Author: Evening Standard
Images of London
Great cities change almost as you look, and not just the buildings. The people who live in them change too. They stare at us from the pages of this riveting book, a moment in their lives captured and held. We stare back. It is the way they dress that strikes you first, then the body language, the life behind the eyes. Who are they? What are they up to? What happened next?
The newspaper artists and photographers who made these pictures open window after window on a city we still share but sometimes hardly recognise. Was this how London and Londoners used to be? It is unsettlingly familiar but another country, another world.
Many of the buildings, at least, remain. Here is Georgian London, Victorian London, Edwardian London, here the often frenetic London of the 1920s and 1930s. Now London is cruelly at war, now newly at peace, and we go on into the 1950s and 1960s, the London of the day before yesterday. This too belongs to history, the flower children and the beautiful people, the mods and rockers, the bouffant hairdos and the Ford Cortinas.
As the years pass and the pages turn we see London booming, suffering, swinging, rioting. London in extremis and London in love. The rich and famous play their part, great buildings are never far away. At the heart of it, though, this is how things were for ordinary people in ordinary times. Extraordinary.
