1-191-844 - © London Museum/Heritage-Images

People watching the Thames from Tower Bridge, City of London, c1930. A man smoking a pipe and some little girls stand by an ironwork balustrade on Tower Bridge. On the right are the docks in the Pool of London, with the dome of St Paul's Cathedral just visible in the distance. Reid, an amateur photographer of independent means, began an ambitious project to record, in photographs and prose, an extended walk through the historic Cities of Westminster and London. By the time of his death in 1933 he had taken over 700 photographs, organised geographically into a series of albums, and had compiled two manuscript books, entitled The Route Ornate, which served to annotate the photographic journey. The photographs are remarkable for their pictorial and technical quality.