London-By the Book

�� 184353715X LONDON BY THE BOOK CMYK 35.indd 1 2/12/05 1:58:47 pm THE ROUGH GUIDE TO LONDON BY THE BOOK by Tom Bullough 2 LONDON BY THE BOOK Credits Author Tom Bullough Editor Helena Smith Series Editor Mark Ellingham Design and Layout Katie Stephens Cover Design Peter Buckley Production Katherine Owers Proofreader Carole Mansur and Nikki Birrell Project Manager Philippa Hopkins Managing Director Kevin Fitzgerald At Booktrust, sincere thanks go to Catherine Large, James Smith, Rosa Anderson, Helen Hayes and Huw Molseed. Publishing information Published 2006 by Rough Guides Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL Printed in Italy by Legoprint S.p.A. © Rough Guides Ltd Cover images © Rough Guides All divider images © Mark Thomas, Rough Guides, except Kenwood House, p.23 © Mark Thomas The publishers and authors have done their best to ensure the accuracy and currency of all the information in The Rough Guide To London by the Book; however, they can accept no responsibility for any loss, injury or inconvenience sustained as a result of information or advice contained in the guide. Get London Reading We are grateful for advice and support from the following: Creative London Penguin Mayor of London’s Office Waterstone’s Rough Guides National Literacy Trust Transport for London South Bank Centre London International Book Fair Book Works London Libraries Development Artwords Agency Gay’s The Word Arts Council England, London Apples and Snakes Booksellers Association The London Library Book Marketing Society The British Library Audiences London The Institute of Ideas Arts & Business Amazon The British Museum Kirkdale Bookshop World Book Day Society of Young Publishers Quick Reads HEAD2 3 Introduction rom Bloomsbury to Bromley, Geoffrey Chaucer to Zadie Smith, London by the Book is a guide to the city through writers and their writing. Packed with F obscure and intriguing information (how did Graham Greene survive the bombing of his Clapham house in 1941? Which nineteenth-century poet was in the habit of sliding naked down the banisters?), it chronicles the waves of novel- ists, poets and playwrights who have lived in London over the centuries, written about it, and developed its identity as a result. I live in Regent’s Park Caroline Forbes near the Mosque. I love that the Mosque is my local place “of worship. I have been inside and was absolutely stunned by the warmth of the welcome I received and by the beautiful interior. There’s a very intense sky- blue colour painted inside the dome and then an amazing carpet which has a pattern of individual prayer mats woven into it. In my third novel, The Last Hope of Girls, the heroine’s father, a successful but rather cold novelist of the do- not-disturb variety, lives in a very grand house overlooking the park and the heroine remembers visiting the ducks with him as a child and discussing their appearance and their characters in great detail. But that novel’s main setting is Oxford Street, where the heroine was the caretaker of some flats that were being reno- vated in a style well exceeding the nines. One of the large depart- ment stores becomes a second home to her and she visits it daily and finds cheer in all its well-ordered plenty, entering into the life of its things when her own life is proving hard to steer. I’m also drawn to areas that are full of mansion blocks, like the short roads near Baker Street; I’m a bit fascinated by what goes on inside them. They can seem like Edwardian stage sets when you peer in through the bay windows and I imagine heroic Brookner-style loneliness among all the pianos and the chandeliers... My favou- rite book set in London is Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton. Set in the seedy pubs, hotels and boarding houses round Earl’s Court in the late Thirties, it gives a powerful insight into a par- ticularly painful way of living in London at a very acute point in European history. ” Susie Boyt 4 LONDON BY THE BOOK Dividing up London is always a tricky business. As Tobias Hill puts it: “London is a city full of quarters. Sometimes these quarters are called villages and sometimes neigh- bourhoods, but village is too quaint a term for London, and neighbourhood says too much about peoples and not enough about the bricks and stones they inhabit… The Thames is the city’s great dividing line, but the quartering of the capital has hardly begun with that simple halving.” In this book, the river is the line between the North and South (even if Chelsea is in SW3) while the Centre has shrunk by any normal standards and, among other controversial deci- sions, Wembley has slipped into West London. The end result is five main sections – Centre, North, South, East and West, each divided up into boroughs and localities – plus sections on the Thames and the Underground, both perennial sources of literary inspiration. The next thing to do is to get stuck in. Have you read Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban? Or Songs of Innocence by William Blake? Or The Unrivalled Spangles by Karen Wallace? Or The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon? Here are hundreds of new ways of looking at London. Now turn the page… Get London Reading The Get London Reading campaign aims to encourage Londoners to make more time for reading by connecting them with those who work with books and writers in the capital – publishers, retailers, libraries, museums, festival and event organizers. Such activity is at the core of Booktrust’s dedication to bringing books and people together. Booktrust is proud to be working with the Mayor of London’s Office and with Creative London to highlight the many ways in which London’s readers can find out more about the literary life of their city. Of course, there would be no books without authors, and it is on these artists that this London by the Book concentrates; indeed, we have asked some of the capital’s best-known contemporary authors to tell us how they have been inspired by the city in which they live. We hope that this Rough Guide will encourage you to find out more about the city’s literary history and its thriving book scene, and get involved in the activities that will be taking place throughout Get London Reading and throughout the year. Booktrust 5 LONDON BY THE BOOK HEAD2 5 The Centre Bloomsbury f any one place in London is synonymous with litera- ture, then it is Bloomsbury. The “Bloomsbury Group” of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster Iet al gave the area its literary reputation, although its history really begins with the opening of the British Museum and Library on Great Russell Street in 1753. The museum itself has inspired innumerable writers – perhaps most famously Shelley, who wrote “Ozymandias”, and Keats, who wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (both 1820), in response to a visit – while, more recently, Russell Hoban’s magnificent The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973) was prompted by a relief of an Assyrian royal lion hunt. The Reading Room in the British Museum has provided research material and a location for almost every great writer there is. In Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), this “true spiritual centre of London” has Karl Marx, George Gissing and the comedian Dan Leno all working side by side. Other famous researchers have included Charles Dickens, Lenin (who signed in as Jacob Richter) and Sherlock Holmes, who consults a book named Voodooism and the Negroid Religions in The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge (1917). Nineteen Eighty-four For all the brilliant imaginings of Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell set his novel in London, and many of its locations are based on actual places. The Ministry of Love, for example, where Winston Smith is tortured in Room 101, began life as Bethnal Green police sta- tion, where the author was detained in 1931 for being (deliberately) drunk and disorderly and where he, like Winston, spent the night counting the porce- lain bricks on the walls.

Load more