click to enlarge

I’m quite proud of myself on this one.

Going through 900 slides can be daunting–especially when you’re unsure of where many were taken and the photographer doesn’t remember every detail either.

These last few days I’ve posted slides my mom took in the UK 43 years ago. My friend Annie thought one slide might have been shot near Trafalgar Square.

And it probably was. She’s British and certainly knows London a lot better than I (who’ve only visited once, four years ago). Plus I could have sworn I found another image that reminded me of Trafalgar Square.

This is that slide.

So I located some photos on the internet of today’s Trafalgar Square. And sure enough certain things in this slide and the photos on the Internet matched up: the fountain on the right, the spire on the left, and the pigeons all around.

When my mom phoned me today from sunny Arizona yesterday, I told her about my proud moment in recognizing Trafalgar Square in her box of unmarked slides from the UK and Switzerland.

I also mentioned how sooty the buildings in the background looked. If you click to enlarge this photo, you can see the gray and downright black residue on the buildings in the background. It was almost like they’d been through a fire.

“The air in London used to be extremely polluted,” she told me. “Some things are better now than they were back then.”