Exploring London since 2007
What must be London’s most unusual guidebook has just landed on my desk – Peggy Lee Loves London. Written by Katrina Leskanich (of Katrina & The Waves) and Sher Harper it’s a whistle-stop tour of the two authors’ favourite London spots, aided and abetted by the Peggy Lee of the title, who happens to be [...]
While the rise of the Kindle and online book sales through Amazon and the like continue to threaten the future of many bookshops, there are other casualties in this war between online and offline. I’m thinking of the small-circulation magazines of short fiction – Smoke: A London Peculiar stopped production in 2010, and then started [...]
Given that Boris celebrated the completion of the London’s Overground’s encircling of the capital earlier this week, it was entirely appropriate that a new book, ‘Stations‘, should land on my desk for a review. ‘Stations’, edited by Cherry Potts, is a collection of short stories whose common theme is the London Overground’s destinations – twenty [...]
It’s probably fair to say that along with the London 2012 Olympic Games came an attempt to rewrite Stratford’s history, with one Minister stating that the Olympic Park had replaced ‘an urban wasteland’. I hate to call a member of the Government a liar, but the displaced businesses and uprooted communities that used to occupy [...]
Celebrating the city’s new-found love for coffee, The Independent Coffee Book: London has recently been launched by Vespertine Press. Authored by Alex Evans and with a foreword by Nick and Andrew Jolly of Taylor St. Baristas in the City, The Inpendent Coffee Book: London lists the thirty four coffee shops, stores and stalls which now [...]
‘Underground: How The Tube Shaped London’ is the latest, and probably most definitive, history of the London Underground to be published to date. Written by three heavyweights from the London Transport Museum – David Bownes (Head Curator), Sam Mullins (the Museum’s Director) and Oliver Green (Research Fellow) ‘Underground: How The Tube Shaped London’s 280-odd pages [...]
Spitalfields Life, published earlier this year, is an intimate literary record of everyday life in the historic area of Spitalfields, just to the east of the City of London. Built up over two years, and the product of over ten thousand posts gathered from spitalfieldslife.com, this anonymously penned tome (authorship is ascribed to ‘The Gentle [...]
