Timeline

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One Street #21

I'm back at the bottom end of my One Street, this time in daylight hours.

If it weren't for the influence of Roger Dorband's Blue Moon Over Thurman Street (the One Street Project's source book) and an enthusiasm for vintage postcards I probably wouldn't have stopped to photograph this scene - it's just a delivery lorry outside a theatre.

Dorband shows us that the life of the street is in the everyday, that the everyday is ephemeral and therefore that yesterday's everyday is tomorrow's vintage. Vintage postcards show me the same, with slightly more chronological distance. Tom Phillips' Postcard Century brought us images of Piccadilly Circus and the New York skyline from postcards posted in each year of the twentieth century. Piccadilly Circus was an ever changing sea of placards and vehicles, and how poignant that 1999 view of New York is now.

Advertisements, vehicles and fashion are signifiers of the changing culture. So here in Bradford 2013 we can mark the imminent arrival of a Broadway/ West End musical and an infamous illusionist, and the delivery of a load of a Danish-owned Yorkshire beer. Queen Victoria looks on, an ever present since 1904.

What will we see next year?