The best books for the curious London time traveler

Ned Ward was a tavern keeper in the early 1700s, and this little-known book offers an extraordinary time capsule. It allows the reader to travel back some three hundred years to the grimy streets of London that feel at once alien and familiar.

The lions and other exotic animals in the Tower of London, the freshly-domed St Paul’s Cathedral, the filth and noise, the danger and the stink. All of it is here, not to mention the fabulous dialect of the time, offering the most wonderful dictionary of terms for sex workers, thieves, lawyers, and every trade imaginable. All history fans should read this book.

I first visited St Paul’s Cathedral as a schoolboy, climbing nervously through the stone corridors, then the precipitous metal gangways and staircases up, up, up to the whispering gallery and the summit of the outer dome beyond. It was a thrilling experience I have never forgotten. Little did I realise then that my dream of becoming a published novelist would come true and, beyond all my wildest dreams, I would bring St Paul’s to life in my own stories.

This book gripped me from the start, revealing the extraordinary engineering required to build the cathedral while the old structure was dismantled. I didn’t realise how many clever tricks were used to make the building look as grand as it does today. The false domes, the use of chains in the stonework, the false facades, and so much corner cutting bring the project to completion within a stringent and often begrudging budget.

I loved reading about the bitter wrangling between the construction committee and Sir Christopher Wren. It’s also a testament to the quality of the research in this book that I was able to write about Gabriel and Henry’s work on the structure as scaffolders, drawing from so many wonderful little details about how construction was planned, organized, and carried out.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone wishing to get under the skin of 1700s London’s most iconic and, in many ways, controversial landmark.

I needed to take my research from the Old Bailey archives and bring it to life, but the detail was disparate and piecemeal. I found myself struggling to get a clear window into Mother Clap’s molly house and other molly haunts.

Rictor Norton’s book was exactly what I needed. Thoroughly researched and clearly laid out, it offers the reader a chance to delve into London’s molly culture, exploring molly haunts and gaining a sense of their language and social mores.

I still had a lot of work to do, bringing the mollies to life as fully-rounded fictional characters. Norton’s book is a stickler for fact and eschews romantic supposition, but without a doubt, his book gives the Georgian London time traveler a vital key not just to the lives of the mollies but to the everyday lives of all working Londoners in all their grimy glory.

I think if we went back in time to 1700s London, we would see very little of the wealthy, privileged world so often depicted on stage and screen, and find ourselves far more excited by the filth and clatter of real London–the London of street sellers, stray dogs, pillorying, bawdy houses, and taverns. I know I would.

Without a doubt, all echelons of society took an interest in bawdy houses back then, particularly those in and around Covent Garden, where sex workers milled around the hummums and various shops, pamphleteers, and stalls, selling their wares.

In Hallie Rubenhold’s brilliant book, we get a glimpse into a surprising world, where (mainly) women found misery but also–in some cases–agency and wealth by selling themselves to well-to-do ‘gents’. This book is thrilling and heartbreaking in equal measure, and it proved to be an essential companion as I wandered through the backstreets of old London.

I hate reading historical fiction when it seems perfectly obvious that the author has no idea where they are. They don’t know the place names, they don’t know the roads, and they haven’t the foggiest sense of how people actually got from one part of the city to another. It is surprisingly common for novels set in London to take the reader on absurdly circuitous routes, simply because the author hasn’t bothered to look at a map.

This is particularly irksome and unforgivable in London’s case because so many of the streets and alleyways are still in existence. For my part, writing Thomas True was an excuse to wander around London with my John Rocque map tucked under my arm, timing various routes and working out precisely how Gabriel and Thomas would have journeyed through the bewilderingly busy city to Mother Clap’s Alsatia Old London Bridge, the Exchange, and Whitechapel.

I know this book isn’t nonfiction, but as an experienced time traveler, I believe nothing tells a story so well as a map.