Allan Hailstone – författare

With nearly 200 unique images photographed on the streets of Berlin by the author between 1959 and 1966, Berlin in the Cold War depicts a city which demonstrated the conflict between East and West at that time like no other. The photographs throw into focus the situation existing both before the building of the Berlin Wall, when anyone could move freely between the two halves of the city, and after its construction, when most Westerners could, with some difficulty, make the crossing. Allan Hailstone took many photographs during several visits in those years, some surreptitiously, despite restrictions placed on photography in East Berlin. These photographs provide a taste of this once dramatically divided city.

The 1950s and 1960s saw great change across the British Isles, but there were also huge variations in everyday life in the streets and countryside around the UK and Ireland at the time. In Forgotten Times: The British Isles in the 1950s and 1960s, Allan Hailstone presents a photographic portrait of this era from his travels around Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland and some of the other smaller islands making up the British Isles. To many readers today, this time seems remarkably far away, with many of our modern conveniences not yet imagined. This nostalgic look at a fascinating era will be of interest to all those who remember the 1950s and 1960s well, or those who wish to have a window into that world.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s photographer Allan Hailstone took a number of trips to France, Spain, Gibraltar, Germany (including Berlin), Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Malta, Italy and Denmark to capture with his camera the world on the UK’s doorstep. In these photographs, which include some colour as well as black and white, a rapidly changing way of life in Western Europe is evocatively captured, as the continent moved from the aftermath of the Second World War, and the destruction and austerity caused by the conflict, into the postwar boom. It was the height of the Cold War, and Western Europe was becoming increasingly commercialised and distinct from the eastern half of the continent under the control of the USSR, which would shut the borders with the West and isolate Berlin with the building of the Berlin Wall.This portrait of a fascinating era in Western Europe will be of interest to all those who remember the 1950s and 1960s or who wish to have a window into that world.

With over 120 unique images of people and places in London in the fifties and sixties, London: Portrait of a City 1950–1962 paints a picture of England’s multifaceted capital in a decade of great change and development. From grand monuments to innocuous street corners, famous faces to passers-by, this selection of evocative photographs captures the very essence of London life in the mid-twentieth century.A keen photographer since childhood, Allan Hailstone’s beautiful images are a tribute to London at what he remembers as a magical time. Fogs, Soho at night, the remnants of St Giles, lost theatres … Here is just a taste of how things were.