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Two pioneering photographers now have Blue Plaques in London.
Christina Broom (1862-1939) — who was Britain's first female press photographer — had a plaque unveiled at her former home at 92 Munster Road in Fulham, on 8 August 2024. Broom lived and worked at this address for 26 years, after getting into photography at the relatively late age of 40, using a borrowed quarter-plate box camera.
She went on to photograph the efforts of the suffrage movement (including the Women's Coronation Procession), and was the only photographer permitted regularly into the Royal Mews. Broom ran a postcard producing business from the house with her daughter, Winifred; at its height they sold 1,000 postcards a day. When Broom was interviewed here in 1937 a couple of years before her death, the reporter was "confronted with hundreds of prints from a selection of some of the thousands of negatives — many of them irreplaceable — that are stored elsewhere in the house".
The second plaque — also unveiled on 8 August — is one dedicated to the photographer, geographer, travel writer and explorer, John Thomson (1837-1921). His seminal work, Illustrations of China and its People, saw Thompson document more than 4,000 miles from Hong Kong to the Yangtze-Kiang, via Canton and the Great Wall. But Thomson also captured everyday life far nearer to home, and his 1877 book Street Life in London revealed a vibrant city populated by flower sellers, Italian musicians, ginger beer pedlars, chimney sweeps, bootblacks, and characters like Hookey Alf of Whitechapel and horse bus driver Cast Iron Billy.
Even at the time, Thomson realised how important his images would become: "We are now making history", he wrote in 1891, "and the sun picture supplies the means of passing down a record of what we are, and what we have achieved in this nineteenth century of our progress." You can find Thomson's plaque at 15 Effra Road in Brixton, which in his day was 12 Elgin Gardens.
Other photographers commemorated with Blue Plaques include Bill Brandt, Lee Miller, Camille Silvy and Cecil Beaton.
