Alex Bartsch grew up listening to reggae. His father introduced him to Bob Marley when he was young, and that early connection never faded. Years later, Bartsch became a serious record collector, building a collection of UK reggae vinyl spanning from 1967 to 1987. But collecting the records was only the beginning.
About ten years ago, Bartsch set himself a specific challenge: find the real London streets, walls, and doorways that appeared on more than 50 of those reggae album covers, then photograph those exact spots himself. The project combined his two passions — music and photography — into something that was equal parts research and street exploration.
Some locations were straightforward to find. A recognizable building, a distinctive corner, or a well-known street made the search quick. Others required real detective work — studying the architecture in the background, the angle of a wall, or the style of a window frame to narrow down which part of London the original photographer had stood in decades earlier.
What Bartsch found when he arrived at these spots was striking. Most locations had changed very little. The same brick walls, the same stairwells, the same patches of pavement that appeared on records pressed in the 1970s were still there — often looking almost identical decades later. London, in many of these pockets, had simply stayed put.
Not every location survived, though. Some spots had been demolished, redeveloped, or turned into something entirely different. Those losses are documented in the project just as honestly as the places that remain.
The albums Bartsch tracked down cover a rich stretch of UK reggae history. The era between 1967 and 1987 produced some of the most distinctive record sleeve photography in British music — shot on location across London’s streets, estates, and neighborhoods rather than in studios.
Bartsch’s photographs sit directly alongside the original album artwork, creating a before-and-after effect that spans several decades. Seeing the two images together — the old cover and the current street — shows just how much, or how little, certain parts of London have shifted since reggae first took hold in the UK.
