Lost London 1870-1945

Product Information

Before replacing your pass it may be worth checking at a tube station to ensure that there is a fault on the pass. I only spotted one howler: Percy Bysshe Shelley didn’t marry Mary Wollstonecraft, but her daughter, Mary Godwin. Checking into the stations, combined with using Twitter to document journeys in real time gives a new lease of life to these forgotten networks, as well as creating a digital version of the analogue journey. While Davies, in his Introduction, does a great job to explain the importance of the images from an architectural history perspective and while he provides us with a socio-economic reference frame for the period covered, it is the images themselves that tell that story best.

There’s a puff on the book jacket from Dan Cruikshank who describes this book as “heartbreaking” and he is right. A follow up edition for the 50s, 60s and 70s would be interesting showing the buildings of the 1870s-1945, and especially the areas devasted by the Blitz and V-weapons, that were in turn replaced by ones designed with concrete and steel that today look dirty, tired, oppressive and outdated.Not to mention upholstery trimmers, laundry workers and the 20,000 seamstresses annually who were kept busy during the brief period of The Season, only to be put out of work immediately at its end. The loss of so very many buildings because of the necessity of new road planning can be explained and understood as motor vehicles (cheaper) replaced horse-drawn conveyances.

Writing for the London Evening Standard, Nick Curtis judged Harrelson's film, "A daft idea, the kind of mad, experimental challenge dreamed up by stoned film nerds after a Hitchcock all-nighter, but one he pulled off with considerable wit and brio. It is liberally peppered with the most astonishing array of genuinely stunning 'pin sharp' photographs which naturally I have never had the opportunity of seeing before, illustrating not just the buildings but also many of the evocative street scenes of the period.

These were the days before people were concerned about conservation, and a great many remarkable buildings surviving from as far back as before the Great Fire have been lost. Lost in London was favourably reviewed by Jason Solomons on BBC Radio 4's Front Row on 20 January 2017, [15] having previewed it the evening before. As primary sources of historical evidence, [the photographs] are by their very nature impartial, and bear witness to past places or events, undistorted by the interpretation of their creator.

We continue our wander, but become lost and find ourselves on the other side of London, the fog sets in. Even though the church buildings were lost you can still find traces of these parishes in the old parish boundary markers that are sprinkled around the city. The cover photo is typical; so sharp that you are standing there, on the edge of the street, almost touching the past and its people.

I was however absolutely appalled by the way it was packaged in what was no more than a two layer thick brown paper bag. If you love London (or once did), or wondered what Dickens was really thinking of when he was writing, you will absolutely not be disappointed. This book is not an architectural textbook, this book is written for laypersons, you don't need to possess any advanced knowledge of architectural history or architectural styles to enjoy this book. Please note that when presenting your pass for visual inspection, the transport operator's staff will inspect the pass closely to confirm its validity. Buildings are to be lived and worked in, after all, not admired as empty white elephants from a distance.

It’s hard to believe how different life is a hundred years later, when everyone has a mobile phone and every mobile phone has a camera. Alas, the British Empire was also in full swing, which meant there was a rush to re-develop and spend money. I actually collect old photographs myself, so the subject matter is naturally of interest to me, but this informative book also taught me an awful lot that I didn’t know about London in days gone by. In the areas where the natives were tolerant or even friendly, the camera has captured solemn and curious groups of Victorian and Edwardian Londoners, mostly all hatted, but many of them not shoed.The text is accompanied by three hundred and three pictures of London's lost architectural features, structures, and landscape. The real heartbreak comes with the bombing of WWII, where many of Christopher Wren's churches were destroyed. Philip Davies has written explanations of the histories of the buildings which are featured in this book, including the reasons that some of these buildings were demolished. This unique archival book shows Elizabethan, Georgian and Victorian London before the city’s major 20th century redevolopment and includes over 500 unseen photographs of London, taken between 1875 and 1945, from the Archives of English Heritage. They’ve been in the news quite a lot lately; my sister sent me these of Oxford, which I absolutely love, and just today I spotted this fascinating set of photos comparing the sites of the D-Day landings back in 1944 with how they are today.