Post-Brexit, It’s a Perfect Time to Look Back at David Bailey’s Lost London, Where He Once Romped with Jean Shrimpton

Long before Brexit and Damien Hirst dreamed of moving in, let alone installing a multimillion-dollar underground swimming pool and yoga room, the northwestern reaches of London were home to the photographer David Bailey, his then-partner Jean Shrimpton, and what began to become a diminishing number of working-class Brits. That’s how Bailey, who’d been mainly photographing Swinging London, decided to turn his camera to something decidedly less glamorous: the crumbled buildings and shuttered cinemas lining the streets of neighborhoods like Camden and Primrose Hill, whose economic downturn he documented for NW1, a time capsule of sorts released in 1982. If the series was nostalgic then, though, it’s nothing compared to the trip down memory lane it is now, with its first-ever rerelease and exhibition through HENI Publishing and its accompanying Soho gallery.