Dining on Jermyn St ^
Strolling Down Jermyn Street in London Type Edition
For better or worse I’ve been reading Monocle and listening to their radio station since its inception. When the opportunity presented itself to visit London for work I started to look in Monocle’s direction about all things London.
One publication I started reviewing was their London travel guide. Capital Letters, Design Inspiration was an essay piqued my interest about typography. Richard Spencer Powell wrote about how the type of Jermyn street had influenced the design of the magazine. “To my eye this road, made famous by its troupe of shirt-making proprietors, has more beautiful typography per metre than any other.”
So with that endorsement in the back of my mind as I made it around the city on foot during my first day, I was ultimately going to stroll down the block of type that influenced Monocle. My first impression was that it reminded me of Elizabeth street a bit after a few steps, not for the shops but for the quiet contrast of the busy street beside it being the Bowery–Piccadilly being the louder sibling in Jermyn. The street width was quite reasonable in that I could get a close look across the street. It ended up being easier to shoot what was across the road as opposed to what was on my sidewalk side. While the overall street distance seemed quite short being two blocks, in the end those blocks doubled as I looped back to catch what I missed the first time around.
