#missing buildings

Marking 75 years since the outbreak of the Blitz, Thom and Beth Atkinson's first photobook, Missing Buildings, will be published this Autumn by Hwæt Books. Launching in early October, this new publication seeks to preserve the physical and psychological landscapes of the Second World War in London. Over a million of London’s buildings were destroyed or damaged by bombing between 1940 and 1945. From the mysterious gap in a suburban terrace, to the incongruous post-war inner city estate, Missing Buildings reveals London as a vast archeological site, bearing the visible scars of its violent wartime past. But this book is more than a simple record of bombsites; to the artists' generation, the war is the distant story of an epic battle, passed down to them through books, images and grandparents' memories. Blurring fact and fiction, Missing Buildings searches for this mythology, revealing strange apparitions of the past as they resurface in the architecture of the modern-day city. Missing Buildings asks us to contemplate the effects of war upon the British psyche and suggests that the power wrought on our imaginations by the Blitz is a legacy as profound as the physical damage it caused. Made on a series of walks over six years, Missing Buildings presents forty two large format photographs in an edition of 600, with a new afterword by writer David Chandler. Go to Hwaet Books for more info