The most innocuous things in a young child’s life sometimes have a profound effect in later years. A young Brian May famously built his “Red Special” guitar at home with his Dad, and as a world-famous member of rock band Queen, Brian has been playing it to millions of fans all over the world since the 1970s. But it was his Mum’s shopping habits that inadvertently sparked a young Brian’s interest in stereo photography, a long-forgotten art form that is enjoying a resurgence thanks in part to a new book just published by May and co-author Elena Vidal.

Brian explains: “When I was 10 years old I discovered you could get 3D cards in Weetabix packets, and that was when I got hooked!”

May’s book, A Village Lost and Found, details a series of stereo photographs taken in the 1850s by pioneering photographic artist T. R. Williams. The images were very personal to Williams, who spent his boyhood summers in the isolated idyll of Hinton Waldrist, now in Oxfordshire. The pictures, and this book, capture a moment in social history now long gone.

Stereo images allow us to immerse ourselves in a scene with an enchanting three-dimensional effect. They were enormously popular in Victorian Britain, and now, thanks to a labour of love spanning some 30 years the first complete collection of perhaps his greatest body of work is published this month.

Here, in an exclusive interview with Mercedesmagazine, Brian May explains how a lifetime hobby formed, and why he feels so passionately about the lost village detailed in his new book.