Not only does Ken Crowe have in interest in old pictures, he takes tomorrow's history pictures today, he tells TOM KING

Southend Museum curator Ken Crowe probably knows more about the history of Southend, and has certainly stared at more old photographs of the place, than any man else alive.

For more than 20 years, Ken has been mounting exhibitions, talking to Southend old-timers, and poring through letters and old newspapers, all with one purpose in mind - to tell the story of his home town.

So Ken was the natural choice as author for the latest volume in the enormously popular Sutton local history series, title: Southend-on-Sea Past & Present.

"I leapt at the chance to do this book," Ken says, "because it gives us the chance to reveal some of the pictures in the archives to a wider audience. I've tried to ensure that a good majority of these pictures are ones that haven't been published before."

Ken's book leads us on a guided tour of Southend as it would have looked roughly 100 years ago, warts and all.

We see the Edwardian seaside in all its vibrant glory, the bands and the steam-roundabouts, the seafront entertainers and the dandy-promenaders.

We also catch murkier glimpses of a town where huge areas of slums existed alongside the elegant Regency terraces and cosy boarding-houses.

Perhaps Ken's favourite picture is one that goes with a newspaper report of 1885.

"The writer watched people listening to phonograph records," says Ken. "To hear these recordings, they had to use a doctor's stethoscope."

The look on the listener's faces reveals the emotions as the human race made contact with recorded sound for the first time - as a sideshow attraction.

Not all the photographs are confined to the golden days, however. "I think some of the most interesting pictures are from the 1960s, when huge changes were taking place in Southend," says Ken.

Half the centre of the town was torn down during this period, high rise buildings appeared for the first time, and a loop of a never-completed ring-road was gouged into the town.

Ken's photographs provide a clear record of this cataclysmic period, which is now itself part of our history. "People only realised how much they had loved the old town when it was too late," says Ken, sadly.

Southend)Past & Present ensures that the human history of Southend is set down, as well as the saga of its buildings. Ken Crowe's particular interest has always been reserved for the day trippers - or "lower class excursionists" as they were referred to at the time.

"The trippers made much of Southend what it is," Ken says.

"They actually had a major effect on the architecture of the town.

"Although many of the residents and traders complained about the trippers, they were at the same time raking in the money and becoming prosperous on the back of these lower class excursionists."

The statistics from this lost world, as gathered by Ken, are sometimes astonishing. On some hot summer nights, more than 30,000 trippers spent the night on the beach.

More than a million visitors troo-ped along Southend pier in its heyday; sometimes the Pier had to be shut from sheer weight of numbers.

Southend was a tougher, although less violent place at the dawn of the last century. Bruisers and roughnecks figure large, "But nobody seems to have been mugged," says Ken.

"There were plenty of fights, but you could almost say that the violence was more good-humoured." Nevertheless, the streets were full of drunkards, flopped outside the pubs, and many men and a few girls from the East End were on the look-out for a brawl.

Ken records a typical occasion when a group of gunmakers from Silvertown arrived on the pier.

One of their number insisted on riding on the top of the pier-train (or tram as it was then), until the piermaster hauled him off.

A fight then ensued between the gunmaker visitors and a group of local fishermen and according to the newspaper report of the event, some of the women present "nearly or quite fainted away at the sight."

Ken Crowe's book clearly paints the double nature of Southend in the old days - run down and garish to the east, respectable and almost sedate to the west, with the pier providing a clear boundary.

"In 1900, Alderman Brightwell fought hard to prevent any amusements developing to the west of the pier," recalls Ken.

Few of the people pictured in these pages could have realised that one day, they would be the subject of a history book.

Most of them are just going about their business, or enjoying the myriad pleasures of Southend, without thought for the next day, let alone the next century but one. But then, "few of us imagine that one day, we will also be part of history," says Ken.

Far-sighted Victorian and Edwardian photographers saw the value in making photographic records of the Southend of their time.

To ensure that his successors have an equally wide stock of photographs on which to draw, Ken has embarked on his own recording process.

Every five years, he systematically takes pictures of every corner of Southend. These photographs are laid down in the museum archives, all ready for the Ken Crowe of Year 2100, whoever he or she may be.

Southend-on-Sea Past & Present by Ken Crowe is published by Sutton, at £9.99.

History as it happens - Ken Crowe in Southend library where picture archives are kept

Picture:LUAN MARSHALL

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.