Palace of Westminster London (by Trodel)
From Malcolm Burgess, publisher of Oxygen Books’ city-pick series, featuring some of the best writing on favourite cities, comes a new series for Spotted by Locals on the best city books written by local writers. This one is all about London…
Sorrows of the Moon, Iqbal Ahmed
Iqbal Ahmed’s book is a moving and visionary outsider’s view of London. Here he describes visiting Hampstead Heath.
‘It was a Saturday afternoon in July and many people were arriving for a picnic in the park. The first pond opened in my field of vision like the landscape in George Seurat’s Sunbathers. A group of tramps was making merry by the next pond. One of them was playing a guitar and another was dancing on tottering feet. A woman in the group was feeding a dog from the palm of her hand. The path inclined after the second pond, and I could see many people on top of a hill trying to locate landmark buildings in London.’
The Groundwater Diaries, Tim Bradford
An author who really gets under the skin of London, or rather into its underground rivers and sewers. Tim Bradford is in love with London’s underbelly.
‘London’s got its fair share of nice parks and museums, but I love its underbelly, in fact its belly in general — the girls in their first strappy dresses of the summer, the smell of chips, the liquid orange skies of early evening, high-rise glass office palaces, the lost-looking old men still eating at their regular caffs even after they’ve been turned into Le Café Trendy or Cyber Bacon, the old shop fronts, the rotting pubs, the cacophony of peeling and damp Victorian residential streets, neoclassical shopping centres, buses that never arrive on time, incessant white noise fizz of gossip, little shops, big shops, late-night kebab shops with slowly turning cylinders of khaki fat and gristle in the window, the bitter caramel of car exhaust fumes, drivers spitting abuse at each other through the safety of tinted electric windows, hot and tightly packed tubes in summer, the roar of the crowd from Highbury or White Hart Lane, dog shit on the pavements, psychopathic drunken hard men who sit outside at North London pub tables. London has got inside me. I’ve tried to leave. But I always come back. It’s love, y’see.’
London Fragments, Rüdiger Görner
German academic and writer Rudiger Görner lives and works in London and offers many fascinating views of the city.
‘There can be no doubt that the Tube is a cultural centre, a social studies subject of the first rank, an experience, an emotive word, a political issue in view of its proverbially poor service. Depending on your taste, you may count on the positive side of the ledger that the Tube offers its own world of advertising. It brings forth poetry and comforts those who are combating shortage of breath and panic attacks with individually mounted poems arranged at the level of the handrail.’
Night Haunts, Sukhdev Sandhu
London from the air at night has its own special beauty, as Sukhdev Sandhu discovers when he accompanies those who patrol the city’s skies between nightfall and dawn.
‘Politicians and demographers often assert that London is overloaded, crammed to the hilt, but from the sky it appears far from congested. The concrete jungle is nowhere to be seen. Even the most built-up areas are punctuated by large expanses of dark forest, empty parts of the city’s night-canvas. The capital is an endless origami unfolding, stretching out horizontally rather than vertically. Its residential buildings are so crabbed and timid that any sticking out appear both heroic and lonely.’
The Room of Lost Things, Stella Duffy
In Stella Duffy’s gripping novel, The Room of Lost Things, Hungerford Bridge – linking Charing Cross Station and the Festival Hall – is wonderfully evoked.
‘To Marilyn’s right, Hungerford Bridge is a dream spider’s web, sticky iron filaments holding up a toy train as it crosses south to north; she looks through the white threads of the bridge to the chocolate box Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. To her left, St Paul’s is diminished by a Christmas-lit city crane, directly ahead, the National Theatre squats in great chunks of illuminated concrete. Walking further over the bridge, the angle of the wheel becomes so acute it is a single green cat’s eye, turning slowly above the water, and every ripple below, every wave, is a Christmas sparkle in the slanting western light.’
London and the South-East, David Szalay
David Szalay’s fine novel describes Londoners at work – here socialising at the Old Cheshire Cheese, a famous old pub on Fleet Street.
‘It is half past five and every part of the pub is packed. Eddy is not there, so Paul goes back upstairs to his favourite place, the snug on the other side of the panelled entrance hall from the Chop Room restaurant (which does not seem to have changed much since the late eighteenth century, except that the waiting staff are now mostly Antipodean), where there is a fireplace with orange coals in a black grate, and a muddy painting of a man wearing a wig, and a window of thick, imperfect glass — he used to while away whole afternoons under that window — and wealthy American bankers talking shop.’
Saturday, Ian McEwan
This brilliant and multi-faceted novel is partly set beside a typical London square in Fitzrovia.
‘He opens the second shutter, letting it concertina into the casement, and quietly raises the sash window. It is many feet taller than him, but it slides easily upwards, hoisted by its concealed lead counterweight. His skin tightens as the February air pours in around him, but he isn’t troubled by the cold. From the second floor he faces the night, the city in its icy white light, the skeletal trees in the square, and thirty feet below, the black arrowhead railings like a row of spears. There’s a degree or two of frost and the air is clear. The streetlamp glare hasn’t quite obliterated all the stars; above the Regency facade on the other side of the square hang remnants of constellations in the southern sky.’
Kandahar Cockney, James Fergusson
Journalist James Fergusson journeys to the eastern suburb of East Ham – a mysterious part of London to many Londoners.
‘Mafeking Avenue is beyond the most easterly suburbs that even many Londoners had heard of. Almost everyone knows that West Ham has a football club. Some people know of Plaistow from the song by Ian Dury. But what is there to say about East Ham, or the communities of Plashet, Wallend or Manor Park? And these are still placed with ‘proper’ London postcodes. Out beyond the eastern arc of the North Circular ringroad the capital struggles on for another five miles at least, through Barking and Dagenham, barely thinning through Hornchurch and Upminster to the limits of the street directory. The immensity of the city was sobering.’
Salaam Brick Lane, Tarquin Hall
The ever-changing East End and its new and old immigrants is the theme of Tarquin Hall’s dazzling book.
‘By the time I reached Whitechapel it was nearly four o’clock and already dusk was falling. The neon signs above the shopfronts seared the gathering darkness like branding irons, while the main road, still slick with rain, began to glisten beneath the headlights of passing vehicles. I crossed over Whitechapel Road and entered the warren of narrow streets behind the East End mosque where Bangladeshi children in white skullcaps played football between rows of parked cars. Not for the first time during the past few days, I found that I was the only white face on the street.’
Necropolis: London and its Dead, Catherine Arnold
A magisterial journey through London’s cemeteries: here Catherine Arnold takes a look at the great Victorian cemetery of Highgate, the city’s equivalent of the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
“The Egyptian Avenue is essentially a street of the dead, created by excavating twelve feet deep into the steepest part of the hillside. One enters beneath a colossal arch, flanked by columns featuring a lotus-bud motif and leading to a tunnel. The dead were interred in a line of sixteen family vaults, which resemble a street of terraced houses. Each vault was brick-lined, with enough shelf-room for twelve coffins. In front of each door was an inverted torch — the symbol of life extinguished.”
Excerpts from all the books featured here are available in Oxygen Books’ city-pick London (£8.99) Other titles in the series include Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice and Dublin. City-pick New York will be published on October 20th. www.oxygenbooks.co.uk
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