Metier: Small Businesses in London – review

Optical instruments maker Tom McLucas

Time was that a man making his way in the world (and in those days it would only ever have been a man) would immerse himself in honing his craft or métier. This profession would put bread on his table for life and would become unbreakably linked with who he was.

Workers were their professions. Their jobs were their identities, and everything about them, from their surnames to their clothes and dialect, marked them as a butcher or a baker, as if they were divinely ordained to fill such a role.

Surely this state of things was in a way depressing – the relative lack of social mobility must have been stifling – but did at least give working people a sense of security that is virtually non-existent in today’s volatile job market.

Melancholic reflections on changing working practices and the homogeneity brought to our high streets by big chains pervades photographer Laura Braun’s thoughtful photographic project studying London’s most interesting professions and time-warped small shops.

But her photographs also betray a pleasure in the fact there are still so many gloriously specific small businesses ploughing furrows in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of our city.

Braun lived in Hackney for around 10 years and has recently moved to Archway. She started taking photographs of small businesses and the people at the heart of them in 2007. The project was supposed to last a few months but ended up becoming an obsession lasting years.

The result was Métier: Small Businesses in London, a lovingly produced book. East End businesses featured include Walthamstow neon shop sign business Signs of all Kinds, photography studio Kibris of Newington Green and Bow printing enterprise W.F. Arber & Co Ltd.

Also featured are Clapton film emporium Umit & Son and Dalston little-bit-of-everything shop C.Demetriou Zingas.

Braun says: “I think it’s clear from the project these are the kind of businesses I love and these are the places that make a city exciting, and also that they are really important for local areas and differentiating parts of the city from one another.”

The book has a small print run and was supported by the Arts Council. It is available from Clapton bookshop Pages of Hackney.

Métier: Small Businesses in London is published by Paper Tiger Books. ISBN: 9780992752705. RRP: £18