Modern Christmas shoppers dread going to Oxford Circus but there is nothing new about its crazy congestion.

Go back 100 years and the mercantile mecca was choked with people and traffic, just like today.

(Clockwise from top left) Nannies with babies, traffic in Oxford Circus, and Tower Bridge under construction in 1893

A new book, Lost London 1870-1945, clearly shows that many aspects of life in the capital hardly seem to have changed.


Back in 1910, pedestrians still had to be able to look in three directions at once as they nipped in and out of horse-drawn carriages and avoiding those new-fangled buses and taxis.

A policeman directs the traffic while men in bowler hats cross the road looked down on by people in open-topped double deckers.



The collection of black-and-white images is from the former London County Council archive of photographs, held by English Heritage for the past 25 years.

The city is full of building sites and crowded schools and the traffic hardly moves at road junctions

Among the characters featured is Mrs Mary Smith of Brenton Street, Limehouse Fields, who was paid 6d (2.5p) a week to shoot dried peas at the windows of market stall workers who had to get up early for work every day.

In another photograph, from 1893, Tower Bridge is under construction, a year away from being completed.

Its amazing steel mechanism would be cladded over with the granite and portland stone we see today.

Three nannies in aprons and white cloth hats are looking after more than 20 children at a house in Deptford, south-east London, in 1911.

Many of the photographs are previously unpublished and, according to its author Philip Davies, were originally taken to provide a record of districts marked for demolition.

In his note to the £29.99 book, he writes: ‘Most were taken as an historical record for the Survey of London as old buildings and streets were awaiting redevelopment.

‘It is impossible not to speculate what happened to these people. What sort of lives did they lead? What were their hopes and dreams? How many were destined to die on the Western Front, or in the great influenza epidemic of 1920?’