Old New World

Another weekend, another sunny Sunday afternoon, in between lengthy bouts of depressingly sustained rainfall. It has been very, very wet down here on the south coast, so it was a pleasant relief to be able to get out of the house for a few hours. Although it was disconcerting to find the way onto the sunlit meadows blocked by this martial-looking character.

We had decided to visit Mottisfont Abbey, where a small exhibition of "classic" 1960s fashion and celebrity photography is being held (by the likes of Patrick Lichfield, Brian Duffy, and Terence Donovan): handy in case the rain returned. For some reason, various period-costumed scarecrows were scattered around the grounds, too. Sigh... But I won't go on – again – about how the National Trust has ruined the place with its attempts to engage and entertain children presumed to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. I'll just repeat what I've said before: if kids can't learn how to be bored at a National Trust property, where can they?

As to Lichfield, Duffy, and Donovan: their work hasn't worn well, to my eyes. It made sense, I suppose, back in the sixties, to go for that intense focus on the physicality and personality of celebs, typically posed in front of a blank background. Such pictures made an impact in fashion magazines and the new colour supplements, with their clean, lean, "modern" lines. But, unlike Avedon's superficially similar work, there is no subversive intent behind the scrutiny: it is entirely, naively celebratory of the faces of "faces". Now, 50 years on, they seem almost content-free. Who cares about the clothes, or how young John Lennon or Joanna Lumley looked? You long to see the world hidden behind the white backdrop.

Only one picture detained me for more than a cursory glance: Duffy's shot from 1967 of Reggie Kray sparring with his ex-flyweight grandfather in the kitchen of 178 Vallance Road in London's Bethnal Green. There you have an image that really does speak of the true 1960s: the sharp-suited mobster looming over the tiny boxer, in his working-man's braces and collarless shirt, amid all the inherited pre-War domestic clutter that, in most of the other photographs, has been cleared away and hidden as embarrassingly un-modern. The 1960s in Britain was probably the last time that the old world and the new world still co-existed, before the slums and the old streets and facades had all been cleared and levelled, to make way for high-rises, office-blocks, and shopping centres. Then, "heritage" was still something you had to live with, like inconvenient old relatives and sooty open-hearth fires, rather than something remote and vaguely aristocratic, as interpreted for you by the National Trust in one of its history zoos.