Lost London 1870-1945

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In conclusion, this is a remarkable document, and it has very much influenced my view about street and social documentary photography. This book is a monumental document about one of the world's great cities and about the photographers who documented the changes in London over 75 years. A piece of experiemental cinema whereby the film was shot in real time and streamed to a live cinema audience in the USA and then the UK on the 19th January 2017. Had the technology allowed him back in 2000, Mike Figgis would surely have shown his brilliant, split-screen Timecode this way. For the first time in my six decades in the city I strolled on the foreshore at high tide, near where my dad had played in the mud in the 1920s.

There’s a puff on the book jacket from Dan Cruikshank who describes this book as “heartbreaking” and he is right.

Taken to rovide a unique recored of whole districts of London as they were vanisching, each of the photographs is a full-plate image, a stunning work of art in its own right.

This makes me very boring on outings to old churches and stately homes, because I rarely know what I’m muttering about, but I simply love the shapes and structure of a building and the naming of its parts. This is, no pun intended (well, maybe a small one), a book in which you get totally, completely lost. Images of such abject poverty are a stark reminder that while there is much that we might mourn the loss of in the way of historic buildings, the changes to London since these moments were captured have not all been for the worse.This unique archive shows Elizabethan, Georgian and Victorian London before the major 20th century redevolopment. A spectacular collection of more than 500 of the best images from the former London County Council archive of photographs, which has been held by English Heritage for the past 25 years. I like architecture, because it’s in the blood: my uncle ran his own practice in Oxford and my great-great uncle was an architectural draughtsman, and a fine West Country watercolourist in the early 20th century (Arthur Fare, if you’re interested). Please note that when presenting your pass for visual inspection, the transport operator's staff will inspect the pass closely to confirm its validity.