Henry Dixon

London Redevelopment and Preservation Photography

In 1870s London, road improvements and redevelopment were rapidly erasing older buildings, and SPROL used photography as a means of preservation in response to that pace of loss^*18. Historic England identifies the threatened demolition of the seventeenth-century Oxford Arms coaching inn in 1875 as the immediate catalyst for the society’s formation^*18. Yale’s account describes antiquarian Alfred Marks as a central organizer and traces the project to concern over architectural heritage disappearing amid rapid urban transformation^*17. The 120 photographs published between 1875 and 1886 were therefore planned records of sites selected because their loss was anticipated, not incidental street views^*1. By linking the moment of exposure to a future in which the building would no longer exist, the project made “photographing before disappearance” an explicit temporal logic of urban preservation^*1.

Photography served this project because it could fix windows, facades, signs, masonry, and surrounding streets within the same frame^*3. The Society of Antiquaries’ collection record confirms that the series was conceived as a publication for the systematic preservation of the “relics of old London”^*3.

The project also emerged from a broader change in how Britain valued the urban past during the first half of the nineteenth century^*23. Rosemary Helen Sweet’s 2026 study traces the formation of the idea of the “historic town” in early nineteenth-century Britain, when vernacular buildings—old houses, lanes, and shops as well as churches and castles—came to be valued as evidence of an urban past^*23. The study links this urban picturesque to later nineteenth-century preservation movements and places SPROL’s photography of a vanishing old London within that trajectory^*23. Dixon’s photographs of inns, timber buildings, and narrow streets therefore did more than preserve the appearance of celebrated architecture^*23. Photography helped turn ordinary urban structures, whose value was being threatened by modernization, into objects of historical record^*23.

Dixon had already photographed urban transformation before his work for SPROL^*14. In the 1860s, he documented the Holborn Valley Improvements for the City of London, including the clearance of overcrowded housing and the construction of roads around the Holborn Viaduct^*14. After photographing redevelopment as an administrative record of construction, he used photography within the same changing city to preserve buildings that were about to disappear for future reference^*14. His preservation photographs therefore belong to a sustained record of a changing London shaped by redevelopment and preservation at once^*14.

Dixon and the Bool Brothers

Dixon worked professionally in London and collaborated with Alfred and John Bool on Relics of Old London^*4. Assigning the series to a single author obscures how it was made. The British Library records the Bool brothers as the makers of the first twenty-four negatives, with Dixon producing carbon prints from them^*5.

For later numbers, Dixon and his son also took part in making negatives, and the series developed through collaboration among multiple photographers, printers, and the preservation society^*6. Getty ULAN likewise documents Henry Dixon & Son and their involvement in the Relics project, underscoring how nineteenth-century photographic authorship could encompass studio organization and divided labor^*6.

Carbon Printing and Permanence

The use of carbon printing in Relics of Old London was tied to more than deep blacks or finely rendered detail^*21. Because carbon prints form the image with pigment, they resist fading better than many silver-based processes; Princeton University Art Museum’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields is explicitly inscribed “Photographed & Printed in Permanent Carbon by Henry Dixon”^*21. Since the photographs were intended to remain useful after the buildings disappeared, the longevity of the print itself became part of the record’s function^*21.

The preservation society needed records that would remain legible after the buildings had been demolished^*8. Reproducibility from a negative and the durability of the print were therefore practical requirements of the project, not simply stylistic choices^*8.

Recording Buildings and Streets Together

Dixon generally presents buildings frontally and legibly, while retaining figures at entrances, shop lettering, pavement, and adjoining structures^*9. In Great Saint Helen’s, the facade and the depth of the lane occupy the same image, preserving the building as part of a city block with its urban surroundings intact^*9.

Old House, Fore Street likewise records an old building while retaining its place within a contemporary commercial street^*10. The photograph preserves a relation between building and street that an architectural drawing would be less likely to retain^*10.

Why Photography Became a Preservation Record

Architectural drawings can organize dimensions and elevations; a photograph can preserve weathering, signs, windows, adjoining buildings, street width, and human movement within a single image^*2. The SPROL photographs held together by Historic England allow later viewers to compare individual architectural designs with their surrounding environments shortly before they disappeared^*2. The documentary force of Relics therefore lies in a sequence of operations—selection, photography, printing, numbering, annotation, and publication—as much as in any single composition^*2. The series remains useful to urban historians because it survives as a geographically and sequentially organized record as well as a body of individual photographs^*2.

In its 2016 exhibition Relics of Old London, the Yale Center for British Art described the series as a permanent visual archive for endangered buildings and examined it as an instance in which photography helped establish new forms of public history and visual record^*24. By selecting subjects for preservation, photographing them systematically, and retaining durable prints with explanatory information, SPROL turned photography into a shared urban resource for future citizens and researchers^*24.

No. 73 Cheapside and Serial Numbering

No. 73 Cheapside, held by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, belongs to a serial urban record, where its meaning depends on its place within the larger sequence^*11. Each photograph in Relics was assigned a place and number; gathered into multiple volumes, individual buildings were edited into a shared historical image of a disappearing old London^*12.

Historic England’s record for the first volume notes that the first thirty-six plates include both carbon and collodion prints, showing that the material construction of the series was not uniform^*13.

Documenting Redevelopment Sites

SPROL’s subjects extended beyond individual celebrated buildings to sites facing redevelopment or alteration, including Aldgate, Holborn, and the Charterhouse^*22. Photographs such as Charterhouse - Great Hall, held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, preserve specific exteriors and interiors and show how the series became a site-based record through which later viewers could trace urban change^*22. Reading the photographs only as individual masterpieces misses the significance of their sustained accumulation across multiple locations^*22. Historic England’s Aldgate record likewise provides information about a site before redevelopment alongside its record of a single building^*15.

Charterhouse Cloisters, held by the CCA, survives as a carbon print in which the structure and surface condition of the cloister remain legible^*7. Oberlin College’s Charterhouse Chapel Entrance and Grand Staircase show that the project extended beyond streets to interiors and architectural details^*16.

Who Chose “Old London”?

Treating the series as an objective survey of London would obscure the project’s acts of selection^*17. As Yale notes, Relics emerged from preservationist concern over disappearing buildings and privileged old architectural remains over a comprehensive record of urban social life^*17.

Photographic precision does not erase the institutional decision about what to photograph^*18. Historic England’s history of conservation likewise connects photography to the emerging practice of defining which buildings merited recording^*18.

Dixon and Thomas Annan

During the same period,Thomas Annanphotographed dense closes and living conditions within Glasgow’s improvement schemes, while Dixon’s Relics placed the preservation value of old architecture at the center of the project^*19. Nineteenth-century urban photography developed through distinct commissions in municipal improvement, architectural preservation, publishing, and urban history; these functions cannot be reduced to a single path toward “social documentary”^*19.

Historic England’s DIX01 collection is cataloged as a group containing architectural photographs attributed to Dixon as well as prints and annotations connected with a later Guildhall exhibition of his work^*20. Because the catalog dates include posthumous copies and later reorganization, they should be distinguished from the dates of the original exposures^*20. That history of recollection and recataloging itself shows how his photographs continued to function as an urban and architectural archive^*20.

SPROL and Dixon’s Place in Photographic History

For the first twenty-four photographs in Relics, Alfred and John Bool made the negatives and Dixon produced the carbon prints^*5. Because the preservation society selected the subjects, photographers and printers divided the labor, and the images circulated with numbers and explanatory texts, the series cannot be reduced to a single photographer’s vision^*5. Compared with Thomas Annan’s photographs of urban improvement, Relics centered on selecting endangered architecture and making records that could be consulted in the future, while Annan addressed the social environment more broadly^*19. SPROL offers an early institutional example of urban photography entering preservation work, architectural history, and archive building, and provides a useful historical point of comparison for later heritage documentation^*20.

The series’ long-term use is also evident in its republication^*25. In 1975, Graham Bush’s Old London gathered photographs made for SPROL by Dixon and by Alfred and John Bool into a single volume^*25. That the photographs could be re-edited roughly a century later as evidence for identifying places and buildings reflects the way Relics had been constructed as an ongoing urban record with numbers and locations, enabling reuse well beyond its original audience^*25.