Tangerine dreams

In 1926, Tessa Codrington’s maternal grandfather, Jack Sinclair, once British Resident in Zanzibar, decided to buy for his wife a house on the ‘New Mountain’ in Tangier. One of Muriel Sinclair’s many eccentricities was that she had no wish to see her grandchildren. In consequence it was not until the old woman’s death that Tessa Codrington, then nine, first visited the house. Subsequently her mother was to give her a smaller house, built by Jack Sinclair, originally an architect, in the spacious grounds of the main one.

An eager amateur photographer from her earliest years, Codrington is now a professionally accomplished one. As one turns the pages of this photograph album, one is repeatedly arrested by some striking image. Tangier is far from being the most beautiful of Moroccan cities, but images of the precipitous slope of the Old Mountain down to the indigo sea below it, of the narrow, tortuous streets of the Kasbah and of the brilliant sweep of the Atlantic Beach, almost persuade one that it is.