• It was a year since the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act enabled married women to obtain a court order against violent husbands, independently of divorce or separation proceedings. (The first recorded use of the term ‘domestic violence’ in the context of the home was in 1973 in an address to Parliament by Jack Ashley, MP.)

• It was four years since Virago Press, committed to publishing women’s writing and books on feminism, was founded

• The Women’s Room by Marilyn French was published

• The United Nations formalised International Women’s Day

• The first Star Wars film was released

• Saturday Night Fever was a box office hit

• Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours was a global hit

• Greenpeace UK was founded, in a borrowed office in London, with four members and £800

• The first series of TV’s Top Gear, presented by Angela Rippon and Tom Coyne, aired in the UK

• Edinburgh women held the first ‘Reclaim the Night’ march in Britain

• The Women’s Liberation Movement held a national conference in London, where Sheila Jeffreys presented a paper called ‘The Need for Revolutionary Feminism’

And, in a Chelsea flat, Veronica Moon and Leonie Barratt are having a difficult time.

15 April 1977

15 April 1977

Chelsea

Vee is transferring the last of her London Street Project films from the safety of their black plastic cylinders to the safety of the developing tank. It’s the trickiest part of the developing process, because if a film is flooded with light now then whatever carefully exposed image is on it is gone forever. If light gets in later, then it’s a print that’s ruined, and though it’s a pain to develop another, it’s possible. But open the darkroom door when the film is being transferred and there is absolutely nothing to be done to save it. You are exposing a light-sensitive material to more light. You are bludgeoning it. Vee finds that she is holding her breath. She is working via the eerie red glow of the darkroom bulb.

There are five films, thirty-six frames on each: one hundred and eighty images altogether, and a year’s work.

Once the transfer is done, she will add the developer, look at the negatives, and develop the first round of prints, maybe twenty or so from throughout the sequence, to see what’s there, what the theme of this work might be. It’s exciting. And now that most of her films are developed by newspaper and magazine labs, it’s good to get back to basics in the darkroom like this. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of being the first person to see what you took, and whether it matches up with the shots you think you have.