The masterclass was for this year’s Harrow Photographer of the Year contest, organised by the Harrow Giving charity to attract support for good causes, with the winner due to be announced in October.
The area is now being turned into the new ‘Eastman Village’ development and the class involved a treasure hunt around the new Barratt development with tuition from professional photographer Niaz Maleknia, who has been documenting the Kodak site for Headstone Manor museum’s Now and Then exhibition.
“The Kodak chimney tower is such an iconic symbol,” Niaz said. “But it’s the people and their stories that really bring photographic images to life.
“Whenever you see a photo, you see the person who took it, a glimpse of their life here and now.”
Eastman Village, in fact, is named after Kodak’s American founder George Eastman. Some 2,000 new homes are being built along with a gym, supermarket, café, offices and eventually a new primary school.
Kodak played a big part in Harrow’s identity throughout the 20th Century as a major employer until traditional photography using rolls of film gave way to digital technology.
Eastman opened his factory in 1891 on a seven-acre greenfield site at Wealdstone, close to the main-line railway into London.
Wealdstone back then was a quiet patch of farmland — but that didn’t last long. The village population jumped from 2,500 to 12,000 by 1911. Many of the new workers were women, making Kodak the first big employer in the area to give them a foothold in industry.
Kodak Harrow by the 1920s became a mini town with its own research labs, social clubs, sports ground and even a Kodak FC football team. Production during the Second World War turned to materials for military photography.
The heyday for Kodak was the 1950s, when the factory expanded across 55 acres and employed 6,000 workers, a major global player with the growth of mass photography as a popular pastime.
But Kodak could not keep pace with the digital age. Sales of film and printing out rolls of snapshots dropped rapidly by the 1990s. The writing was on the darkroom wall. Production ended in 2005 and only photographic paper was being made by then.
Just 250 staff were left before the plug was finally pulled on the last machines in 2016 — bringing 125 years of photographic history in Harrow to a close.
The site was sold off to developers who named it ‘Eastman Village’ — a nod to Kodak’s founder.
All that remains of his legacy is the Eastman name and that landmark chimney dominating Harrow’s skyline.
