Mary Evans collection of the week: In Suburbia

While we have our fair share of photographs that chronicle great deeds and iconic moments, sometimes, it’s the pictures that record more ordinary lives that speak to us most eloquently from the past.

A case in point is a recent set of one family’s snaps which we’ve just added to the website. Taken between 1959 and 1961, they capture this period of British suburban life quite perfectly.

The ladies are wearing a succession of gorgeous Horrockses frocks and pose on the neat lawn of their back garden in deckchairs, with garden gnomes, a lawn mower and, out on a day trip, a Mini Cooper.

There is a rather endearing awkwardness to some of the poses that make us imagine them as a humorous card range or a leftfield choice for a book cover; we look forward to seeing how some of them might be used.

You can step back in time a few decades here.

Mary Evans newsletter – 1 March, 2021.

Picture credit: Smartly-dressed middle aged woman standing proudly (if slightly stifly) in a suburban garden with her lawnmower ©Mary Evans Picture Library / Tom Gillmor