Journal — Blog — Skye O'Neill

I know, I know, there’s nothing really to see there, it’s all just the South Bank or the Tate Modern, or Borough Market, and some not-very-nice riverside pubs. I hear you. But there are a couple of spots hidden just behind the Tate Modern that you’ve probably never seen, and which you really should if you want to get a sense of what this part of London used to be like.

Hopton’s Almshouses

I love almshouses. I love that even hundreds of years ago people thought that providing some form of social housing for the poorest members of society was A Good Thing. These almshouses were founded in 1746–49 by a fishmonger, Charles Hopton, with the aim of providing accommodation for 26 “poor decayed men” of the parish. And one of the things I like about them is that they are still operating as social housing, albeit for the Borough of Southwark rather than the local parish. The other thing I like is the poignant contrast between that classical Georgian architecture and the steel and glass dazzle of the huge modern apartments behind them, dwarfing the homely little almshouses below. It’s like a microcosm of London as a whole: the new sitting cheek by jowl with the old (and not always coming off best in that comparison).

61 Hopton St

This little house is just down the road from Hopton’s Almshouses at no. 61, and like the almshouses it’s a valiant little survivor in amongst more modern buildings. There’s something about the scale of it and the angle of the roof that make it a bit of a challenge to photograph, but also satisfying when you manage to capture it. According to my trusty copy of Pevsner, it dates from 1702.

As always, I’d love to see your photos from this part of town, so please tag me on Instagram if you do visit!

The Walbrook Club is a private members’ club near Bank station — the building is in the style of Queen Anne but it actually dates from the 1950s, and the club itself opened in 2000. People often make the mistake of thinking that the building is much older than it is, and it’s true that it makes a striking contrast with the modern office blocks all around it, that seem to tower menacingly over it.

The photograph below of the Walbrook Club is my highest performing post of all time (26.7k likes). When I look at the image, there are some elements I can identify that my audience tends to like: a strong centred composition, lines leading to something slightly startling (in this case what looks like an old building dwarfed by modern buildings around it), warm lit windows. I can only assume that it grabbed people’s attention enough to pause in their scrolling and double-tap.

In my experience (and I follow a lot of city-based Instagram accounts!), that same principle is true for their high performing posts too — there is something unexpected or arresting about them, whether it’s the scale, or a striking floral element, or (and these are the best kinds of posts, in my view) a mood or visual cue that evokes an immediate emotional response in a viewer.

There’s a caveat to that, of course, which is that everyone’s audience is different, and they expect different things. For example, I tend to focus on architecture and street scenes rather than, say, food or floral images, and so if you follow me on Instagram you may have come to expect those types of images, and to engage more with them. (That isn’t to say you should never post different kinds of images — quite the contrary!)

If you’re interested in finding out more about what resonates most with the people who follow you though, I’d encourage you to look at your most popular posts, and see if you can identify any common threads running through those posts — maybe it was the image itself, or something in the caption that struck a chord?