The best books about London
The London book of 2016 has to be Curiocity: In Pursuit of London (Particular Books, £20.40, Buy it now), an endlessly absorbing A-Z illustrated dictionary-encyclopaedia of the capital. Cloth-bound and very easy to use, it encompasses all contemporary London from Atlas (maps, charts) to Zones (the Tube’s outlying districts).
The heroic enterprise began life in 2009 as a six-issue broadsheet with foldable maps, cartoons and notebook jottings on London life. Since then it has swelled into a lexical juggernaut. Compiled by the bibliophile social historians Henry Eliot and Matt Lloyd-Rose, the book is a gorgeous plum pudding of off-piste facts and oddities.
Bookshops in 2017 are full of omnibus remedies for our perceived ignorance of London — user guides, illustrated dictionaries, thesauruses. One of the best is The London Complaint: A Celebration of the Capital’s Maladies (Harbour, £10, Buy it now) by Geoff Nicholson. It catalogues the irritants, dislikes and complaints that Londoners love to vent about their city, from the cost of a pint of lager to extortionate taxi rides. Mayor Sadiq Khan (born in Tooting, raised in Earlsfield) has even complained about Tube train and bus network adverts showing women in bikinis and other “body-shaming” accoutrements. By the end of his four-year-term the city may look very different.
London was made great by opening its doors to foreigners. In Spitalfields: The History of a Nation in a Handful of Streets (Random House, £19.99, Buy it now), the architectural historian Dan Cruickshank documents east London’s most mythologised and densely populated area. Spitalfields was once a labyrinth of Jewish immigrant culture and Hasidic custom. By the late Sixties, however, when I was an underaged habitué of its Sunday market (my mother was an antiques dealer), the Jewish presence had all but vanished.
Cruickshank’s history laments the City’s encroachment on Spitalfields and the attendant growth there of estate agents, internet companies, fashion outlets and beardy hipster capitalists bent on having their slice of East End exotica. East London is changing by the day, Cruickshank writes. In early 2016 the developer-friendly Mayor Boris Johnson approved a business retail and office building project bang in the heart of Georgian Spitalfields. Hawksmoor’s Christ Church now overlooks a hideous building pit. The heritage brigade are up in arms at BoJo the perceived vandal.
Isobel Charman’s charming The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of the London Zoo (Viking, £8.94, Buy it now) provides a fascinating Zoo’s Who of the Victorian naturalists and wildlife enthusiasts who established a “Noah’s Ark” in the heart of the rackety capital. According to Charman the London Zoo reindeer can run at up to 50 miles an hour — but do they know it’s Christmas?
Jerry White’s marvellous history of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, Mansions of Misery (Bodley Head, £16.59, Buy it now), is no less sobering. Marshalsea, a dismal pile situated off Borough High Street, was a byword for human misery and corruption. In vivid prose White conjures a murky underworld of jailbird chancers and scufflers of one stripe or another.
Spitalfields Life Books, an excellent local publisher, has long produced beautifully designed titles about east London culture and custom. The Boss of Bethnal Green: Joseph Merceron, the Godfather of Regency London by Julian Woodford (Spitalfields Life, £16.59, Buy it now) charts the life of an 18th-century gangster, Joseph Merceron, who operated out of Brick Lane like a prototype Kray brother. His ruthless greed and thirst for power are described with real narrative verve and a suitably appalled eye.
Prince Charles may hate it but Simon Phipp’s photographic exploration of post-war modernist architecture, Brutal London (September Publishing, £13.48 Buy it now), salutes the brash, hard-edged high-rises and Centrepoint-type utopias that were built in Sixties and Seventies London by Ernö Goldfinger, Denys Lasdun and other forward-looking architects. Like it or not, the exposed aggregate and board-marked concrete of London’s public libraries and council estates is here to stay.
Another photographic gem, London Uncovered (Francis Lincoln, £20.40, Buy it now), gathers 60 sets of photographs by the noted London snapper Peter Dazeley. Among the little-known locations captured by Dazeley are the scarlet-and-gilt Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley and Tooting’s lavish, Venetian Gothic-style Gala Bingo Club. Mark Daly’s lively text is an added pleasure.
London’s population is fast approaching nine million. Where do all the people live? London Perceived by V S Pritchett (Daunt Books, £10.68, Buy it now), first published in 1962, describes the increasingly overcrowded, congested city in all its polyglot ferment. A lost classic, Pritchett’s elegant reportage makes an ideal Christmas gift. He lived in London for 80 years, yet has no blue plaque.
Why ever not? Blue plaques are as much a part of the London streetscape as black cabs, red phone boxes and plane trees. The English Heritage Guide to London’s Blue Plaques (September Publishing, £15.18, Buy it now), edited by Howard Spencer, catalogues the 900 official plaques to be found across London.
A significant number commemorate 19th-century political refugees, among them the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and the architect of Latin American independence, Simón Bolívar. As often as not, plaques conceal a murky history. The hotel behind Victoria station where Jeffrey Archer paid for sex (rubber-insulated, one hopes) with a prostitute in 1986 is marked by a blue plaque to Joseph Conrad. The Polish-born novelist might have relished the story of a proud man’s fall from Conservative office; it has a flavour of The Secret Agent, which Conrad wrote at the Victoria address.
No “plaqued” houses are known to mark the serpentine course of London’s mythical Effra. River Effra: South London’s Secret Spine (Signal, £9.99, Buy it now) by Jon Newman is an engagingly written, imaginatively illustrated history of the river which rises in the heights of Upper Norwood to wind its way eventually into the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge. Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I sailed along the Effra in her royal barge. Though the river vanished 150 years ago, it continues to flow underground.
This Christmas many of us will be called to the bar. The illusion of drink-fuelled happiness (what James Joyce called “tighteousness”) is lovely while it lasts. So what better than the traditional festive pub crawl, when the previous night’s drinking is remembered (if remembered at all) with a festive hangover?
Great Pubs of London (Prestel, From £31.21, Buy it now) celebrates the capital’s old-world boozers from the cramped (but cosy) Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden to Ye Old Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street. A total of 27 pubs close in the UK each week according to the Campaign for Real Ale; Charlie Dailey’s sumptuous photos and accompanying words by George Dailey (her father) provide a record of a fast-vanishing world. The foreword is by the ale-quaffing thespian Sir Ian McKellen (“I feel a pub crawl coming on!”). Party on!
