London In Photographs: 1953

~ beetleypete

I found a selection of photos online, taken by the Dutch photographer Cas Oorthuys in 1953. At the time, I was one year old, and not much was to change during my childhood.

Window shoppers.

The doorman outside the Ritz Hotel. He is protecting customers from the rain with his umbrella.

The evening commute on a Northern Line Underground train. Everyone concentrating on their newspapers.

Berwick Street open-air market, Soho.

A busy pub interior.

Newspaper seller, Piccadilly. News headline of ‘The Hampstead Strangler’!

Traffic chaos in Lower Regent Street.

High Holborn. Those buildings famously survived the Great Fire of London, and still stand today.

The busy junction outside The Bank of England.

People queuing for a bus outside London Bridge Station. British people tend to queue in an orderly fashion.

53 thoughts on “London In Photographs: 1953”

    1. I know it seems earlier, but they were all dated by the photographer. Of course, many of the vehicles would have been second-hand, so could date from the 1940s, or earlier. My dad bought a car in late 1953, but it was a 1938 model car, an ex-police Wolesley already 15 years old. He had been in the Army from 1936-1947, so had never owned a car. He learned to drive in Army cars.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  4. (1) Are those sheer walrus condoms in the window? Goo goo g’joob!
    (2) Did you hear about the fat, dumpy parachutist that landed on a London hotel? Pudding on the Ritz!
    (3) Headline in the evening newspaper: “Northern Line Underground Train Barrels Towards Flooded Tunnel – DEC Prepares – Disaster Imminent!”
    (4) “How many pineapples do I need to make enough Piña Coladas for 650 members of Parliament?”
    (5) “You think this pub is busy? You should see my guest house on the weekend!”
    (6) Headline in the Hampstead News: “Heath Bar Patrons Fear Strangler, Go To Kit Kat Bar Instead”
    (7) Radio announcer: “And now the lowdown on London’s top of the hour traffic: There’s higher traffic volume on Lower Regent Street.”
    (8) That guy will come across a sexier Broad further west on High Holborn. The one he’s walking with fails to light his fire.
    (9) The Bank of England is not far from the Bank of the River Thames.
    (10) Sorry, I don’t put butter in my tea. (But then, I don’t put blood in my pudding either!)

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  5. Keep those photos coming, Pete. I love them.
    How about that old guy sitting in the pub with a smiling woman on each side of him. Bet neither one of them is his wife.

    As far as weekly bathing, before we had a water heater we only had a complete bath in the tub on Saturday. It was hard work for Mom to heat water on the stove and carry it into the bathroom…and dangerous. The water in the tub was saved with a tea kettle more of hot water and the next kid got in. Down the road, during nice weather the kids didn’t get a bath in the house. They got clean by jumping into the horse trough.

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    1. When I was young, we also had a metal bath for the weekly bath on Friday nights. I got ‘third go’ in the water, after my mum and dad. Then my dad had to empty it using buckets, before carrying it downstairs to hang it on a nail in the back yard. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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    1. I agree that it did not have much seating, but that didn’t seem to affect its popularity, Janet. When I was a teenager, no men ever sat down in pubs. We always stood at the bar. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  9. The year I was born. 8 years after the war. And to answer a question above, there was a massive man shortage & hence massive breeding from the lucky women who were able to find a man. Those that didn’t were called spinsters. So me & Pete are known as the “baby boomers”. Our role was to replace the men lost in WW2. And so commonwealth govts had to build more houses, roads, schools etc to cater for us. Its a fascinating phenomenon.
    And these pictures sum up that dichotomy – moving on yet repairing.

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    1. Thanks for your thoughts, Gavin. Most unmarried women I knew as a child had lost their boyfriends/fiances in the war, and were too upset to get married to anyone else. Some took that grief to their graves.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  10. I’m sure there are shots of NYC or Chicago of the era that resemble these, but there’s something about the architecture and automobiles that give this an “older” look. The fashions strike the same chord. Where I grew up in the mid America suburbs, in the same time frame, most everything was “new”. A good deal of it in that 50s “futuristic” way. Plus, we had room to burn. Like I told people after visiting Oxford and seeing a cornerstone older than the Aztec empire “There’s pigeon (poop) on statues in England older than America. Thanks!

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    1. Yes, England is very old, Phil. There is a church less than two miles from where I live that was originally built in the mid-600s (AD), almost 1,600 years ago.. The current church was erected on its foundations, and has later additions

      St Margaret’s Church

      The photos in this post are taken only 8 years after WW2, so London had yet to see any modernisation.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  11. Lots of memories. The underground always smelled of wet wool! Cox’s orange apples…my mum liked those. Are they still grown? And queues. During the war I was told if you saw a queue you just got on it and found out after what you were queuing for!

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    1. Cox’s Orange Pippin Apples are no longer sold in shops, mainly because they fell out of popularity and supermarkets dominate the sales, so want fast-selling apples. You can still buy the trees to grown them in your garden though. They cost about £120.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  14. Pete,
    The British have always dressed well. Hats, top coats, polished shoes, etc. Even in the 60s when the Mod fashions took root, the youngsters looked manicured and well groomed. I have not been to Britain, but that is where my family came from, and Scotland also. My Mother visited in the 1980s and felt like a slob compared to the folks on the street. Try coming to America, we are a land of slobbish fashion and the Kardashians; and it’s getting worse by the day. Makes me yearn for the good old days, whenever in the hell those were. Good pictures.

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    1. Thanks, Phil. As a 1960s teenager, I always wore a suit and tie when I went out with my friends, even in the summer. I didn’t own any denim jeans until the l980s, and they were only to wear when I commuted on a motorcycle. We also went to the barber every week without fail, to get a ‘style and trim’.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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        1. Stevie, today we sadly judge how we live on how it is currently. The men working & women at home was the result of major wars & they were lucky to have survived. Society had demarcations that is lost in understanding today. The women did not feel poor cows at all but happy & stable. And their mummys did not put them on the pill whilst teenagers either. There was no pill for the mums! My mum was never a poor cow & to quote her on one occasion “these young girls today out working, on the pill & being men, poor cows”.

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          1. Each generation thinks they have it best, I suppose, because they don’t know any different. What I think is unfair is that married women were not allowed to work, and they had to give up their jobs to the men after the war. They didn’t know they were being treated like second class citizens and did as they were told because that’s how it was.

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    1. It interested me even more because I was a baby at tthe time, John. By the time I was ‘aware’ of my surroundings, nothing had really changed from the images in these photos.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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    1. Yes, almost every man wore a shirt and tie, suit, and raincoat. Even manual workers wore ties. And many men and women were still wearing hats all the time. Women kept them on in the cinema, (your mum will remember) and I used to try not to sit behind them.
      That said, most people were not as clean then, usually washing and shaving at the sink, and only taking a bath once a week. It was not unusual for them to wear the same shirt for two or three days before changing it, and deodorants were almost unknown until the 1960s.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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