DANGEROUS: NOT to be used, says the notice tacked to the door of the outside toilet in this extraordinary photo from 1922. Dangerous? Really? We'd never have guessed...
The photo, which comnes from Explore York Libraries and Archives, shows Dennis Street, just off Walmgate, in June 1922. Walmgate, before a major programme of clearances and rebuilding, was a well-known slum: in fact, the houses you can see in this photograph were demolished in the late 1930s.
In many ways, the small group of women sitting in the street are as telling as the collapsed street surface itself. Washing hangs on lines in the background to dry. But this is clearly the women's communal space: the place where they can snatch a few moments to sit and chat and catch up on the day. It's not much of a space. But it demonstrates that extraordinary human ability to make a community as and where we can, regardless of our surroundings.
This is poverty of the kind that Joseph and Seebohm Rowntree spoke out about. But there's a poignant dignity to these women, too. In many ways, there's more of the real York in this photograph than in any amount of images of the Mansion House or of elegant city centre squares...
To see other photos like this, visit www.imagineyork.co.uk
Stephen Lewis
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