Lost London 1870-1945

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And forgotten or overlooked heroes like the Tradescants, great voyaging horticulturalists of the 17th century, responsible for so much of London’s flora and buried in literally the first place I intend to go when the cafes reopen. Edgington’s was a supplier of tents, awnings and sails, and included among its illustrious portfolio the flags for HMS Victory and tents for David Livingstone and Scott’s Antarctic expedition. Taken to provide a unique record of whole districts of London as they were vanishing, each of the photographs is a full-plate image, a stunning work of art in its own right.

Light offsetting on endpapers, near fine in a very good dustwrapper with short tears on nicks on edges and modest internal tape repair. The last section in the book, on the photographs taken in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, shows you the streets lived and walked in by Dorothy L Sayers, Michael Arlen and Noel Coward. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?

I only spotted one howler: Percy Bysshe Shelley didn’t marry Mary Wollstonecraft, but her daughter, Mary Godwin. Our company was launched based on the fundamental belief that used books have value and should never go to waste.Please note, if your pass expired recently and you renewed it online you may already have an account. It is thirty-nine years since the historian and conservation-campaigner Hermione Hobhouse published her own epoch-marking Lost London. 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). There are some striking images of how the local population went about their daily lives and, perhaps surprisingly, how detailed some of the commercial establishment images portray the range of goods and services on offer to them.

That was 1971, the moment when the destructive, let-us-build-a-brave-new-world forces of the postwar period were finally in retreat, rattled by a rising storm of protest at the obliteration of familiar townscapes.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. Buildings are to be lived and worked in, after all, not admired as empty white elephants from a distance. The City churches where Oliver Cromwell was married and Samuel Richardson was buried are revealed as beams and shattered stonework pillars. It’s an unplanned creation and remains unlike any other European city with its own distinctive form, a direct result of its history and this book is here to show its many sides.