If you, like us, are a little geeky about the area – not to mention the capital in general – you’ll be all over this quite lovely new hardback tome.
A London Year is an anthology of short diary entries, one or more for each day of the year, which, taken together, provides a portrait of life in the city from Tudor times to the present day. It’s also co-edited by Travis Elborough, who has written for our sister site Below The River.
Two hundred featured writers cram the pages, from Samuel Pepys to Alan Bennett and Chris Mullin. There are, says Elborough, “coronations and executions, election riots and zeppelin raids, duels, dust-ups and drunken sprees, among everyday moments like Brian Eno cycling in Kilburn or George Eliot walking on Wimbledon Common.”
“I have just returned from Kentish Town; a calm twilight pervades the clear sky; the lamp-like moon is hung out in heaven, and the bright west retains the dye of sunset. If such weather would continue, I should write again; the lamp of thought is illuminated in my heart, and the fire descends from heaven that kindles it.”
And finally, we also rather like this little gem from Alan Bennett, writing in 1985: “I am buying daffodils in a shop in Camden High Street. An oldish woman asks for some violets, but they aren’t quite fresh. ‘Never mind,’ she explains. ‘I only want to throw them down a grave.’”
A London Year, edited by Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison, is out now, published by Frances Lincoln. £25. Find it at Owl Bookshop or Daunt Books.
