London in the 1920s population 8.5 million, about to be eclipsed as the world's largest city by Tokyo and in turn, NYC.
The Crystal Palace, a vast palace to the industrial era, soon to be destroyed by lightning
Battersea, London's vast power station (another two chimneys were later added making it look like a huge art deco table upended
the creaky fogs that earned the city the moniker of the 'Big Smoke'. Despite the romanticism these low level coal smogs- in effect what they were- grew progressively worse until The Great Smog a decade later killed nearly 10,000 in four days, and called in legislation to curb the pollution.
Parisian fashions copied from over the Channel
Parisian style caffs (read: London tea houses, now all gone) were the order of the day. (love those streeamline chairs).
working class ghettoes
all over London you will still see people sitting on the under-pediment steps in summer
Leicester Square. That neoned building on the left still functions as a tacky club.
working class market at Covent Garden
while the rich queued up for galleries around the Opera House next door
note the Black guy under the left of the arch. Blacks were then very rare (despite many in medieval times and reaching a peak population of 20,000 in the 1500s, were later 'absorbed' into the white population through intermarriage). Most of the ethnic groups were Jewish and European, though the majority of 'native' Londoners were actually descended from immigrants through the centuries.
The City of London was still the medieval and Victorian business district, not yet razed by wartime firestorms.
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