Although milkmen were still a regular daily feature of life in the 1980s (and we still get our milk delivered three times a week), hand-drawn carts such as this were antiques then, though some milkmen still had larger electric flat-bed carts with a handle at the front they walked holding rather than those they could sit in and drive.
 
Though this cart offering 'Every Grade' of milk looked rather like something from a museum or film set, it did seem to still be in actual use when I took the picture. I took this picture to record the milk cart, but also because the wrecked car looked a little like a mouth, a shark about to swallow the cart, or perhaps two combatants facing each other after the first encounter, decisively (and surprisingly) won by the milk cart without it suffering any damage. There is certainly a rather aggressive quality about that milk crate extending at an angle from its front.
 
Unfortunately this was one picture where I seriously underexposed all three exposures I made, and this, together with considerable insect damage to the negative, has removed much of the shadow detail in this picture. I can find no record of a dairy belonging to D Jones & Son (which is I think the name on the cart) in the area.
 
Many dairies were set up in London in the nineteenth century, at first keeping cows in their back yards but later mainly relying on milk trains from the country into stations such as Paddington. One of my grandmothers came up from Wales to work in such a diary owned by her relatives on the Gray's Inn Road, and I think it was probably there that she met my grandfather who was a wheelwright and blacksmith in the area and they married on the Highgate Raod in 1890.
 
Harrow Road at this point runs beside the canal, on which a small boat can be seen in the background. And a London black cab - then as all were without advertisments - drives along on the other side of the road.