The past is another city

This absorbing book is — in both format and content — a much expanded follow-up to the same author’s very successful pictorial anthology Lost London of 2010. It replicates some of the photographs that appeared there and contains many new ones, all in captivating detail. The photographs are ones of record. There is little sense of artful composition or a striving for special effects. Many are of great beauty in their direct simplicity, as though the images were breathed onto the page with no human intervention. But of course the presence of a photographer with his cumbersome equipment in a slummy alley or dead-end court was bound to attract attention; inhabitants gather; children gawp; men in caps and boaters stand nonchalantly waiting for the click of the shutter; some are caught in the midst of their daily work; others seem to have given life the slip. There are haunting faces, yet it is extraordinary to think that some of the younger people in the later photographs might still be alive, so distant in time do the images appear.

Here are streets that Dickens would recognise (although the Old Curiosity Shop in Portsmouth Street, Holborn, a rare pre-Restoration survival, was not his fictional model). Gissing is invoked in images of the shabby-genteel and the ‘London particular’, as described, for example, in The Odd Women. Going deeper into some of the most wretched quarters, we are in the world of Kipling’s story of Badalia, beaten to death by her drunken husband, of Arthur Morrison’s ‘mean streets’ and Maugham’s Lisa of Lambeth. Here are the shop fronts of backstreet Soho — Conrad’s Mr Verloc is surely behind the window of one of them — and of the Clerkenwell where Arnold Bennett places his bookshop in Riceyman Steps; shops that Sickert would have painted with all their signs, placards and posters forming an exclamatory collage, caught in these photos with minute legibility.