Man With A Pram

In the early 1960s I remember using the wheels from old prams and push chairs to make a ‘trolley.’ All you needed was two sets of wheels nailed to a plank of wood. The front wheels were connected to a seperate piece of wood which steered the trolley (in theory) in the direction you wanted to go. There were no breaks and motion was secured by pulling your trolley up a pavement on an incline and letting gravity do it’s work at the top of the incline. Trolleys were a health and safety nightmare but great fun.

I remember thinking of my days on a trolley as I observed old men wandering around the East End with a battered trolley collecting useful scrap that had been discarded.

‘Man with a pram’ (mixed media on paper) is based on a photograph I took of one such man in Toynbee Street in the East End (see below).