Book Review: Forgotten London

In The Good Companions, published in 1929, the Yorkshire playwright and novelist J.B. Priestley included a chapter on ‘How London Strikes a Provincial’. In it he lauded the capital as ‘easily the most good-humoured and pleasure-loving city in this island’ despite its inequalities, its vast size, its ‘roaring tumultuous scene.’ It is this sprawling, lively, elegant, roistering city that is the subject of Forgotten London.

The sepia photographs, framed in gold, are taken from a three-volume work, Wonderful London Described by its Best Writers and pictured by its Best Photographers, published in 1926-27. Judging by Drury and Lewis’s selection, the title was no exaggeration: G.K. Chesterton and H.V. Morton were among the essayists. The photographers included E.O. Hoppé and Donald McLeish. The photographs they took provide a window on the rich and varied life of London almost a century ago ranging from the 1926 General Strike to a Jewish East End baker preparing unleavened bread for Passover. There is ‘Cockney London’ enjoying a ‘fresh air holiday‘ on Hampstead Heath on August Bank Holiday Monday to the crowning of the Master of the Girdler’s Company in 1920 – though the trade of girdlers, making sword belts and girdles, was long defunct. There is also a wonderful array of shops, such as Birch & Birch of Cornhill in the City which specialised in soups and jellies and is also now, sadly, long gone too.