Revisiting Southam Street: Class, Generation, Gender, and Race in the Photography of Roger Mayne

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines pictures taken by the British photographer Roger Mayne of Southam Street, London, in the 1950s and 1960s. It explores these photographs as a way of thinking about the representation of urban, working-class life in Britain after the Second World War. The article uses this focused perspective as a line of sight on a broader landscape: the relationship among class, identity, and social change in the English city after the Second World War. Mayne's photographs of Southam Street afford an examination of the representation of economic and social change in the postwar city and, not least, the intersections among class, race, generation, and gender that reshaped that city.