How to fix 'Sorry, your session has expired. Please refresh and try again' message in Laravel 5

I have Laravel 5.7 running on my local xampp server (MySql and Apache). When I navigate to the homepage 'https://laravel.platform/public' I get a message that it's redirecting to 'https://laravel.platform/public/login', and then it presents the normal login page where I enter a username and password. When I log in though I get greeted with a page that says '419 Sorry, your session has expired. Please refresh and try again.

GO HOME'. This shows up regardless of whether I log in with the admin credentials or with user credentials.

Any help would be much appreciated - I have tried clearing the cache and deleting config.php from laravel/bootstrap/cache.

Thanks,

Rob

London, UK

via Chebli Mohamed