensive construction technique than tunneling itself.
