Postcards

There are quite a few postcards of Lower Edmonton about, mostly dating from the 'golden age' in the early 20th Century.

Lower Edmonton isn't really the sort of place to feature in modern picture postcards but go back to the beginning of the last century and there would have been quite a few about. I'm not sure quite how many different ones there are likely to be but I have seen dozens mentioned from publishers such as E. Gordon Smith, Raphael Tuck and Frederick Fisk. A lot of the photos seen in the various local history books originated as postcards.

I particularly like the old colour postcards. The selection above are from E. Gordon Smith who seems to have published a reasonable number (I counted around two dozen of Lower Edmonton subjects). They generally have a three or four digit catalogue number and sometimes a suffix letter (typically for multiple views of the same subject). The number may feature on the handwritten lettering on the front, typed on a separate white band at the bottom, typed on a white area that is softly merged into the picture itself, typed on a side panel on the front, it may be printed on the back, or it may not appear at all (in which case all we can say is that the picture is the same as a numbered card). I've cropped the white panels off in the scans. The same number card may have been published with more than one style of lettering and numbering, sometimes the title changes for the same card, sometimes a number is reused and sometimes it appears there is a mistake in the numbering. For example the second card of All Saints above is numbered 329 but is surely meant to be 325 to match the other views (there also being another unrelated 329). However the first All Saints card above is also number 325.

A few of the Gordon Smith cards are real photo cards and I suspect the photo of the lake in Pymmes Park above may be one of them, based purely on the title!

Another favourite selection is the Raphael Tuck & Sons 'Oilette' series number 7617. I am told there are six cards in this series so the above should show all of them.

All Saints is, unsurprisingly, a popular choice of card and it is quite often the same view from the gate on the north-east side that is chosen with three more examples shown here. The first two examples above are another E. Gordon Smith card and a real photo card from C.A. Hodge.

C.A. Hodge of Enfield Town crops up a lot for real photo postcards of the Enfield area. A couple more are shown above along with one from the Taylor's 'Reality' Series 70 and one from D. Leslie.

The well known photo of the Alcazar c. 1913 that features in many books and on this site (and see the repro postcard below) seems to have originally been a C.A. Hodge real photo card.

There are also other coloured photos about and the two by Charles Smith shown above are clearly based on the same images used in numbers 6 and 107 Enfield Libraries series (below), which also crop up in the local history books. The second image above is described as 'Tram near Edmonton Police Station' on the back of the reproduction card but that is a pretty weak caption. In fact the picture is looking south with the Albion public house and Sebastopol Road visible on the left, and the second Horse and Groom pub behind the tram on the right (you can see the sign and also the tall chimneys).

'Enfield Libraries' have issued a number of modern postcards featuring old photos of the borough with quite a few showing scenes from Lower Edmonton though as you might expect they are again mostly what I call the 'usual suspects' that are featuring in one or more of the books. Many will have originally been published as postcards. The ones I have seen are in two sizes so there could have been two separate issues perhaps. There are some moderately glossy ones measuring 5 .5" x 3.5" with rather anonymous backs and some less glossy ones measuring 15cm x 10.5cm published by J. Arthur Dixon. All the postcards have a white border on the bottom front with the number and title and the J. Arthur Dixon ones have an extra short description on the back (for example the front will just say 'Hertford Road' but the back will be more helpful and say 'Children playing in front of The Crescent'). I don't know if any of the postcards are still be available from the local libraries.