Time, as the saying goes, flies. It races ahead of us, fleet of foot and boundless of energy, transforming everything it touches – but often so slowly, and so imperceptibly, that it is only when you glance back that you realise how much the world around you has changed. 

This is nowhere more the case than in the cities in which we live, and in the places we admire. What seems firm and immovable when it forms our daily context tends to be radically different when viewed in the past tense, particularly over a distance of decades.

The following photo-feature peers at 17 celebrated locations – all of them familiar travel destinations or bucket-list staples – through two separate lenses; one finding its focus in (roughly) the present day, another concentrating on a significant yesteryear. How did London, New York, Berlin and even Stonehenge look at a particular misty moment in their respective backstories, and how does that compare with today? You may well think you know the answer – but the gap between “right now” and “as then” can be surprising.

Tokyo

Like Dresden, Tokyo “emerged” from the Second World War in a badly damaged state – around half the city had been destroyed in the airborne assaults of 1944 and 1945. If this left something of a blank slate for redevelopment, it took a while for the all-gleaming version of the Japanese capital, so well-known today, to rise from the ashes. Shinjuku did not start to morph into a business district, skyscrapers bristling, until the demolition of the Yodobashi Water Purification Centre (which dominated the area) in 1965 created space. There is still a lack of flair to it in the first photograph, snapped in 1979, but there is neon glitter aplenty in the second – which captures the Kabukicho entertainment zone in 2017.