The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839-1879

The earliest surviving photographs of London date from 1839, the very year in which Daguerre revealed the invention of the first practical form of photography to the world. These delicate, hazy images show London in the second year of Victoria’s reign, when the city was very much as the Georgians had left it. Very few of these early views of London have been published before. Yet they provide.a unique architectural, topographical and sociological record which had, surprisingly, ben largely overlooked by historians, who have relied instead on contemporary prints and drawings. Gavin Stamp has brought to light a remarkable collection of images of a city in transition. The earliest photographs sho Wren’s City of London before it was transformed by the Victorians, and John Nash’s West End when it was still smart and new; other record the building of the important architectural landmarks of the early Victorian decades - the Palace of Westminster, the Crystal Palace, the Weest End clubs; we see a London transformed in the 1860s by massive public works ) the building of the Embankment, the widening of old streets and the ruthless cutting of new ones, and, most destructive of all, the extension of the railway lines right into the heart of the city and the digging of the first underground tunnels. Ny the 1870s, when photography had become comparatively commonplace, London looked very different from the way it had at the beginning of Victoria’s reign. The photographs in this book are of interest not only as a record of long-vanished buildings and of the scale of the mid-Victorian rebuilding programme; the else reveal many of the fascinating details of everyday life in the city. They illustrate the character of the streets, with their elegantly designed shop fronts, railings and lamps; they show the clothes worn and the vehicles driven; they reveal much about the commercial and cultural concerns of the city through the advertisements, theatre bills and railway posters which frame the mid-century building sites. In The Changing Metropolis Gavin Stamp has assembled a remarkable photographic record of the city in the throes of industrial and architectural change, but his rare and beautiful early photographs also create a vivid and haunting impression of the elegant, harmonious London of an earlier era, a London which, sadly, has all but disappeared.