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| (O) The London Compendium |
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By: Glinert, Ed
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Your Price: £25.00
Hardback
ISBN: 0713996889
Publisher: Allen Lane
Weight: 885
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The London Compendium reveals the glorious and enthralling secret history of London as it has never been shown before.
Organised area by area, street by street, there is an entry for every significant building, place and road, both past and present. Ed Glinert’s extensive knowledge of London, together with his endless curiosity about the unusual and the outrageous, has produced a continually surprising and compelling look at the hidden city. Packed with stories on every conceivable subject, from East End lore to espionage, music to murder, politics to poets, this is hugely entertaining and engrossing book on England’s capital.
Discover the secret tunnels under London, the hidden haunts of Cold War spies, the inspiration behind the capital’s best known works of art and what buildings lie beside the Thames. From the Gordon Riots to the Notting Hill riots, George Orwell’s West End haunts to Lenin’s Bloomsbury, here is an endlessly enticing panoply of information.
As well as providing a broad historical sweep across London’s many districts, we are presented with a wealth of unusual stories about people, places and events that spans two thousand years. Grisly serial killings are juxtaposed with the rich and the rogues (sometimes one and the same), prime ministers with petty criminals, railway stations with rock venues, and the sites of wartime Special Operations with prisons and markets. Public houses, rich with stories, jostle against publications (from Fleet Street dailies to underground rags), anarchists vie with architecture, both the glorious and the ghastly, as we read of the demise of Docklands and its subsequent rebirth.
Soho crime sits side by side with Louis Armstrong at the Palladium and the story of Carnaby Street fashion, poets and prisons, civil unrest and civic architecture, the Rolling Stones’ first gigs and the filming of Nicholas Roeg’s Performance, revolutionaries and rakes, the East End and the West End all vie for attention. Special sections on each London Underground line give their individual histories as well as information on every station.
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