Capturing Peterborough’s Street Life.

The members at the Septembers meeting of the Peterborough Local History Society welcomed Chris Porsz  the ‘Paramedic Paparazzo’ once more. The last time Chris was welcomed to the Society meeting was during Covid 19 Pandemic  and  then it had to be a Zoom meeting. This time we were meeting in the warmth of the St Andrews church.

Chris began by giving the meeting with a compelling insight into his Polish ancestry during the early years of the 20th century and especially during the second world war. Sharing pictures from his vast collection of images, that, despite the trauma and turmoil of the war had survived.  He  recounted how his mother, a holocaust survivor and his father an Arnhem veteran met after she was released half starved from the German gulag she was imprisoned in.

After the war, in 1947, the penniless Polish couple came to Britain  and made their life in Peterborough where Chris was born in 1953. He concluded his talk with tales about his childhood and early forage in to employment, his introduction to photography  and how he came to walk the City streets, to revealed a social history of street-life in the 1980s and becoming known as the Paramedic Papparazo.