Quiz question: which famous 12-word quotation is followed by the phrase ‘for there is in London all that life can afford?’ Clue: two of the words are ‘tired’. If you need any more clues … well, I might as well warn you now that this probably isn’t the blog post for you. Because it’s about London books. It’s struck me that our capital city is the perfect example of a gift that keeps on giving, at least when it comes to writers and their inspiration. It seems Dr Johnson was correct: 350 years on and there’s still all that life can afford in London. It’s fascinating the different ways authors find of slicing up that life and putting it between the covers of a book.
This year I’ve reviewed four London books for the magazine: you can read the results here, here, here and here. (I felt like the leader of a bank robbery pointing at a map then.) There was Boris Johnson’s history of the city (a chapter each on 18 of its most famous residents); Matthew Sweet’s The West End Front (about the grand hotels during World War II); The City of London, edited by Nicholas Kenyon (drool-making coffee-table stuff); and Animal London by Ianthe Ruthven (a smaller picture book about the city’s animal monuments, statues, graffiti and the like).
Just from those few you can see the variety of options open to a Londonphile whose pen is twitching. Another taking Boris’s ‘London through its people’ route is Craig Taylor.Londoners is simply a collection of interviews. Simply? It’s genius. A registrar reveals that marriages are recorded with a special sort of ink (supplied by HM Government) which darkens with age; ‘sometimes people get a fountain pen, they’re not used to using it, they can’t get it to work and they’ll go shake it, and of course the ink goes everywhere.’ If you want to stick with Big and Glossy, try London: 1000 Years, edited by David Pearson. Collected from the archives of the City of London Corporation, it includes a police notice from 1910, a pre-CCTV era when descriptions of criminals had to be precise: ‘medium moustache (turned up at ends, lighter colour than hair of head), eyes grey, nose rather small (slightly turned up), chin a little upraised, few small pimples on face, cheekbones prominent, shoulders square but bends slightly forward …’
Next year’s big London event is already making its presence felt in the bookshops. English Heritage’s ‘Played in Britain’ series now includes The British Olympics, in which we learn that the capital’s 1948 games were the first to use angled starting blocks (before that sprinters used trowels to dig toe holes in the track), and will soon include Played in London.
But perhaps the single most fecund source of London books is the city’s Tube system. Having traipsed the entire network at street level for my own book Walk the Lines: the London Underground, Overground, I’ve come to appreciate just how much inspiration there is in them there tunnels. (Well, obviously not literally in my case, but you take the point.) Recently Ben Pedroche has published Do Not Alight Here, a guide to London’s lost Tube stations, which tells us why the bricks change colour for a section of the Piccadilly Line tunnel between South Kensington and Knightsbridge: they’re walling up the disused Brompton Road station. Meanwhile David Long’s London Underground: Architecture, Design and History tells the story of how a humble transport system rapidly became one of the city’s greatest icons. The icon’s icon, of course, is the Tube map, the result of Harry Beck’s eureka moment: ‘if you’re going underground, why bother with geography? Connections are the thing.’ So unimpressed were his bosses that they made him develop the map in his spare time.
I’m glad he persisted. For me the Tube map is the perfect symbol not just of London, but of our need to make sense of it. If a city does indeed offer all that life can afford, you need a framework, an angle, a hook with which to get hold of it. Thousands of writers have done that in their own different ways – and by the looks of it there are thousands more to come.
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