Antique & Vintage Postcards

Crowds of Londoners in overcoats and hats cluster around the newly unveiled Cenotaph on Whitehall — Britain's most sacred war memorial — in this evocative early-1920s real-photograph postcard that captures the monument when it was still fresh, still raw with grief. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and permanently unveiled in Portland stone on Armistice Day 1920, the Cenotaph became an immediate national pilgrimage site, and postcards like this one were snapped up by a public hungry to share and possess images of the memorial. The scene is thick with period atmosphere: a double-decker early motor bus passes in the background, soldiers and civilians mill about in Edwardian-transitional dress, and the grand colonnaded facade of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office looms on the left. A Horse Guards building dome is visible in the right distance. This is an unusually animated street-level record of Whitehall in the early interwar period.