The 40 best photos of London ever taken

The oldest photograph in our top 40 is the oldest photograph in the V&A collection. It was 1839 when a Monsieur de St Croix arrived from Paris to promote the newfangled photographic process invented by Louis Daguerre earlier that year. To demonstrate, much like every tourist in his wake, he took a few snaps, the difference being that the results are among the first photos of the capital in existence. Which means the figures seated by the railings in this shot could well be the first Londoners ever photographed. Merci, Monsieur de St Croix for dragging your crazy photo machine across the Channel all those years ago.

© V&A

Of all the things the Victorians gave us (including hopscotch, shopping arcades and state-of-the-art sewers) the thing we use most on a daily basis (after the sewers) must be the tube. And while we probably don’t feel especially thankful as we studiously avoid eye contact on the stinky commute, this awesome image of the Central line being built reveals the debt we owe to Victorian engineering and the men – Mustachioed to the last chap – who braved dangerous subterranean conditions so that we might get from A to B, or Shepherd’s Bush to Bank. ‘These anonymous workers were the heroic constructors of the modern world,’ says John Falconer, Curator of Visual Arts at the British Library, where the photograph forms part of an extensive collection dedicated to Victorian Britain.

© British Library

From a contemporary perspective, it’s hard to look past the hats and frocks in what’s clearly a staged photograph, and fully appreciate the violence and suffering endured by the suffragettes in their struggle for equal rights. But Broom herself has earned a place in feminist history: she’s widely accepted as Britain’s first female press photographer.

© Museum of London

You can tell that Wolf Suschitzky has been a cinematographer as well as a still photographer. In this quiet evocation of the drama of reading, the main figure almost looks like a posed actor; while central London itself, bathed in slanting, early-morning light, resembles nothing so much as a giant, empty stage set. There's a nice autobiographical touch to this image: Suschitzky comes from a family of booksellers and publishers.

© Wolfgang Suschitzky. Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

Where’s a jacket potato hawker when you need one? Crowned jauntily with spuds, portable ovens such as this were a regular sight on London’s streets during autumn and winter in the late nineteenth century. Scamell took the photograph for the National Photographic Record and Survey (1897–1910), a project to document our buildings, ceremonies and customs. It’s thought that around ten tons of potatoes were sold in this manner every day. Baked beans were unlikely to have been a filling, though – they didn’t arrive in the UK until 1886 and were sold by Fortnum & Mason as a fancy foreign delicacy.

Two years after the end of World War One, Nicholls was granted special access to Westminster Abbey to photograph the coffin of the Unknown Soldier, an unidentified British soldier killed on the battlefields of northern France and brought back to the UK to represent the multitudes who died ‘for king and country’. The eerie timelessness of the picture is lent an extra human dimension by the fact that Nicholls lost his eldest son on the Western Front.

At the beginning of WW2, Bill Brandt (1904–1983) returned to London from photographing the industrial north of England. ‘The darkened town, lit only by moonlight, looked more beautiful than before or since,' he remembered. The blackout was in force but serious hostilities between Britain and Germany had yet to begin in earnest. A year later, as the Blitz began, Brandt was commissioned by the Ministry of Information to record bomb shelters like the one in this picture. In its bid to bring the US government on side, the ministry sent Brandt’s photos to Washington. In fact, Brandt’s pictures were used widely to illustrate Londoners’ stoic resistance. What he remembered most about these long, fearful nights deep underground, though, was 'the long alley of intermingled bodies, with the hot, smelly air and continual murmur of snores'.

You have to wonder what Cartier-Bresson, a native of republican France, made of this scene, shot as the Queen’s father hastily ascended the throne in the wake of his brother’s scandalous abdication. From the bronze Trafalgar lion, to the medals gleaming on the serviceman’s chest, this image perfectly describes a very British patriotic fervour. You can see this quirkily brilliant shot as part of ‘Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers’ at the Barbican Art Gallery.

© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, on show as part of ‘Strange and Familiar’ at the Barbican

Fashion and society photographer Cecil Beaton was an unlikely war photographer but he quickly became a great one. Commissioned by the Ministry of Information in 1940, his images of a blitzed London were circulated round the globe and credited with raising sympathy for Britain in its hour of need (especially in America, which had not yet joined the war). This is one of the Imperial War Museum's 7000-strong collection of Beaton's war images.  

Martin was one of the inventors of what we now call street photography, using a detective camera camouflaged as a satchel to take quick, impromptu snapshots of candid, quotidian moments. The raw, unposed honesty of his images, and his choice of working-class subjects, offended polite society but revolutionised photography.

© Museum of London

Before Robert Frank produced one of the greatest and most enduring of photographic projects, ‘The Americans’, the Swiss-born artist spent a couple of years documenting postwar London. This shot of an anonymous street has all the hallmarks that would go on to define his style, with its grainy, slightly off-kilter composition, and its powerful sense of melancholy.

© V&A

A pioneer of street photography, Sergio Larrain was hired by the British Council to produce a reportage project on British cities in 1958. The Chilean’s ethos was all about capturing spontaneous, fugitive moments – and what could be more iconically fugitive, more quintessentially fleeting, than Trafalgar Square’s pigeons?

This image can be seen as part of the exhibition 'Sergio Larrain' at the Magnum Print Room, London until Apr 22 2016.

© Sergio Larrain/Magnum Photos

Mayne repeatedly visited a few, favoured pockets of Notting Hill, capturing the hustle and bustle of the insalubrious backstreets before they were razed, some years later, in the name of slum redevelopment. His shots of children at play are particularly, and justly, celebrated – little did his subjects know they were participating in one of the most significant social documents of the decade.

© Roger Mayne/Mary Evans Picture Library

Is she distracted? Sad? Lonely? Clutching a doll, the woman in this mid-1960s photograph is an enduring mystery. Armed with her trusty Rolleiflex camera and blessed with a brilliant eye and endless patience, Dorothy Bohm has taken some of the most iconic shots of London street life over the past 70 years. Now in her nineties, Bohm, who moved to England in 1939 to escape the threat of Nazism in her native East Prussia, counts this picture, taken for a book about 1960s London among her own favourites. ‘She was standing quite motionless, absorbed in her thoughts,’ Bohm explains. ‘She seemed totally unaware of the market, which was noisy and full of people. I was intrigued.’ Half a century later, we’re still intrigued by this enigmatic woman.

© Dorothy Bohm

Emerging from a hole in a London pavement, the boy in Native American head-dress aims his gun at the camera. Shooting back (with his Leica, a camera he protected so fiercely that he used to take it to bed to keep its shutter mechanism warm) is the legendary Fleet Street photographer (and south London lad) Thurston Hopkins. In his 101 years, Hopkins (1913-2014) went on assignments in Africa, India, Australia and the Pacific, but he’s best known for the work he did in the 1950s for Picture Post of London picking itself up from the war, much of it featuring kids finding their own fun on the streets and bombsites of the city. London photography gallery owner Michael Hoppen met Hopkins a number of times and remembers ‘the glint in his eye when reminiscing about making this picture.’ But he loves the images most for what it says about a certain type of London childhood at a certain point in history. ‘It reminds me of my own carefree existence as a child, which sadly seems a rare thing these days.’

© Getty Images 

The clothing’s certainly different from today, in Collins’s wonderfully dynamic, impressionistic image from over half a century ago; and the street ironwork and signage similarly seem quaintly old-fashioned. Yet it’s somehow reassuring to know that overcrowding on the London Underground is the same as it ever was.

© Estate Bob Collins/Museum of London

London isn’t just for Londoners – the hordes of gawping, snap-happy tourists also contribute to its complex character. Turning the camera back on to these same temporary visitors, then, was a typically astute and subtle move by the late Jane Bown, of the most esteemed of British photojournalists.

© Jane Bown

A cool shot of a stylish couple. What could be simpler? Taken at a party in Notting Hill in 1967, this isn’t the most immediately momentous of Charlie Phillips’s photographs, which include images of global icons such as Muhammad Ali and the first images of a fledgling Notting Hill Carnival, as well as intimate photos of Windrush-generation west Londoners. But it’s a picture that speaks volumes about London living and loving. As Phillips remembers, at the time being in a mixed-race relationship meant you'd get ‘louts shouting "nigger lover" from the windows of their cars as they passed’. Thankfully, those days are gone, but issues of race, visibility and Notting Hill’s heritage still occupy the photographer. ‘What really pisses me off,’ Phillips told us when we spoke to him last year, ‘is when they made that horrible film, “Notting Hill”. There wasn’t even one person of bloody colour in it!’

© Charlie Phillips/www.akehurstcreativemanagement.com

Who could have predicted that a nondescript thoroughfare in St. John’s Wood would become one of the capital’s most popular sights? And what do the thousands of annual tourists do when they get there? They stage their own, parodic snapshots in emulation of the iconic original – a testament to the ritual power of photography.

The 1980s weren’t all big hair, shoulder pads and brick-size mobile phones. Under Margaret Thatcher, unemployment figures reached three million – and London suffered. Taken in a Brixton dole office, this photograph by fine art and documentary photographer Paul Graham is startlingly evocative of that era’s hardships. Barbican Art Gallery curator Alona Pardo singles the image out for ‘a sinister quality that immediately brings to mind the dark days of Thatcherism: the rise of the City and the fall of the unions, the energy of a renewed entrepreneurialism and the entropy of a new, entrenched unemployment.’ It’s a bleakly beautiful image of a desperate environment.

© Paul Graham

Photography was central to ‘Swinging London’, with its culture of fashion and celebrity chic. Inevitably, the era saw the emergence of the photographer as a star in his (and it was pretty much always his) own right. Handsome, socially connected, sexually charged – it was a stereotype that David Bailey, above all, did his best to live up to.

© Getty Images

Smoking? On the tube?! Those who fondly remember the days before BoJo banned drinking on the tube (in 2008) might look at this picture with equal nostalgia. It was in the ’70s that Aldgate-born Bob Mazzer started surreptitiously snapping his fellow passengers, creating intimate pictures that are full of all sorts of London characters, but always the same warmth and humanity.

Ray-Jones was a master of framing multiple narratives within a single shot, capturing different people looking at different things, often to paint a gently satirical picture of British life. In this image, the starting point for the linked network of glances is more than evident.

Primarily known as a music photographer, Morris also produced a scintillating chronicle of Hackney in the ‘70s, back when the borough was more than a playground for hipsters, and mixed-race communities embraced radical politics as a matter of course.

© Dennis Morris

German-born Brandt produced mainly portraits and landscapes – and this study, ostensibly of the painter Francis Bacon, shows his mastery of both. It’s hard to tell which aspect is the most severe, the most sullenly evocative: the dark, stormy sky; the angled stripe of pathway up Primrose Hill; or the glowering snarl across Bacon’s face.

© Bill Brandt Archive

While punk had a lot of front and was all about in-yer-face attitude, shot from the back, this image is a super-stylish distillation of its spirit – ‘Destroy London’ indeed – by photographers, one Swiss, one German, who arrived in London to study just as the punk scene kicked off.

© Tate/Karen Knorr and Olivier Richon

It was dubbed the Second Battle of Trafalgar – the afternoon when anti-Poll Tax demonstrators, kettled within Trafalgar Square and attacked by riot police, finally responded in kind, and London witnessed its worst riots for a century. And Hoffman’s shot, indeed, resembles some classical battle scene, with the array of bodies and poses conveying a sort of desperate grandeur.

London in the early ’60s, before it began to swing, was really more like the ’50s: a little bit dismal, a bit pokey and dowdy – still dusting itself off from its postwar blues, not yet ready to embrace the Technicolor future. Arnold’s wonderfully moody photograph seems to capture that in-between era perfectly.

In this photo, Nick Waplington's lens transforms kids on London Fields into fairies in a golden-lit Arcadia – a reminder that, if we only stop to look, we’re constantly surrounded by such magical scenes in our day-to-day lives. And that the city has some fantastic green spaces to enjoy. Roll on summer!

There’s a hallucinatory, almost watery feel to Polly Braden’s study of London’s Square Mile. It’s as if she’s evoking the collision between two fundamental, opposing tendencies: architectural lines and grids, and the rigid demarcation of territory, on one hand; and the way that workers and capital ceaselessly flow and morph, on the other.

© Polly Braden

The closest thing that London has to homegrown royalty, Vivienne Westwood is our punk fairy godmother, our wickedest of grand dames. In Teller’s shot, she becomes elevated into an emblem for our great city – a totally individual mix of the gleefully coarse and the gracefully refined.

© Juergen Teller

Downing Street has witnessed major political events, of course, but the actual drama mainly happens behind closed doors. Not so with Margaret Thatcher’s tearful, final departure from Number 10 in 1990, when it was hard to know which was more startling: the suddenness of her ousting, or the Iron Lady displaying human emotions.

Bathed in a beautiful morning light, Tom Hunter’s young woman looks likes she’s stepped out of Johannes Vermeer’s seventeenth-century masterpiece ‘Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window’. The narrative, though, is pure late twentieth-century. Fillipa is a squatter reading an eviction notice from Hackney Council. Hunter, at the time a fellow member of Hackney’s squatter community, shot the image for his ‘Persons Unknown’ series. It went on to win the John Kobal National Portrait award and has shown around the world. ‘I never envisaged this response to a photograph I took of my neighbour and friend in a squat one sunny morning in Hackney,’ he says. ‘But its intimate depiction of the mother and child in a moment of vulnerability seems to resonate in a universal way.’

© Tom Hunter

Though it only lasted six months, The Shop, Emin and Lucas’s studio-slash-gallery-slash-actual shop just off Brick Lane, has achieved legendary status – the sort of place where everyone retrospectively claims to have hung out. Famed for its parties, its debauchery, its selling of cheap arty tat, it marks one of the starting points for the YBAs and the Shoreditch scene.

© Sarah Lucas; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London/Tracey Emin; photo: Carl Freedman

You don’t know what the crowds are reaching for in this slice of social commentary – some sort of free giveaway, presumably. But with its illuminated atmosphere of religious devotion, its mood of mass delirium, it’s clear what the satirical target of Reas’s image is: London’s reverence for rampant consumerism.

© Paul Reas/James Hyman Gallery

While many artists in the 1990s were busy getting thrown out of the Groucho, German photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg was casting a more sobre eye over the city at night, using long exposures to create poetic images that are the photographic successors to Whistler's 'Nocturne' paintings.

© Rut Blees Luxemburg, courtesy V&A

Things you should remember to carry with you on the tube: copy of Time Out, bottle of water. Things you should remember to carry with you on the tube if you’re having your photo taken by Wolfgang Tillmans: ambivalent expression, nipple clamps. ‘I knew I had to stop shooting when Lars’s face turned from pleasure to pain,’ recalls Tillmans, who took this photo on the Jubilee line as part of a series about Germans in London for a German magazine. Yes, that’s a lot of Germans (Tillmans was born in Remscheid) but it’s a defining image of London and its embrace of, ahem, underground culture by a much-loved adopted son who became the first photographer and non-British artist to win the Turner Prize in 2000, and was elected a Royal Academician in 2013.

© Wolfgang Tillmans, courtesy Maureen Paley

We screamed a lot during the 2012 London Olympics: at the telly, at home, in pubs, and at each other. But nowhere was the din as loud as in the Olympic Stadium when Mo Farah claimed his second Olympic gold by winning the 5,000 metres. The sound of the 80,000-strong crowd was so loud that the camera at the finish line started to shake, warping the image. ‘Nothing captures the fervour, the noise and the enjoyment of London 2012 more than this image,’ says Time Out photographer Rob Greig. ‘It’s a picture taken by 80,000 people.’

We’ve all been high on a Saturday night but, orbiting 400 kilometres above the earth, British astronaut Major Tim Peake takes the (freeze-dried) biscuit for altitude. Shot from the International Space Station at midnight on Saturday January 31, 2016, his image of London, its skeins of twinkling lights shining brightest around Oxford Street and Regent Street, is the most recent image in our top 40 and the ultimate establishing shot. ‘I’d rather be up here… but only just!! #toughcall,’ Peake told Twitter as he flew past at 17,150 miles per hour.

© ESA/NASA