Plenty of books offer a glimpse of old London. City Of Westminster: The Archives of Judges of Hastings Ltd is different. It draws exclusively from a stock of early postcards, commissioned by Fred Judge, an early pioneer of the pictorial missive.
The images capture London in the early years of the 20th century, when horses still jostled with trams and motor cars for space on the road, and thick fogs were a common occurrence. This one's from around 1911:
As well as capturing many famous views you'd expect to find on postcards, the book also includes quite a few surprising subjects. Would you send someone a postcard of people hosing away horse poo at two in the morning?
The postcards continue through the First World War. Here, for example, are some captured German guns on the edge of St James's Park. Note how tiny the trees are.
Even a captured German sub, moored up along Embankment with yet more young saplings where today mighty plane trees do grow...
The book is annotated by Blue Badge tour guide Warren Grynberg, who draws on his own private collection of Judge's postcards to present 150 evocative images of the capital a century ago.
City of Westminster: Photographs and Postcards From The Archives of Judges of Hastings Ltd is out this month from Amberley publishing.
