Britain Yesterday & Today by Janice Anderson and Edmund Swinglehurst (Carlton Books, £20).

SADLY, memories can't be bottled. The only way to capture yesterday is on film, and then, you only have an image of a moment in time.

The idea of comparing yesterday's photographs with those of today is not a new one and, of course, the "today" image is already "yesterday" by the time it is developed.

But as TV newsman Peter Sissons says in the foreward to this look back and linger book: "The story of Britain is the story of change. For well over 100 years now, since reliable photography became common place, we've been able to record that change - and the pictures are fascinating across the whole of British life.

"The Britain of yesterday was different, but it made Britain what it is today. In these pages you'll see what I mean..."

A little clumsy perhaps, but what we have here is a document recording the social change of a country. It is a glimpse of a lost way of life - and not always for the better; witness the naivet of a 1936 bride and groom with a pony and trap against a modern wedding group all wearing red noses!

Compare the Lyons Corner House Nippie serving tea in 1926 - all silver service and a table groaning with food to the today equivalent: a cup of cappuccino and a cake; camping in the 1930s with boys who could be Julian and Dick from Enid Blyton's Famous Five to a 21st Century scene of lightweight tents and backpacks and the tall mast ships of 1900 London Docklands to the tower blocks that are there now.

How innocent and jolly is the sight of 1949 housewives wearing pinnies and headscarves as they compete in a pancake race and the shed on wheels that was the 1926 answer to caravanning.

And it is difficult to comprehend that in 1930s Britain, the few who had cars could only transport them across the Channel by having them hoisted aboard a steamship with the help of a crane.

What would 19th Century ladies in bombazine black standing next to Blackpool donkeys think of white knuckle rides and conversely, what pleasure would today's children glean from bowling a metal hoop or sitting, listening to a big-as-a-TV-set radio?

A few images remain remarkably the same and some have an ethereal quality that goes beyond the evocative... such as the two teenage girls in straw hats, fitted jackets and diaphanous skirts walking like swans across Pensarn Beach, Colwyn Bay, in 1890. Pure magic.

David Chapman