St. James's Palace Courtyard, London, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

St. James's Palace Courtyard, London, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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St. James's Palace Courtyard, London, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-6A3C48

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Tourists in the 1950s had not yet been told which royal buildings were worth photographing, so they photographed all of them, standing in courtyards that had no particular viewing angle and pointing their cameras at walls that had seen five centuries of court intrigue but were, on any given Tuesday, just brick. St. James's Palace, the senior royal residence in the London hierarchy that Buckingham Palace had quietly supplanted, still carried enough prestige to draw visitors willing to stand in its forecourt and squint at the Tudor gatehouse range, the ivy having done its best to make a working palace look like a country house.

The NO PARKING sign planted in the middle of the courtyard is the detail that does the most work here. Someone in the Lord Chamberlain's office had decided that the solution to modernity arriving at a fifteenth-century palace was a small black sign on a stick, the same design used outside fish-and-chip shops. By the 1950s the tension between ancient institution and contemporary convenience had been resolved in Britain largely through signage.

The figure in the foreground — back to the camera, curly hair, coat — has the posture of someone who has been walking all day and is now deciding whether this counts as worth the detour. It did. St. James's remains the court to which foreign ambassadors are still formally accredited, a fact the palace announces nowhere, because announcing it would spoil the whole effect.

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