Picture: Footballers, Southam St., N Kensington 1958 © Roger Mayne
Alan Johnson MP, a former Home Secretary, today told Amateur Photographer (AP): ‘I never met Roger Mayne although he entered my life in 1956 when he came to photograph Southam Street, the North Kensington street that I lived in for the first nine years of my life.
‘He captured the squalor of those awful slums but ensured that the people who lived in them were shown in all their humanity (which was important given that the houses we lived in were declared unfit for human habitation in the 1930s).
‘After he’d heard me mention Southam Street on the radio in 2007, he wrote to me and we corresponded for a while.
‘I was delighted that he gave permission to use some of his amazing photographs in my childhood memoir This Boy.
‘I was so sad to hear of his death and offer my condolences to his family.’
To read more tributes to Roger Mayne, see AP’s article, published HERE yesterday.
