Robin Muir has summed up his legacy: "His portraits still look starkly modern, half a century on. His street photographs are haunting documents too, a singular vision of three great cities. After two major retrospectives in London institutions, the Victoria & Albert Museum (1984) and the National Portrait Gallery (1996), and an entry in the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography", his place in the pantheon of twentieth century British photographers might be secured." Bruce Bernard wrote, at Deakin's first retrospective, that he was proud "to have had a part in doing our dear, witty and wayward friend some of the justice he so strenuously denied himself."