Images of factories, schools, universities and civic buildings rising among old streetscapes – but also of rotting houses, barefoot children and faces pinched with poverty – have been unearthed from millions of photographs of late 19th- and early 20th-century England.
Philip Davies, an architectural historian, spent seven years trawling through the photographs, compiling the best 1,500 into a 558-page book entitled Lost England.
He said: “Many of the buildings are beautiful, but if this book does anything, it challenges the Downton Abbey myth of a Victorian golden age. The fact that shocked me most was that life expectancy for a boy born in the slums of Liverpool in the 1840s was 15 years. Many lives were spent in appalling conditions in the shadow of epidemics of killer diseases like typhus, cholera, TB and diphtheria.
“I was also struck at how contemporary so many of the issues were: immigration, housing, poverty, urban sprawl, employment conditions. You can see these things behind the superficial attraction of many of the images.”
One of his favourites was taken in 1895 and shows a group of boys gathered around a new drinking fountain in Liverpool. Davies pointed out that although the boys were working as shoe cleaners, apart from two who are wearing magnificently polished boots, most are barefoot. The fountain, with its shining bronze cup, was built to offer the urban poor an alternative to the seduction of the palatial Morning Star pub in the background.
As a trained urban planner as well as a historian, Davies grieves most over the images of Victorian and Edwardian Birmingham. Most of the grandest buildings he has included in the book – complete with turrets, spires and carved stone or cast iron ornaments – were demolished in the 1960s.
“You can see what a stunning city it was, bursting with civic pride, yet the whole city centre now stands as a monument to poor planning, carved up by the inner ring road, which in many places makes regeneration impossible,” he said.
During his time at English Heritage, Davies was responsible for the register of historic buildings at risk in London. It spread to become an inventory of England’s endangered buildings and sites.
Many of the lost buildings in his book were the subject of passionately fought conservation battles and some survivors are still under threat. One 1912 photograph shows passersby stopping to study the posters outside the gleaming white Picture House cinema in Lime Street in Liverpool: the building just about survives now as a propped up facade, part of a block of buildings that stand in the path of proposed redevelopment.
The photographs in the book are drawn from Historic England’s archive of more than 9m images. It includes work by some of the pioneers of photography and has expanded to absorb many commercial, industrial and specialist research archives to become a collection of international importance.
