The London Compendium: A street-by-street exploration of the hidden metropolis

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Even Joe Meek is in the book! Feb 23, Sitatunga rated it really liked it Shelves: Well it's a much celebrated book. My take is that's its handy but lacks the breadth of the London Encyclopaedia ] though I have reservations about that too and rather too easily beguiled by the criminous class on the one hand and the long-since debunked, faddish, so-called alternative left-wing politics and culture on the other; a sort of up-market Rough Guide.

Feb 20, Alamgir Khan rated it really liked it.


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Usually, I would say that this type of book is one you dip into rather than read cover to cover. However, read cover to cover I did. I have always been fascinated by my hometown and this book is brimful of interesting information about London, and not just about the obvious things you would associate with it. Nov 05, Tina Scott added it.

Secrets of Underground London - Original Narration

Little bits of History that fascinate me. I will always read this, over and Over. Hilarie rated it it was amazing May 18, Ilona rated it really liked it Feb 01, Michael rated it really liked it Feb 25, John rated it really liked it Nov 14, Caroline rated it it was amazing Feb 20, Zoe rated it it was amazing Mar 07, Jeremy rated it it was amazing Oct 29, Shin Yoo rated it really liked it Nov 26, Karl Williams rated it it was amazing Aug 12, Calico rated it really liked it Jul 21, Richard Stokoe rated it liked it Aug 26, Patrick Keilty rated it it was amazing Mar 05, Elisa rated it really liked it Aug 27, Parzival rated it really liked it May 16, Matthew White rated it really liked it Jul 21, Sarah rated it really liked it Apr 14, Louise Smith rated it liked it Nov 04, Terry Clague rated it it was amazing Feb 12, Paul Forrest rated it really liked it Feb 19, Rosalind rated it liked it Jul 26, Bruno Ciscato rated it it was amazing Jan 27, Svetlana rated it it was amazing Jul 16, Ewan rated it liked it Mar 10, M rated it it was amazing Jan 02, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

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But simply the sheer number of writers in the city ensures that the would-be definers of London keep coming. Nowadays at least, they can be said to follow two broad approaches.

One, in evidence everywhere from guidebooks to the more recent work of Peter Ackroyd, is to step away from the seeming chaos of the present and into a more controllable London of familiar historical landmarks: The other approach is to relish the volatility and unknowability of this vast, cracked saucer of a city: Iain Sinclair has made a good living and quite a few disciples in recent years by pioneering this method.

Yet the great majority of books about London still take the more orderly heritage route. AN Wilson's is one of them.

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

On page one, he refers four times to the chaotic and unplanned nature of the capital, but the history that follows is not allowed to sprawl. In brisk, lordly sentences, like an impatient upper-class tour guide, Wilson strides through the story of London, from its Roman founders to its Norman occupiers to its Victorian reformers, at the slightly dizzying rate of a century every dozen pages.

Famous buildings are indicated and described. Textbook events - the blitz, the beheading of Charles I - are given brief, melodramatic reconstructions. The only unpredictable moments are flashes of hot-tempered commentary from Wilson such as: Here and elsewhere, there is a hint of a more interesting book about London trying to get out. Wilson loathes most of the concrete and glass - "ugly, ugly, ugly" - of the modern capital. He describes London now as a "confused, overcrowded, multinational conurbation".

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Yet he decides he quite likes it anyway - for its "dynamism" and "unquenchable life" and, most intriguingly, for its absence of Englishness. For much of the narrative here, as in much of everyday life in London, the country the capital dominates and depends on may as well not exist. Wilson's fickle mixture of pride and hostility and fatalism towards the city where he lives vividly typifies how people see London once they feel part of it. Perhaps a memoir on the subject would have been a more suitable project. Gavin Weightman has fewer opinions about London but a lot more knowledge.

His book is even shorter - volumes on the infinite city tend to be cautiously brief or recklessly epic - yet it immediately establishes a stronger physical sense of the capital. The gritty brown Thames, Weightman argues, has been central to the city's development. Being tidal, unlike, for example, the Seine when it reaches Paris, the Thames acted as a conveyor belt in and out of London during the long period when the capital's other communications routes were congested and primitive you wonder sometimes whether this period has actually ended. Building materials, trade goods and people were able to bypass the city's surrounding ring of swamps and hills; well into the 20th century, when the docks began to close, London was despite appearances a coastal capital, what Weightman calls "London-on-sea".

A capital city

The water freed up a city known almost from the beginning for being tight and crowded. The river has been a place of leisure, a fishing ground, a taxi route, and a source of light for artists struggling with dim English afternoons. Not that the bright horizons and slap of waves changed the London instincts of river users completely: