All the best books about London from recent months.
If you’re interested in London history but are intimidated by Peter Ackroyd’s London and can’t get your head round Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic rambles then this beautiful beast of a coffee table history book may well be the thing for you. Written by eminent Birkbeck historian, …
Following one of our number’s valiant attempts to put the brakes on with Slow Club we received notice of a new London guide book aimed at helping us all do just that. ‘Slow London‘ says ‘live more, fret less’ and signposts ways to slow your …
Neatly packaged as “half anti-guidebook and half urban manual” the Not For Tourists Guide to London is ironically, probably pretty good for a certain kind of tourist. If you shun the double decker bus tour and Blue Badge guides or are newly resident and have …
What can you possibly do at 4am in London that doesn’t involve sleeping, menial labour or puking into a gutter? Marsha Moore’s new book offers six suggestions: queue for beigels on Brick Lane; tuck into German sausage at Kurz & Lang; clubbing at the O2; …
Ellen Donovan died, her plaque tells us, because she ‘rushed into a burning house to save a neighbour’s children and perished in the flames’. She is just one of the everyday heroes commemorated in the Watts Memorial, which lies in Postman’s Park north of St …
Is there anything new to say about the Ripper murders? A search on Amazon yields over 50 results – from forensic casebooks to fantastical reinterpretations – and that’s before you even look at web resources. Mary Kelly’s mutilations are as mere paper cuts beside the …
Did you know that there are eight Royal Parks? Can you name them all? Nor could we. But now we can, thanks to this neat box-set of short stories each inspired by one of the parks. The eight tales come from established writers such as …
Here’s a book that should keep you busy for a while. 1000TTDILFUTP builds on an already teetering stockpile of ideas from Time Out Guides, which previously showed us how to score a millennium ‘in London‘, ‘in Britain‘ and ‘for kids‘. With its focus on cheaper …
There are now so many books purporting to reveal the ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ side of London that they probably outnumber the mainstream guides. Books offering a cliché-free guide to the city are therefore becoming something of a cliché themselves. How many more volumes do we …
Not many people can trace their job back through 678 previous incumbents. Sir John Stuttard can, after serving as Lord Mayor of London in 2006-7. His new book “Whittington to World Financial Centre: The City of London & its Lord Mayor” neatly captures the endless …
Medical London, just published by Strange Attractor Press and the Wellcome Trust, is the latest in a long line of books to refract our city through a thematic lens. We’ve dutifully devoured Underground London, Violent London, Mapping London, Secret London…and a shelf full of similar …
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