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Camden books | Review | Photographer Clive Boursnell | Covent Garden Market | Fruit and Vegetables
Photographer Clive Boursnell has rediscovered the fruits of his creative Covent Garden market labour and brought the collection together in a new book, writes Gerald Isaaman
THERE'S a sense of satisfaction in the smile of Clive Boursnell as we stride across the cobbles of Covent Garden to his favourite café, and sit snugly in the window looking out. For him it’s like coming home to a place for which he has a real personal passion.
“Those cobbles were called The Stones when the market was here, the east stones and the west stones,” he recalls. “And I can look at these stones now, 35 years after the market has disappeared, and remember precisely where all the various firms like Tremain’s were.
“There are stories in the stones, stories I remember amid all the hustle and bustle, the noise and dirt of the farmers selling their fresh produce from the back of their trucks, of the old porters who could go back to the beginning of the last century when the first commercial shipment of bananas arrived, of the enormous number of people working here and how the discipline of the merchants was sacrosanct.
“If you arrived at work two minutes late you would be told to go home and lose a day’s pay because you obviously need some rest. And if the boss heard you whistling he would come over and say, ‘If we wanted a musician we would have ordered one. We don’t want any whistling – go home!’
“I remember a porter telling me it had been his job each morning to empty all the piss pots from the rooms of two or three lodging houses starting just after 7am – all to be emptied and washed up by 8.30 to avoid a clip round the ear. All this he had to do for sixpence a week.”
Boursnell’s ability to capture the essence of the past, the smells, the physical presence and beauty of the produce, early morning tea laced with Scotch in the Nag’s Head accompanied by toast covered with dripping, is remarkable.
Yet it is his compelling brilliance with a camera that has brought us back to Covent Garden, the scene of a fascinating saga he has to tell of how he captured the magic of the place, round the clock, before it died – and why it has taken so long for his talent to emerge in a new book and exhibition.
It was early one summer morning in 1968 that Boursnell arrived with just one Hasselblad camera in Covent Garden, to start a photographic essay extolling all its romance until the day it moved away in November, 1974.
“The first flood of love for Covent Garden was sustained and grew as I and the market people got to know each other and I came to understand a little of how the market worked,” he explains, one porter telling him: “This photography lark of yours, mate, is like painting with light, in’it. Rembrandt, mate!”
Rembrandt indeed, says Boursnell with a chuckle, as he remembers how with a bag filled with four cameras and a lighting pack he became an accepted recorder of a market that dates back to Saxon traders until the Earl of Bedford was granted a market charter in 1670.
But what is more extraordinary is that though he produced a black and white book of the Covent Garden story – one of his market photographs came second in a Sunday Times national competition on the theme of work – it was no overwhelming success. And then he virtually forgot about the colour rolls he had taken of the market, day and night, in rain, sunshine and snow.
Indeed, he thought he had lost them en route to the Devon chapel where he spends his weekends, forgetting that he had stuffed them into a sealed light-box and deposited them with an uncle in Chiswick, where he was born and brought up.
Yet such trauma has been part of his peripatetic life as the son of a BOAC navigator flying officer who failed to recognise that his child was seriously dyslexic – the problem was unknown 60 years ago – and thought, as Boursnell puts it, that “I had a screw loose or was mentally deficient.”
The result was that he was sent to an arts school, aged five, and, amazingly trained as a ballet dancer along with the three Rs, because the one recognisable trait he had was the ability to act out childhood cowboy and Indian stories.
Then, aged 17, Boursnell was shipped off to Canada when an unexpected baby joined the family. He worked 95 hours a week for £22 on a dairy farm in Ontario before going underground as a miner, then up peaks like Mount McKinley as a professional mountaineer and, finally, on a McGill University Arctic expedition as an assistant glaciologist – with camera.
It was an Evening Standard advertisement that took him into the world of fashion photography when he arrived back home – he lived for 30 years in Eton Road, Hampstead – and then branched out working successfully for major magazines, national newspapers and prestigious bodies such as English Heritage, the Royal Academy and the Royal Opera House.
Hence his contact with the market and the miraculous rediscovery of his colour photographs after his partner, Barbara, pestered him and two friends offered to pay for them to be developed and digitally scanned if he could only find them.
“I went to see my old uncle and looked around a room where I knew I had some stuff in store,” Boursnell recalls as he savours the moment like a good storyteller.
“They weren’t here, or there. Then, in a dusty corner, I found this big box. I looked at it and I realised I had found my buried treasure, and there were far more rolls of film there than I ever remembered.”
The living colour of Covent Garden, including a unique record of every single market building, has now transformed itself into his book, and the once-hidden fruit of his long ago labours put on display for all to wonder at and welcome as a tribute to his true talents.
“It is a good yarn,” he admits with a grin.
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