Lithograph, 1937

483 by 410 mm (19 by 16 ins)

Boswell was strongly attracted to Camden, not far from where he lived (initially in Chalk Farm, before moving to Hampstead). It is the inspiration for many of these street scenes. Eric Hobsbawn remarked that Camden ‘isn’t as flamboyant as Stepney or Shoreditch, or as grim as Canning Town; it is just ordinary. That is why Boswell’s pictures show its people doing nothing specially Camden Townish, but simply the sort of things that are being done in scores of neighbourhoods in Inner London’ (quoted in Austen/Desmond Fine Art, James Boswell: Extracting the Dream Reality, exhibition cat., 1999).