London

The problem
Lawrence, 27 ‘I am keen to start building a collection of London-related books. Can you suggest some indispensable titles?’

The prescription
Reflecting the vastness of London’s chaotic history and barely contained creative frenzy is up there with Dr Johnson’s great feat of publishing. There’ll be the temptation to load your shelves with classics from Pepys, Chaucer and Dickens, who are all fine recorders of the city but shouldn’t obscure other, more asymmetrical views of the Great Wen.

A well-thumbed volume that flits around Time Out desks like one of Harris’s Covent Garden ladies is Peter Ackroyd’s ‘London: The Biography’, which wisely swaps chronology for excavating the city’s psyche in themed chapters. Similarly ‘Necropolis: London and its Dead’ by Catharine Arnold fascinatingly engages with the philosophy and practicalities of death across centuries of London life. Ed Glinert’s ‘The London Compendium’ is a street by street exposure of centuries of London experience. For something closer to psycho-geography, Jonathan Raban’s ‘Soft City’ is a must.
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Two physically and psychologically defining moments for London are vividly captured in Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’, an account of a disaster more familiar from Pepys, and Edward R Murrow’s Blitz reportage ‘This Is London’, a collection of the American journalist’s commentaries from beneath the bombs.

Portraying the fuel to the capital’s creative fire, George Gissing’s ‘New Grub Street’ focuses on the drudgery of literary ambition in 1890s London, while Nigel Richardson’s ‘Dog Days in Soho’ offers an atmospheric take on the artists, writers and musicians finding a new voice in 1950s Soho.

The roots of more recent cultural vibrations are explored in Matthew Collin’s ‘Altered State’, channeling Acid House from the pre-Shoom! Club kids to East End warehouses and the ensuing M25 orbital lunacy.

Do you agree? Post your suggestions for Lawrence's London book collection.

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