Fascinating historical photographs show the ‘lost’ London of 100 years ago

London has been through some serious change in its lifetime. Founded by the Romans in 43 AD, the capital’s 2,000 year history has seen the city go through plagues, fires, industrialisation, the Blitz, and the tech boom. 

Now a new photo book has revealed London’s lost and secret histories. To be published on November 23, Panoramas of Lost London: Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870-1945, features more than 300 black and white photos, 60 of which have never been seen before, showing London in the 19th and 20th centuries.  

Panoramas of Lost London depicts a city that Londoners of today may not recognise. It features photographs including 17th-century wooden weatherboard buildings, which were still common in early 1900s London; 18th-century cottages still inhabited in Elephant & Castle; the building of Tower Bridge in 1883; and Covent Garden in 1925, when it was still a busy fruit and flower market.

The collection also shows how everyday Londoners lived, revealing the inside of houses of Mare Street, and shoppers on Oxford Street. It includes portraits of Victorian and Edwardian Londoners: blacksmiths, butchers, bookmakers, shopkeepers, seamstresses, pharmacists, chimney sweeps, mothers and their children.

The photos span a tumultuous time full of change in the capital: from the horse-drawn Victorian and Edwardian city with its East End slums, through the inter-war years, to the streets devastated by the Blitz. 

The book contains a foreword by art historian Dan Cruikshank. He said: ‘Few photographs are more powerfully evocative than those of lost buildings of great cities. The photographs in Panoramas of Lost London have astonishing emotional power and appeal.

‘Even if the actual buildings cannot be brought back to life, this evocative and haunting book is the next best thing. Like its many photographs, it is pervaded by an intangible magic.’

Panoramas of Lost London is published in hardback on 23rd of November. Available from all good bookshops at £40 – get it while stocks last. Waterstones.

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