THE past is a foreign country; they do things differently there, wrote the novelist LP Hartley in 1953.

How right he was. And perhaps never was that more true than when comparing the England of the early 1800s with that of the early 1900s.

In 1814, England was still a largely rural nation. Almost two thirds of its 12 million people lived in the countryside, in small towns and villages.

Fast forward 100 years to the eve of the First World War, and how different things were.

Dring the Victorian era, the country had undergone the most staggering transformation ever seen. England had become the workshop of the world - an industrial powerhouse built on iron, coal and steam.

Factories sprang up across the land; the railways stretched their iron tentacles from corner to corner of the nation; great manufacturing cities such as Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool sprawled out into what had been countryside; and people migrated to the new urban areas in their millions.

The result? At the outbreak of the Great War, almost 80 per cent of the nation’s 37 million people were urbanised, writes historian Philip Davies in his new book Lost England.

The pace of change had been unprecedented. And thanks to a new invention – photography – the transformation England had undergone was recorded for posterity.

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Trinity Lane, York, c 1902. Photograph taken from Lost England, published by Atlantic Publishing

Historic England, the public body set up to look after England’s heritage, has an extraordinary nine million images in its archive.

Mr Davies – an internationally-renowned expert in heritage conservation - spent seven years combing through them. He selected 1,300 of the best images through which to tell the story of the way England was transformed between 1870 and 1930, a 60-year period in which the pace of change was perhaps the greatest.

The result is Lost England, 550 pages of stunning, pin-sharp black-and-white photographs which depict a country lost or changed forever.

The photographs are arranged gazetteer-style, by region, then county and town. Each image comes with a carefully-written extended caption which puts it in context and points out details you should look out for.

There are, as you may expect, many pages devoted to Yorkshire, with York itself quite prominent – the book’s front cover actually shows Trinity Lane in York in 1902.

We have chosen some of our favourite photographs from North Yorkshire and York to reproduce on these pages. There is a wonderful clarity to them, which enables you to make out everything from the expression on the faces of children who have come out to pose for the cameras to sagging timbers and the sheen on pots hanging outside a Jubbergate ironmonger.

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Shambles, c 1900. Photograph taken from Lost England, published by Atlantic Publishing

And Mr Davies is a wonderful companion, commenting wisely and yet with a marvellous lightness of touch on each image in turn.

The author clearly used his seven years of research well. This is a beautiful, beautiful book which is epic in scale and evokes the lost worlds of Edwardian and Victorian England like nothing else.

  • Lost England: 1870-1930 by Peter Davies is published by Atlantic Publishing priced £45.

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