Robert Hallmann is one of the now-dwindling band of people who experienced Swinging London at first hand, indeed almost nose to nose.

These days Robert lives quietly inHadleigh and doesn’t even own a swing. But this is a man who worked in the West End of London during the Sixties and early Seventies, right at the epicentre of what was then the grooviest place on the planet. He roamed the city, and he photographed its places and people.

Robert had arrived in London, a young German in search of colour and adventure, towards the end of the Fifties.

It was still the shabby, post- Blitz city of fogs, bomb sites, horse-drawn milk floats, and six-figure telephone numbers that began with letters (Scotland Yard wasWH 1212).

But London was already moving fast into the world of the Beatles, hippies, psychedelia, flower power, miniskirts, mods, rockers, kitchen-sink movies and the Twist. Carnaby Street, round the corner from Robert’s workplace, was the focal point of all these happenings.

“London was changing into a young person’s world, vocal and pushy and full of ‘whizz kids’,”

he says.

Robert found work as a typesetter in a printing works in Mayfair (before that district became too posh to house anything as lowly as a productive workplace). But he was also developing a vocation as a freelance photographer.

“A camera was always close to hand, to grab opportunities when they came,” says Robert.

He began his photographic career with a small Agfa, rescued from the embers of his family home in Germany, after it had been destroyed by artillery fire in the last months of the Second WorldWar. He graduated to a Hasselblad, won in a competition. Whatever camera he was clutching, all the material that any photographer could want lay at his doorstep.

Robert didn’t seek out pop stars and supermodels. Instead, he concentrated on the ordinary scenes and people in a city that enraptured him, and still does. “Take to the Tube or bus and you’dmeet the world,”

he says. “Sandalled monks, stiletto-heeled damsels, heavies in chains and bovver boots, those who would pray for your soul and those who would prey on your money.”

Amuch older, but now vanished, London still co-existed alongside the world of the swinging Londoners.

Tarts with hearts would lean out of upper-storey windows in Shepherd’s Market, flick cigarette ash at (male) passersby, and greet them with: “Hello, dearie,” when they looked up.

Milkmen in peaked caps still delivered pint bottles to doorsteps from horse-drawn floats. Raw sides of meat still hung on hooks outside butchers’ shops. The stonework of public buildings was still stained black from the coalsmoke of steam trains and factories.

Robert captured these everyday features with his lens, as well as the trendier side of London. “They were just part of the ordinary street scene that made London what it was,”

he says. “It didn’t occur to me that a lot of these sights were about to vanish.”

The shots taken by that young, roaming photographer, half a century ago, have lain for decades, almost forgotten, in a cabinet at Robert’s Essex home.

Now the dust has been blown off them, and they can be seen for what they are – a visual record, gorgeous, and also historic, of a capital at a high point. Almost everything in the collection represents something transient. Swinging London, too, has passed into history.

“Those were exciting times,”

says Robert. “Daytime, night-time, summer, winter, London always presented a photo opportunity.”

  • Robert Hallmann’s photographs of London have been published as Londoners’ Street Scenes of the Capital 1960-1989 (Amberley £15.99 ISBN 878 1 4456 4562 9)