Images of Lost London : Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change

Philip Davies's best-selling Lost London 1870-1945 has been described as a publishing phenomenon. Opening windows on a vanished past it captivated modern audiences and was described by John Carey in The Sunday Times as a 'haunting portal into the bygone life of the capital'. Like its predecessor, Panoramas of Lost London reproduces historic photographs commissioned by London County Council - many of them in the early days of photography - to capture individual buildings and streets that, along with their entire neighbourhood, were on the threshold of redevelopment. Lost London's portrayal of whole buildings, entire streets and skylines was achieved by scaling the images which often made invisible the wealth of pin-sharp detail contained within the historic photographs. Changes in scale and cropping have have brought to light an astonishing depth of detail: haunting faces from the forgotten past live again, hoardings and shopfronts reveal their wares while architectural details and text