
A new book lifts the lid on 'lost London'... but lost not that long ago.
Are you old enough to remember London with no parking restrictions, when Potters Fields was... all fields... and where Angel station still looked like this ☝️. Thing is, you don't have to be all that old. New book Lost London by Tim Brown looks at capital life (mostly) in the 1980s and it is simultaneously a familiar yet alien place. All the photos in his book are his own, and they've not been publicly seen before.

Many books and articles have been written about 'lost London', but they usually focus on the more historic structures like Old St Paul's Cathedral, the Coal Exchange or the Euston Arch. Here we find buildings and street scenes swept away more recently.
Here, for example is the view looking down Ludgate Hill towards Fleet Street in 1987 👇. Demolition work has begun to enable construction of City Thameslink and the offices above it, but parts of old London such as the famous old rail viaduct still cling on.

Covent Garden was another area undergoing radical change. The fruit market had closed in the 1970s, and the plaza area was reborn as a tourist centre in the early 1980s. But many old structures remained that have since vanished.



One of the biggest changes, visible on many of these photos, is the change in office architecture since the 1980s. The difference is most stark on London Wall, where these large concrete chunks have been replaced by shiny glass edifices. The last surviving remnant, Bastion House, is due for demolition soon.

Transport is another area where great changes have taken place. The author — a former tube driver — includes numerous images of familiar platforms or stations looking not quite how we see them today.


Lost London is a delight from cover to cover. Even if you don't remember London in this era, you'll enjoy looking at the photos of familiar places twisted in regressed time into something less-than-familiar.
Lost London by Tim Brown is out 15 June 2024 from Amberley Publishing. (First link is to Bookshop.org, which supports local bookshops and also gives us a small commission on any sales.)

See also: The East End in Colour: 1980-1990 by the same author