
Charlie Phillips – A Grassroots Legacy
- Publisher
- Bluecoat Press
- Year
- 2026
- Specifications
- cloth-bound hardcover with a tipped-in plate
240 x 291 mm
112 pages
Introduction by Cecil Phillips
First edition
Published with the support of the crowdfunding backers listed in the volume
A retrospective of Charlie Phillips's London street work.
He describes himself as a Windrush kid: he arrived from Jamaica in the late 1950s at the age of eleven, into a time of slum landlords and race riots, and spent his teens in Notting Hill — then regarded as a ghetto — sharing a single cramped room with his parents. A Black American serviceman looking for fun in the city left behind a Kodak Retina at a house party, swapping it with Phillips's father for the taxi fare, and that changed everything. At fourteen he taught himself to develop film, turning the bathroom into a darkroom in the dead of night. A copy of The Saturday Evening Post the same man left behind, with Norman Rockwell's The Runaway on the cover, became his gateway to another world.
At first he made pictures of his friends and sold them at school; then he began to record the world around him — musicians, street life, parties, families, rude boys in zoot suits fresh off the boat at Tilbury — and the world that was disappearing, taking us into Afro-Caribbean funeral culture in a decades-long project and photographing the last days of streets demolished for the Westway. The ease of his subjects speaks of his own spontaneous manner, while the compositions tell a bigger story of a changing London.