Then and now: How 17 travel icons have been transformed
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
The Japanese capital “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 Tokyo, 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.
See it for yourself: Tokyo takes up a third of the 12-night “Essence of Japan” tour sold by Trailfinders (020 7084 6514; trailfinders.com). From £11,670 per person; flights extra.
New York
The Manhattan skyline has never been a static vista, with new structures rising at any given moment. The two photographs here show the same location – Battery Park, at the south tip of the island – with a century between them: in the “Roaring Twenties”, as the multi-multi-storey New York so familiar to the mind’s eye begins to take form; on August 6 2021. The glaring absences in both cases are what were not yet there a century back, and what – infamously – fell from view 20 years ago. The towers of the World Trade Center, once the tallest buildings on the planet, did not enter the picture until 1973.
See for yourself: The best view of Lower Manhattan is from the ice-cream-shaped Governors Island, at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers, directly opposite. A seven-night stay at the Conrad New York Downtown, flying from Heathrow on October 26, starts at £2,853 a head, with Virgin Holidays (0344 472 9646; virginholidays.co.uk).
(The City of) London
While not as changeable as Manhattan’s, the skyline of London’s financial district has also found itself with a range of newer – and much taller – skyscrapers over the course of the past 30 years.
This image captures the city on the evening of March 31 2013, with The Shard (still its tallest building, completed in 2012) and the Salesforce Tower (popularly known as the “Heron Tower”, finished in 2011) fully in place – and 20 Fenchurch Street (aka the “Walkie-Talkie”) a year away from a completion that would come the following spring.
The same scene is much lower-slung in this image, taken on New Year’s Day in 1966 – with St Paul’s Cathedral in the midst of maintenance work.
See for yourself: Double rooms at Sea Containers London (seacontainerslondon.com) – on the Thames riverside just to the west of Blackfriars Station – cost from £251 per night.
Berlin
Though 35 years have passed since the fall of the wall which came to define the German capital between 1961 and 1989, there is still a lingering, mildly shocking power to any image of the divided Berlin. If the sight of Europe’s fifth biggest city with a line of concrete and barbed wire across its middle sounds like an impossible nightmare to those who were not alive at the time, these two photographs tell the story all over again.
The first, snapped on March 1 1982, peers east from the erstwhile West Berlin, with the 1,207ft Fernsehturm (Television Tower) – constructed by the East German government, as a statement of Communist strength between 1965 and 1969 – two miles into the distance.
The second captures the Brandenburg Gate from almost exactly the same spot, on August 17 this year – music fans gathering for a Saturday techno festival.
See it for yourself: A three-night stay at the five-star Adlon Kempinski, which directly overlooks the Brandenburg Gate, costs from £1,268 per person, including flights, transfers and breakfast – through Kirker Holidays (020 7593 2288; kirkerholidays.com).
Hong Kong
The planet’s most iconic port has changed immeasurably in the past seven decades, not just swapping arms-length British control for a rather tighter Chinese version, but mushrooming in size and wealth – all in a space of “just” 426 square miles; the fourth most densely populated place in the world. The metamorphosis is evident in these two images.
The first, taken from above the railway terminus on the Kowloon peninsula in 1955, shows Victoria Peak still towering above the main city.
By the time of the second photograph, taken in July 2010, the skyscrapers of the waterfront – including the 1,363ft International Finance Centre, finished in 1998 – have all but eclipsed the horizon.
See it for yourself: You can enjoy this view from the five-star Langham Hong Kong, on the Kowloon waterfront. A seven-night holiday, flying from Heathrow on November 3, costs from £1,580 per person through Best At Travel (020 3993 7652; bestattravel.co.uk).
Los Angeles
One of LA’s main traffic arteries, the 16-mile Wilshire Boulevard has sliced across California’s largest conurbation since 1895 (in name at least – it loosely follows the line of the earlier Calle de los Indios). In doing so, it has helped to define the cityscape. It passes through Beverly Hills and Koreatown. It runs directly down the middle of MacArthur Park near its eastern terminus. And it has drawn a fair deal of construction to its kerbside – the 1,100ft Wilshire Grand Centre, at the junction with 7th Street, is both the tallest building in the state, and the tallest American building west of Chicago.
If much of this development has occurred in the past 60 years (the Wilshire Grand Centre was finished in 2017; the 433ft “5900 Wilshire” dates to 1971), it is a far cry from how the road and its surroundings looked in 1925 (first image).
Early plans to close off the MacArthur Park stretch (seen here in July) to vehicles may yet alter the picture again.
See it for yourself: American Sky (01342 395043; americansky.co.uk) sells “Encounter Los Angeles and San Diego” – a seven-night holiday which splits its time between the two cities, while hitting the shops along Rodeo Drive. From £1,349 a head (with flights).
Dresden
There is something particularly shocking about the first image, of the ruins of the great Frauenkirche at the heart of Dresden: that it was taken, not in 1945, shortly after the church had been destroyed in the notorious Allied bombing raids which reduced much of the Saxony city to dust – but in November 1989, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What had been an epic Baroque temple, completed in 1743, had been left in ruins by the authorities in the GDR (East Germany). The broken building spoke loudly, in its official role as a memorial to the horrors of conflict. But it also – tacitly – said a great deal about the withered condition of East Germany by the end of the Cold War.
Indeed, that first image could just as easily be 79 as 35 years ago, so far removed does it look from the 21st-century Dresden, where the centre, the Frauenkirche included, has been fully rebuilt.
See it for yourself: Ramble Worldwide (01707 524295; rambleworldwide.co.uk) runs a regular four-night escorted “Dresden City Break”, from £1,149 per person – with flights.
Dubai
The development of the most glitzy of the seven United Arab Emirates – not least the city around which it revolves – has been rapid, and impossible to ignore. A place that was little more than a village 200 years ago, and was still a small port a century or so ago, has mushroomed into one of the most recognisable dots on the global map, home to the world’s tallest building (the 2,722ft Burj Khalifa; glaringly obvious on the right side of the second photograph, taken in 2023).
That the first photograph is only six decades old emphasises the pace of change. If not quite the fishing village of the 1820s, the Dubai of the early 1960s was demonstrably different to the holiday hotspot it is now.
See it for yourself: A seven-night getaway to the five-star Armani Hotel Dubai (which occupies 11 storeys within the Burj Khalifa), flying from Birmingham on November 2, costs from £2,040 per person, through Thomas Cook (020 8016 3295; thomascook.com).
Doha
There are similarities between Dubai and its “neighbour” 430 miles around the Persian Gulf. As with the home of the Burj Khalifa, there was very little to the Qatari capital 200 years ago. It is generally accepted that Doha was established in 1825, and that it took a fair while to become more than a tiny notch on the map; in 1907, it was a pearl-fishing village of just 12,000 residents. Things changed after the discovery of oil in the region in 1908 – although even in 1960 (the year of the below photo), 11 years before Qatar ceased to be a British protectorate, its capital was low-slung and dusty.
Certainly, it is hard to see this city in the below image, snapped in December 2010. Although it was still two years away from completion at this point, the ornate Doha Tower, built by the French architect Jean Nouvel, stands proud at the heart of the picture. December 2010 was also the month Qatar was awarded the right to host the (men’s) Fifa World Cup, in 2022. The decade leading up to the tournament, a time of grim headlines about the poor treatment (and deaths) of migrant workers constructing the stadia, altered the city further.
See it for yourself: A four-night mini-break to the five-star Fairmont Doha – a remarkable pile of modern architecture in its own right; an upturned C-shape – costs from £1,049 per person, including flights, with Hays Travel (0800 408 4048; haystravel.co.uk).
Las Vegas
“Sin City” has changed so extensively in the past 119 years – it was barely more than a bare desert junction on the Union Pacific Railroad when it was founded in 1905 – that it is easy to pinpoint certain periods in its history. In the case of the below image – taken looking along the arterial Fremont Street – we are somewhere between 1936 and 1947.
The clue is the gateway message above the road; not the telltale “Welcome to Las Vegas” with which the city is so closely associated, but the tagline: “The Gateway to Boulder Dam”. It is impossible to think of the Las Vegas of today (or 2022, as is the case in the second photo) declaring itself a gateway to anywhere or anything but its own neon pleasures. But in those nine years in and around the Second World War, it was still sufficiently small and unassuming that it would direct visitors towards another attraction.
Why “between 1936 and 1947”? Because those were, respectively, the year when the great dam on the Colorado River – right on the state line between Nevada and Arizona – was completed, and the year when it was given its more familiar name, the Hoover Dam.
See it for yourself: A seven-night dash to the original kernel of Vegas, and the four-star Downtown Grand Hotel & Casino (just off Fremont Street), flying from Heathrow on October 12, costs from £998 per person through Expedia (020 3024 8211; expedia.co.uk).
Rio de Janeiro
Few cities have sprouted and sprawled over the past century quite like Brazil’s second biggest. The evidence is clear in these two images, taken from (pretty much) the same angle, 88 years apart. Both show Praia de Botafogo (Botafogo Beach) – always a quieter option than its sandy neighbour, Copacabana, just around the headland to the south – with one of Rio de Janeiro’s most distinguishing landmarks, the Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain), rearing in the middle distance. But so much has been built in the interim that the city of 2015 has swamped the city of 1927. The Basílica Imaculada Conceição is present in both photographs, but this lovely piece of neo-Gothic whimsy, completed in 1892, is only really visible in the older image, its steeple rising on the left side of the bay.
See it for yourself: Journey Latin America (020 3131 8374; journeylatinamerica.com) devotes four of the 15 days of its “Signature Brazil” itinerary to Rio de Janeiro, including an ascent of Sugarloaf Mountain. From £4,080 per person, excluding international flights.
Singapore
Only 53 years separate these images of the Far East’s great city-state – but, to the eye, the gap between the two looks considerably wider. The below photo, taken in December 1961, shows Singapore just as it was emerging from British rule – and two years prior to its brief spell (1963-1965) as one of the states of Malaysia. This was still a city of manual toil under a fierce sun, doughty sailing boats almost choking the currents of the Singapore River.
Compare this to the technicolour metropolis of, in the case of the below picture, 2014, where the very modern vision of the electronic “supertrees” dominate the river-mouth – as part of the Gardens By The Bay nature park.
See it for yourself: Inside Asia Tours (0117 244 3380; insideasiatours.com) sells a five-day “Singapore Past & Present” break from £1,367 per person, not including flights.
Washington DC
It hardly needs explaining that Washington DC does not have Roman roots in the manner of London or Paris, but the youthful age of the USA’s government hub is made especially clear by these two photos of one of its most famous landmarks.
The city only came into being (and even then, only on paper) in July 1790, via the act of Congress that authorised the creation of a federal capital on land, donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, alongside the Potomac River. Its growth took time. Abraham Lincoln died after being shot during a performance at its Ford’s Theatre in April 1865. The grand Memorial in his honour was not formally inaugurated until May 1922. Even then, just 102 years ago, the city had plenty of room for expansion.
The below image shows what is now the National Mall on March 25 1920, the reflecting pool in front of the monument still being dug from the soil.
This image shows the same location on September 6 2014. But Washington DC is still not a high-rise giant; the buildings behind the Memorial are in Arlington, Virginia.
See it for yourself: Bon Voyage (0800 316 3012; bon-voyage.co.uk) offers a 14-night “American History Tour” which calls upon Washington DC, Gettysburg, Philadelphia, and various significant sites in North Carolina. From £2,195 per person, including flights.
Machu Picchu
Peru’s foremost Inca citadel had been forgotten by all but a handful of Andean locals by the time villager Melchor Arteaga led the American professor Hiram Bingham up to its doorstep in 1911. Actually, the Peruvian adventurer Agustín Lizárraga had rediscovered Machu Picchu nine years earlier, in 1902, but it was Bingham who took a great deal of the credit – as well as the first photograph here. It reveals the extent to which the former royal estate – built in around 1450 – had been left to Mother Nature’s unswerving attentions in the 360 or so years since it had been abandoned (in about 1550). Bingham’s snapshot shows the site after 10 days of hard labour, clearing vegetation from around the buildings.
Certainly, you can barely tell that this is the same place visible in the modern photo, taken almost an exact century later, in 2010 – eight years after the point (2002) when the emperor Pachacuti’s hilltop des-res had become so famous that the Peruvian government had introduced a permit system for hikers walking the Inca Trail to reach it.
See it for yourself: Machu Picchu is a key part of the 11-day “Classic Peru” tour sold by Cox & Kings (0330 173 3035; coxandkings.co.uk). From £2,395 per person, with flights.
Chichen Itza
The oldest image in this collection points its lens all the way back into the far distance of the mid-19th century. At this point, in 1860, Mexico’s most celebrated Mayan structure was in a dishevelled state. While Chichen Itza had never been wholly abandoned, the Temple of Kukulcan at its heart was increasingly shrouded by jungle. Its rare majesty is only vaguely apparent in this photograph, taken by French explorer Claude-Joseph Désiré Charnay, whose tour of the Yucatan Peninsula at the start of that decade resulted in the 1863 tome Cités Et Ruines Américaines.
Nowadays, the temple (seen in the second image in June 2007) is a Unesco World Heritage site, and welcomes two million visitors a year.
See it for yourself: Chichen Itza is part of the succinctly named “Mexico: Yucatan” tour sold by Last Frontiers (01296 653000; lastfrontiers.com) – an 11-day odyssey which also visits Mérida, Uxmal and the beach at Cancun. From £5,170 per person, including flights.
Stonehenge
Britain’s greatest prehistoric structure is literally set in stone – but the stones have not always been firmly set. A considerable time has passed since Stonehenge took shape (the first human activity at the Wiltshire site can be traced to around 8500 BC; the first raised stones were placed into position in around 2500 BC); so much so that, come the turn of the century, the monoliths needed a little love.
The first photograph here was taken in 1900, a year before restoration work commenced, and 18 years before the site was gifted to the nation.
The second shows them in their gently corrected glory – in December 2013.
See it for yourself: Stonehenge is run by English Heritage (english-heritage.org.uk). Rooms at The Chapterhouse (thechapterhouseuk.com) in Salisbury start at £130 a night.
Bath
Some sites are so important, and so carefully preserved, that a pair of photographs, taken eight decades apart, can look all but identical. Such is the case with the Roman Baths in the Somerset city named in their honour. Never really lost to public view (although they fell out of use with the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the fifth century), these wonderful water features have largely maintained their basic shape across the centuries.
The first image shows them in 1935, the second on a winter morning in March 2019. The Abbey Church behind – a relative survivor of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries (his daughter Elizabeth I diverted significant cash to its restoration) – is another constant.
See it for yourself: The Roman Baths are open daily, with the exceptions of December 25 and 26 (romanbaths.co.uk). Nearby, The Gainsborough adds a 21st-century, five-star take on the spa experience, with double rooms for £213 (thegainsboroughbathspa.co.uk).
