
We've asked London Walks Guides & London Walkers to recommend a favourite book or story, and we've also raided the archives here at The Daily Constitutional to bring a rich and varied selection of London-themed and London-set reading matter.
Whether you live here in London, work here, play here or if you are in the throws of planning a trip to visit us here, these are the books you need to read. As usual, you can give us a shout with your own recommendations – thrillers, literary classics, biographies, anthologies, anything! – at the usual email address, via Twitter or Facebook, or simply leave a comment below.
London Walks pen and Daily Constitutional Special Correspondent David Tucker writes…
The book I’d recommend on London? Eezy peezy. I think it’s
the best book ever written on London. Well, the best non-fiction book.
V.S. Pritchett’s London
Perceived.
Why is it so wonderful? Well, first of all it’s beautifully
written. It’s the prose equivalent of a prima ballerina – Sylvie Guillem, for
example, dancing the Odette and Odile roles in Swan Lake.
But that shouldn’t come as a surprise because V.S. Pritchett
is one of the two or three greatest prose stylists in English of the 20th
century.
So, a joy to read.
But that’s only part of the story. The other (main) reason
it’s at the top of my personal Leader Board on non-fiction books on London is
that it does what I wouldn’t have thought was possible.
And what’s that?
It captures, in words, the
spirit of London, the soul of the place. The London essence.
Again, for a pretty good analogy, think of a great portrait.
There are any number of competent draughtsmen. Artists who can do a good
likeness, draw – or paint – a portrait that looks like the sitter.
A Rembrandt though only comes along once a millennium, if
that often. The point being that a Rembrandt isn’t just a superb likeness –
he’s at the same time done the well nigh impossible. He’s captured, in oils on
canvas, the essence of his sitters. What they’re like, their “interior
landscape”, what they’ve experienced, what they’ve been through, what they’ve
felt, who they are through and through. The innermost self.
And that’s what Pritchett has done with his sitter: London.
It’s not just an exterior description, not just a recounting of some of what
London’s been through – its history – it’s what all of that experience and all
of those externalities have annealed London into it. It’s the deep inside of
London – its spirit, its soul.
Deep inside but ever so evanescent. You wouldn’t have
thought that that was capturable. Not in words on a page.
But that’s what Pritchett’s accomplished in London Perceived. (As long as we’re at
it you might as well pause before – and let it sink in – that wonderful title. Perceived. OED’s first definition is “take in or apprehend with the
mind or senses.” That sequence is important. Mind first. The senses come
second. The blind excepted we all see London. But it’s not just a question of seeing it. Any snap happy,
never been here before, couple-of-days-in-London tourist sees – well, sort of
sees – London. But our book – London
Perceived – it’s not just seeing it, it’s perceiving it. It’s the eyes (and
ears and olfactories, etc.) and that mind of Pritchett’s. The mind of a genius.
The second OED definition of perceived drives the point home: “To
apprehend with the mind; to become aware or conscious of; to realize, to
discern, observe.”
To apprehend with the mind. The spirit – or soul – of London
is not something you can sightsee, take a photograph of. You can only apprehend
it with the mind – and only with a brilliant mind – and then somehow find the right
words and get them into the right order.
Special book. A book I love. And am in awe of.
Here’s a sample passage. From near the beginning.
“One’s first impression is of a
heavy city, a place of aching heads. The very name London has tonnage in it.
The two syllables are two thumps of the steam hammer, the slow clump-clump of a
policeman’s feet, the cannoning of shunting engines, or the sound of coal
thundering down the holes in the pavements of Victorian terraces. Lie down on
the grass in the middle of a London park, far away from any street and from the
numerosity, and the earth rumbles and trembles day and night. The note is low
and ruminative and, in this, resembles the quiet but meaning voices of the
people who hate drama more than anything else on earth and for reasons that do
not totally bear inspection. As Londoners, we are – you see – drama itself and
have no reason to whip ourselves up into states with sirens and altercations.
We like the police to be quiet, the ambulances discreet, and the fire engines
jolly.
This weight of the
city and its name have another associations, mainly with the sense of
authority, quiet self-consequence – known among us as modesty – unbounded
worry, ineluctable usage, and natural muddle. These are aspects of a general
London frame of mind. If Paris suggests intelligence, if Rome suggests the
world, if New York suggests activity, the word for London is experience. This
points to the awful fact that London has been the most powerful and richest
capital in the world for several centuries. It has been, until a mere fifteen
years ago, the capital of the largest world empire since the Roman and, even now,
is the focal point of a vague Commonwealth. It is the capital source of a
language now dominant in the world. Great Britain invented this language;
London printed it and made it presentable. At the back of their minds – and the
London mind has more back than front to it – Londoners are very aware of these
things and are weighed down by them rather than elated. The familiar tone of
the London voice is quick, flat-voweled, and concerned. The speaker is staving
off the thought that hope is circumscribed and that every gift horse is to be
looked at long in the mouth. He is – he complains – through no fault of his
own, a citizen of the world.”
Well, more on that word experience in a forthcoming post.
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