Hornsey Town Hall service counters, 1935

Comment by Geraldine on February 23, 2025 at 21:23

Wonderful Art Deco design.

Comment by e on February 28, 2025 at 20:55

Really beautiful, eileen x

Comment by Hugh on March 1, 2025 at 8:36

I've had a go at colorising the image to try and get some sense of how rich the scene may have been. I can't decide if it adds anything.

Comment by Geraldine on March 1, 2025 at 23:44

I am divided about colourisation.  Though your result better indicates how they really were, yet we are accustomed to seeing the past in black and white so colour seems unreal.  All in the mind really.

Comment by Hugh on March 2, 2025 at 0:30

I completely agree. Colourising is interesting, but I can’t quite reconcile myself with the results. Sometimes it sits more uneasily with me than at others. Perhaps the easiest to accept are workaday landscapes or streetscapes where a light colourisation can seem less jarring than in a photo like this one. So, if I had to choose between the two images in this case, I'd unhesitatingly go with the original. Nonetheless, being able to quickly flash one's eyes to a colourised version confirms what one might expect about the richness of the scene.

Perhaps for architecture, black and white helps emphasise details, even in modern photography. By way of a wee experiment, I took a modern image of the Eltham Palace interior and rendered it as milky black and white image (which I won't show for fear of the Alamy copyright guard dogs). Despite the fact the the colour one was the original, looking at it alongside the monochrome one made the colour version seem jarring almost in the same way the above above does.

Comment by Geraldine on March 2, 2025 at 0:50

Well said, Hugh.

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