The Big Smoke

London’s Burning? Not literally – and perhaps, these days, not even figuratively, although if the radical flames have sunk low it is certainly not the fault of Housmans bookshop. Feature continues

The self-styled ‘radical booksellers’ are spending July and August celebrating radical London, with events that include a walk along the course of the buried Fleet River with psychogeographer Laura Oldfield Ford, including visits to the Irish boozers on Malden Road, to Verlaine and Rimbaud’s house and to the St Pancras Churchyard, which has mould-breaking credentials ranging from a memorial tomb for Mary Wollstoncraft, author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ to a place in the background on the promotion pictures for The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ (which may not have been precisely radical but was certainly in the cultural vanguard).

There’s also a talk by Peter Marshall on William Blake, surely the forefather of modern London radicals. Other events, some still to be confirmed, include a talk by John Williams on Michael X. He was a pimp, drug-pusher, friend of John Lennon and sometimes civil rights activist who was hanged for murder in Port of Spain in 1975, proving once again that revolution necessitates strange bedfellows. Come in under the duvet, if you dare.