A cache of recently discovered, mostly unpublished negatives - and now their public viewing - is surely the icing on Ken Russell's 80th birthday cake this week. The Big Brother escapee is receiving fresh acclaim for his role in Britain's cultural history; this intriguing show records his first job as a twentysomething freelance photo-journalist in the early 1950s.

The selection includes photo-essays of East End teddy girls and small children living around Portobello Road. The Tedettes - Britain's first true teenage girls - pose like cocky fashion models on bomb sites and in derelict houses.

The ease and fun between photographer and subjects continues with the younger children, playing on wet pavements and cycling down deserted streets that today would be lined with 4x4s. Russell obviously encouraged their clambering over sculptures of naked women and performing a "pretend wedding" - set-ups pointing to future directorial skills.

Russell's attraction to eccentrics is epitomised by his work with 72-year-old "Zora", a cellist and unpublished novelist who created "happenings" before the word was invented, pasting a wall with publishers' rejection slips.

His documenting the filming of Alexander the Great in Spain with Richard Burton is unusual for its celebrity content. Most subjects are ordinary people. Russell wasn't pulling back the curtains on injustice like contemporaries Bill Brandt and Bert Hardy, but one moving scene features young female prisoners pushing prams indoors after an exercise break.

Otherwise, his off-beat fashion shoots and a minimalist portrait of a naked woman carrying an upturned bath on her back pre-dates the playful, almost surreal style of 1960s icons such as Terence Donovan. From that earlier decade, Russell reports that post-War Britain's austerity hadn't crushed playfulness or fantasy.

• To late summer. Information: www.proud.co.uk; 020 7839 4942.