Writing on London

benjybars

village elder.
apologies if this has been done before... did a search and stuff.

(and i know it's similar to the Victorian London thread but still...)

anyway.

i work in a bookshop and i need to revamp the london section... basically there's a table dedicated to london writing but it's ALWAYS full of the same stuff ... Sinclair, Ackroyd, Dickens, Ballard etc.... it's so unexciting.

so basically i'm just looking for ANY ideas for london writing that aren't completely obvious. can be fiction or non-fiction, biography, sport, poetry.. anything... anything really that people won't have been exposed to a hundred times before. i know i'm being really lazy and getting everyone to do my work for me but i thought people might enjoy any recommendations that come to light.

cheers!
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I'm sure there is some good information on this topic somewhere on dissensus but you will have to be pretty nifty on the search engine to find it what with all the Londony threads around the place.
How about The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher? I know the film has had a reissue recently but I don't think the book on which it is based is so widely read. I know my girlfriend wanted to buy it on a whim once and nowhere had it at the time so might be a little bit less obvious than the Sinclair/Akroyd axis.


The review mentions some similar books as well.

"The London Nobody Knows was first printed in 1962, and he followed it with a string of books (London After Dark, Pearly Kingdom, The London Dickens Knew) which all covered similar ground."
Which bookshop do you work in by the way?
 

STN

sou'wester
There was a Harvill London Writing series a few years back which included Capital by Maureen Duffy and the Lowlife by Alexander Baron, which I would fucking recommend to anyone. Obviously there's Patrick Hamilton, Derek Raymond's Factory series as reissued by Serpent's Tail, a bunch of Angela Carter stuff, Michael Moorcock etc but I guess I'm veering into the territory of 'stuff that's always there'. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon deserves a mention, it's awfully good. Oh, and Robinson by Chris Petit of course.
 

STN

sou'wester
ooh, and Michael Di Larrabetti's Borrible trilogy, published in omnibus form by Pan Macmillan.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Tony White - Foxy T (novel about 2 girls who run an internet cafe, banglatown bizness)

Sukhdev Sandu - Night Haunts (A journey through the london night - great!)

London - From Punk To Blair (edited by Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson) good essays

Morris Beckman - The 43 Group - Militant jewish anti-fascism in the east end after WW2

Joe Jacobs - Out of the Ghetto - memoirs of working class communist activist in bethnal green mid 20th century.

Bryan Magee - Clouds of Glory -autobiog of someone who grew up in Hoxton.

Smoke and Savage Messiah fanzines
 

jenks

thread death
Waterstones produced an excellent guide to London writing

ISBN: 1-902603-09-5

don't know about availability but might be something which can be sorted through abeboooks.

People like Geoff Nicholson's work is very rooted in London, as is Martin Millar.

Henry Green's Caught which was published in the Harvill London series is very good also.

Remember also Mallarme, Rimbaud, Verlaine all write well about 19th C London.

Riceyman Steps by Bennett is great on Clerkenwell in the twenties.

Jacob's Room by Woolf as well - lots of these might be quite obvious.

Gissing and Ford Madox Ford as well.
 

nomos

Administrator
The Waterstone's guide is a really good place to start for what you're doing Benjy. I liked Sukhdev's Nights Haunts a lot as well. It's more or less a contemporary, non-racist and more narratively satisfying update of HV Morton's The Nights of London.

There's also one from SUNY Press edited by Pamela Gilbert called Imagined Londons. I haven't read all of it but I liked the essays on designing the tube system and 'sonic conflict' in the city.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
The last couple of issues of Vague have been mini-essays on London history, one entitled Rachman, Riots and Rillington place, the other about the Gordon riots. Both great reads:

 

jenks

thread death
Is Smoke still going? That used to have some gems amidst some exceptionally wanky writing - all London based.
 

benjybars

village elder.
The Waterstone's guide is a really good place to start for what you're doing Benjy.

oh right... er, that's where i work... must have been published before i started there!

agree 10000% with STN on Lonely Londoners... ridiculously good. I kept going around saying that I was coasting lime for a few weeks after reading it but no-one seemed to know what I was talking about..

wicked suggestions so far. nice one! keep em coming. ;)

@ Jenks - yeah i think Smoke is still going, been a while since the last one tho. I've said in the thread on here about Smoke how much i love it. yeah, a lot of the writing is pretty wanky, but a lot of it's great and it's so clearly a labour of love that i don't see how anyone could not like it..
 

worrior

Well-known member
On the London tip recently enjoyed Unlondon by China Mielville. Usually found in the Fantasy or even the Children's section of bookshops but deserves to be mixing it up with the usual London fraternity. Place next to the Borribles - which seems to act as Mielville's ur-text.
 
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