London poster collection set to sell for £100,000

Once they were plastered all over London - beckoning you here or there with glamorous, stylised images of the capital between the wars.

The Art Deco bill posters promoted London's leading attractions including stores, museums, the zoo, theatres and picture houses as well as events such as military tattoos, seaside excursions, exhibitions and fashion fairs.

But then they vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

Years ago these echoes of a bygone era could be bought for next to nothing. But surviving examples, particularly those by leading artists such as Alfred Leete, Frederick Herrick, Tom Purvis, Austin Cooper, Rex Whistler and Fougasse, are worth a small fortune.

Now a unique private collection of the posters from their golden age in the Twenties and Thirties is to be split up at auction. The sale at Bonhams on 9 May is expected to make £100,000.

Many of the auction lots were commissioned by London Transport to attract more customers to the Underground.

One of the most striking examples, The Lure Of The Underground, shows crowds being drawn to a central London Tube station. Created in 1927 by Leete - known for his Your Country Needs You poster from the First World War - it is valued at around £3,000.

There is also a set of posters promoting Kensington drapery store Derry & Toms, which became home to Biba. The most valuable may turn out to be F Gregory Brown's 1920 image of a stork beside the slogan: "The daintiest of legwear at Derry & Toms," which could go for £6,000.

Austin Reed's Regent Street and Fenchurch Street stores are well represented, with three of Purvis's Twenties images of gentry elegantly attired for a wedding, a night on the town and a trip to the country set to fetch up to £1,500 each.

A 1921 Christopher Nevinson poster showing a young couple strolling in the woods above the caption: "Lovers: To Lovers' Lane s by Motor- Bus" i s expected to fetch £500.

A colourful 1920 poster advertising The Beggar's Opera at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith could reach £350 and a 1927 specimen for the London Magazine - "For Holiday Reading" - showing a girl in a red bathing suit perched on a diving board, £1,200.

A set of five London Underground posters promoting "The Riches in London" in terms of hearing, smell, taste, touch and sight is set to fetch £3,000.