Feature Page

We have partnered with The Transport Library to offer an expanding selection of images from our catalogue as digital downloads and high-quality prints…

We supply high-quality, traditional darkroom-produced wet prints by mail order. We do not hold stock; all photographs are produced to order.

Our photograph lists contain the negatives that we have catalogued to date. The lists are regularly updated with new additions and new lists will be added…

Lens of Sutton was established around 1927 by T Lens and was taken over in 1948 by John L Smith who turned the small shop at 50-52 Carshalton Road, Sutton into a business famed throughout Great Britain for selling back numbers of railway, tram and bus magazines, advertising as ‘The Back Number Specialist’ and for stocking almost all the transport books currently in print. In addition, John Smith sold photographs of transport subjects, both taken by himself and increasingly from a vast collection of negatives that he acquired over the years, together with many old postcards that he copied. In 1973, the shop moved to 4 Westmead Road, Carshalton, and the sale of photographs continued until John Smith’s death at the age of 80 in 1999.