‘Tony? Oh, he’s a pussycat really,’ said Vogue’s art director without much conviction on my first day as the magazine’s picture editor in the summer of 1990. An appointment had been fixed for the following morning, a meeting with Lord Snowdon in the studio of his home in Launceston Place, Kensington. He would be sizing me up for the role, but it would be fine because he was… a pussycat. Meanwhile someone was squeak-squeak-squeaking like a mouse flayed by giant claws. I was given a list, quite a long list, of things Snowdon liked and expected. Anything he didn’t like? ‘Yes!’ the room chorused. ‘Picture editors!’
And then I made my first mistake. The slender, stucco-ed South Kensington villa built some time in the mid-19th century boasted an impressive flight of stone stairs leading up to a pair of double front doors. Snowdon had acquired the house around 1977 on his separation from Princess Margaret, the reigning monarch’s younger sister. I rang the bell; I knocked on the door; I rang it again. Nothing. And then after an interminable time – had I got the wrong day? – a voice below rang out: ‘What on earth are you doing up there?’ And below, by an unremarkable black painted door, stood an irritated First Earl of Snowdon. This was trumpeted as the ‘tradesman’s entrance’. , Rather pompously, the famous Cecil Beaton had told the budding snapper when young that thanks to his – Beaton’s – pioneering example, photographers need never use the hidden-away side door again. From then on Snowdon resolved wherever possible to only use the tradesman’s entrance (they did not get along).
Entering that nondescript black door was a curiously democratising process. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, the Pet Shop Boys, Gary Lineker, Edward Albee, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Sir Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, David Bowie: they had all stepped down into the canteen and, through a narrow passage, found themselves in Snowdon’s waiting room and beyond it, glimpsed down another passageway, the studio itself.
Here in the waiting room was a first encounter with striking Snowdon design: a half-dozen of the four thousand chairs he had designed for the investiture of Prince Charles at Caernaerfon Castle. Produced in a wood-effect laminate and painted a bright crimson, with the Prince of Wales’s feathers picked out in gold on the backrest, and with a scarlet seat pad, how modern they must have looked in 1969. And how uncomfortable they were today.
In his later years, especially, Snowdon would spend most of his time in his office in the compact daylight studio. Everything was to hand at his desk against the far wall. Along with framed photographs it held a beautiful cigarette box, though he no longer smoked, and two of the many clocks he had designed, a blue-and-white Chinese vase (now a lamp) and, above them, drawings by his great-grandfather Linley Sambourne, the celebrated Punch cartoonist. To his right hung a pinboard of vignettes of family life and near to that stood a penny slot-machine, the sort found on the promenades of Victorian seaside piers. Was it a Punch and Judy show? I can’t now recall. Anyway it appeared no longer to work.
The studio itself jutted out sideways, a prefabricated adjunct, into a small garden, and its roof of corrugated plastic clattered deafeningly when it rained. The manicured garden itself, seen through the windows, was home to a variety of fake animals: a metal decoy pigeon stood sentry on a bench, while a plastic owl, moored to a tree, gazed out; in the circular pond, several plastic ducks drifted aimlessly in the summer breeze.
The studio was the focus of life at Launceston Place. Here against a rotating selection of oilcloth backdrops, painted curtains and rolls of seamless paper, theatre greats, TV celebrities, art world luminaries, giants of the literary landscape, prime ministers and pop stars and professors of philosophy arranged themselves in what the writer John Mortimer once called ‘a carefully organised isolation’. Though it was an intimate space, it was possible to feel entirely alone as the photographer scrutinised you, often, apart from barked commands, in silence. (Picture editors were customarily required to pad around in stockinged feet.)
Some ten years later, Snowdon asked me to work with him on his first retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, so I spent weeks with him in the studio, sunlight streaming through the windows, looking at his volumes of press cuttings and scrapbooks and boxes of pictures going back to when he first started out as a photographer of 1950s debutantes. Spilling out of cupboards, these spanned the decades and for a glorious summer, I heard his fund of anecdotes as we dug deep into what was a roll call of the 20th century. ‘The thing about Marlene Dietrich was…’; ‘I once had to hide in the shrubbery from Christian Dior. Well, I was quite young, you see, and…’
Snowdon died in 2017 and not long after Launceston Place was sold, with many of its contents dispersed at Christie’s. Fortunately, Julian Broad’s photographs preserve the studio as it really was. Here in this small realm, Snowdon was impish ringmaster, magician-in-chief, director of his own repertory theatre with an ever-changing, star-sprinkled cast. He was restless, inquisitive, analysing, scrutinising, always interested. And if it was a blank day with no-one booked in, there was always a new picture editor to be teased or at the very least to be kept hanging around outside a permanently shuttered front door.
Lord Snowdon’s studio, among others, can be seen in Julian Broad’s forthcoming book ‘We Must Be Here: Work and Notes 1988–2024’. Visit julianbroad.com
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