London at Night. What fascinating scenes! What Pictures! The brilliant lighting, the chaotic but orderly moving traffic, the criss-cross of movement along the pavements and across the roads, the well known buildings and monuments, softened here and enhanced there, all combine to make entrancing scenes of movement, life, and mystery. One can almost imagine one's self transported into another world, strange and alarming, alluring and sometimes fearsome; a veritable playground, or the haunt of spectres and goblins, according to the mood. To stand on an island in the middle of Trafalgar Square soon after dark on a day in November, is a wonderful and enthralling experience. The powerful lights, the gleaming cars, the countless buses, the ever changing compositions, there for a few seconds, then vanishing into the night, to be replaced by others, the same but different, is a feast to the eyes and the senses of any artistically minded soul. Where is everybody coming from, where are they going, how on earth do they manage to go through all that brilliant tangle without becoming inextricably mixed. The play of lights, the mysterious shadows, colour galore if you can only appreciate it; a kaleidoscope, living and palpitating, the epitome of the work and industry of man, here, in the centre bit of the Greatest Empire the world has ever known.
 
What a picture to ponder and brood over, what aesthetic emotions it arouses. Piccadilly Circus, with it's brilliant signs and lights, garish perhaps, but containing elements of beauty here and there, that almost compensate for the spectacular rudeness of it all; whilst in the centre are the flower women, placidly carrying on their vocation around the fountain. The figure above the fountain seems ever to be urging London to go faster and faster, to move on and on, and to keep moving. St. Martins-in-the-Fields, an oasis in the turbulent movement, with its dignified portico, its lighted pillars and deep shadows, makes another entrancing view point of London's Pictures at Night; even the steps themselves, viewed from any direction, seem to be full of exquisite charm and beauty. By The Royal Exchange, The Bank, or The Mansion House, are also view points from which, looking almost everywhere, pictures in abundance meet the eye. These contain a more direct evidence of commerce and ever pressing toil, than do those of further west. Any of London's great centres, - Regent Street, Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Strand, Leicester Square, Tottenham Court Road, Whitehall, Westminster, by the Theatres and the large Hotels, provide settings for the most exquisite effects of light and shade in every sense of these words. The camera seems a very feeble instrument wherewith to depict the life and beauty of these night scenes, but herein are set forth a few to capture a little, how very little, of the pictorial delights to be found in London at Night.

Fred Judge
1924^[1]

1. Λ Fred Judge, ca. 1924 [undated], Camera Pictures of London at Night, (London & Hastings: Judge's Ltd)