Panoramas of Lost London

Sequel to the bestselling Lost London book – takes a closer and more detailed view of the city’s lost heritage and its social and economic history. Philip Davies’s best-selling book 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’.

Panoramas of Lost London reproduces historic black and white 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 and in Spring 2010 English Heritage mounted an exhibition of highlights from the Lost London book at Kenwood House. Enlarged to poster size, the true quality of the ‘lost’ detail was revealed to astonished visitors that attended in record numbers. Overwhelming interest from the public and the media, has encouraged the author to return to this theme in close focus, enlarging over 180 of the photographs found in Lost London and adding over 100 new images to create the new, larger, landscape-format Panoramas of Lost London book, so readers can now enjoy the previously unseen gems of detail hidden in these historic pictures.