The 40 best photos of London ever taken

Before Robert Frank produced one of the greatest and most enduring of photographic projects, ‘The Americans’, the Swiss-born artist spent a couple of years documenting postwar London. This shot of an anonymous street has all the hallmarks that would go on to define his style, with its grainy, slightly off-kilter composition, and its powerful sense of melancholy.

© V&A

A pioneer of street photography, Sergio Larrain was hired by the British Council to produce a reportage project on British cities in 1958. The Chilean’s ethos was all about capturing spontaneous, fugitive moments – and what could be more iconically fugitive, more quintessentially fleeting, than Trafalgar Square’s pigeons?

This image can be seen as part of the exhibition 'Sergio Larrain' at the Magnum Print Room, London until Apr 22 2016.

© Sergio Larrain/Magnum Photos

Emerging from a hole in a London pavement, the boy in Native American head-dress aims his gun at the camera. Shooting back (with his Leica, a camera he protected so fiercely that he used to take it to bed to keep its shutter mechanism warm) is the legendary Fleet Street photographer (and south London lad) Thurston Hopkins. In his 101 years, Hopkins (1913-2014) went on assignments in Africa, India, Australia and the Pacific, but he’s best known for the work he did in the 1950s for Picture Post of London picking itself up from the war, much of it featuring kids finding their own fun on the streets and bombsites of the city. London photography gallery owner Michael Hoppen met Hopkins a number of times and remembers ‘the glint in his eye when reminiscing about making this picture.’ But he loves the images most for what it says about a certain type of London childhood at a certain point in history. ‘It reminds me of my own carefree existence as a child, which sadly seems a rare thing these days.’

© Getty Images 

© Estate Bob Collins/Museum of London

Who could have predicted that a nondescript thoroughfare in St. John’s Wood would become one of the capital’s most popular sights? And what do the thousands of annual tourists do when they get there? They stage their own, parodic snapshots in emulation of the iconic original – a testament to the ritual power of photography.

Photography was central to ‘Swinging London’, with its culture of fashion and celebrity chic. Inevitably, the era saw the emergence of the photographer as a star in his (and it was pretty much always his) own right. Handsome, socially connected, sexually charged – it was a stereotype that David Bailey, above all, did his best to live up to.

© Getty Images

Smoking? On the tube?! Those who fondly remember the days before BoJo banned drinking on the tube (in 2008) might look at this picture with equal nostalgia. It was in the ’70s that Aldgate-born Bob Mazzer started surreptitiously snapping his fellow passengers, creating intimate pictures that are full of all sorts of London characters, but always the same warmth and humanity.

Ray-Jones was a master of framing multiple narratives within a single shot, capturing different people looking at different things, often to paint a gently satirical picture of British life. In this image, the starting point for the linked network of glances is more than evident.

It was dubbed the Second Battle of Trafalgar – the afternoon when anti-Poll Tax demonstrators, kettled within Trafalgar Square and attacked by riot police, finally responded in kind, and London witnessed its worst riots for a century. And Hoffman’s shot, indeed, resembles some classical battle scene, with the array of bodies and poses conveying a sort of desperate grandeur.

London in the early ’60s, before it began to swing, was really more like the ’50s: a little bit dismal, a bit pokey and dowdy – still dusting itself off from its postwar blues, not yet ready to embrace the Technicolor future. Arnold’s wonderfully moody photograph seems to capture that in-between era perfectly.

In this photo, Nick Waplington's lens transforms kids on London Fields into fairies in a golden-lit Arcadia – a reminder that, if we only stop to look, we’re constantly surrounded by such magical scenes in our day-to-day lives. And that the city has some fantastic green spaces to enjoy. Roll on summer!

There’s a hallucinatory, almost watery feel to Polly Braden’s study of London’s Square Mile. It’s as if she’s evoking the collision between two fundamental, opposing tendencies: architectural lines and grids, and the rigid demarcation of territory, on one hand; and the way that workers and capital ceaselessly flow and morph, on the other.

© Polly Braden

Downing Street has witnessed major political events, of course, but the actual drama mainly happens behind closed doors. Not so with Margaret Thatcher’s tearful, final departure from Number 10 in 1990, when it was hard to know which was more startling: the suddenness of her ousting, or the Iron Lady displaying human emotions.

Bathed in a beautiful morning light, Tom Hunter’s young woman looks likes she’s stepped out of Johannes Vermeer’s seventeenth-century masterpiece ‘Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window’. The narrative, though, is pure late twentieth-century. Fillipa is a squatter reading an eviction notice from Hackney Council. Hunter, at the time a fellow member of Hackney’s squatter community, shot the image for his ‘Persons Unknown’ series. It went on to win the John Kobal National Portrait award and has shown around the world. ‘I never envisaged this response to a photograph I took of my neighbour and friend in a squat one sunny morning in Hackney,’ he says. ‘But its intimate depiction of the mother and child in a moment of vulnerability seems to resonate in a universal way.’

© Tom Hunter

Though it only lasted six months, The Shop, Emin and Lucas’s studio-slash-gallery-slash-actual shop just off Brick Lane, has achieved legendary status – the sort of place where everyone retrospectively claims to have hung out. Famed for its parties, its debauchery, its selling of cheap arty tat, it marks one of the starting points for the YBAs and the Shoreditch scene.

© Sarah Lucas; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London/Tracey Emin; photo: Carl Freedman

While many artists in the 1990s were busy getting thrown out of the Groucho, German photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg was casting a more sobre eye over the city at night, using long exposures to create poetic images that are the photographic successors to Whistler's 'Nocturne' paintings.

© Rut Blees Luxemburg, courtesy V&A

We screamed a lot during the 2012 London Olympics: at the telly, at home, in pubs, and at each other. But nowhere was the din as loud as in the Olympic Stadium when Mo Farah claimed his second Olympic gold by winning the 5,000 metres. The sound of the 80,000-strong crowd was so loud that the camera at the finish line started to shake, warping the image. ‘Nothing captures the fervour, the noise and the enjoyment of London 2012 more than this image,’ says Time Out photographer Rob Greig. ‘It’s a picture taken by 80,000 people.’

We’ve all been high on a Saturday night but, orbiting 400 kilometres above the earth, British astronaut Major Tim Peake takes the (freeze-dried) biscuit for altitude. Shot from the International Space Station at midnight on Saturday January 31, 2016, his image of London, its skeins of twinkling lights shining brightest around Oxford Street and Regent Street, is the most recent image in our top 40 and the ultimate establishing shot. ‘I’d rather be up here… but only just!! #toughcall,’ Peake told Twitter as he flew past at 17,150 miles per hour.

© ESA/NASA