In a previous life, I was a City trader and as such have always been fascinated by the ridiculous and the absurd. Now a full-time writer and poet, I live on the west coast of Ireland and have written a number of books including A Curious Guide to London, A Splendidly Smutty Dictionary of Sex, and The Men Who Stare At Hens. I also have a blog on all matters arcane.
I wrote...
A Curious Guide to London: Tales of a City
By
Simon Leyland
What is my book about?
From petticoat duels and lucky cats to the Stiffs Express, Lord Nelson's spare nose, the Piccadilly earthquake, the Great Beer Flood of 1814, and the location of where a man died after a Jacob Epstein stone penis fell on his head, A Curious Guide to London takes you on a captivating, irreverent and wildly entertaining tour of the city you think you know, unearthing the capital's secrets and commemorating its rich, colourful, and unusual history.
Brimming with tales of London's forgotten past, its strangest traditions, and its most eccentric inhabitants, this book celebrates the unique, the unusual, and the unknown. Perfect for tourists, day-trippers, commuters, and the millions of people who call London home, this very alternative guidebook will make you look at the city in a whole new light.
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The Books I Picked & Why
London: The Biography
By
Peter Ackroyd
Why this book?
The daddy of all London books, an encomium to a city of myth. Its buildings hold and hide legends. Its rivers are lost underground. Its backstreets vanish into fable. Its characters are blurred between fact and fiction. Truths have been twisted by fantasy. Tourists are rendered blind, stepping around beggars to photograph the past, and sit in parks reading of a city that only springs to life in the mind, for in reality only the faintest outline traces now remain. A truly remarkable tour de force.
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Street Haunting: A London Adventure
By
Virginia Woolf
Why this book?
Written in 1927 it is one of the most entertaining accounts you will ever read of a typical day in London. Using the excuse of needing to buy a pencil, Woolf meanders through London taking in all the day-to-day activities of the populace. Admiring and also sometimes disapprovingly, she comments on the ordinary lives of every kind of Londoner from the sales girls at the haberdashery to the costermongers in the street.
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The Diary of Samuel Pepys
By
Samuel Pepys
Why this book?
Through his jaundiced eyes we accompany our erstwhile hero into coffee shops, the arms of actresses, and experience the ebb and flow of London life. Later we watch as his beloved London undergoes the rigors of the plague of 1665 and then how he buries his beloved cheese in the wake of the Great Fire of London. A true classic.
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London Labour and the London Poor
By
Henry Mayhew
Why this book?
A sadly neglected masterpiece that describes a series of visits into the darker areas of the city where few rarely trod. In an extraordinary and vivid series of interviews, Mayhew gets the mudlarks, rat catchers, pure finders, and the whores of Shadwell and Seven Dials to tell their stories in their own voices.
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London: A Social History
By
Roy Porter
Why this book?
An interesting but idiosyncratic overview of the history and the resultant growth of London. The result is a book full of interesting insights, amusing anecdotes, and historical highlights.A vivid celebration of the city, but also an elegy for its decline, bubbling with statistics and anecdotes, from Boadicea to Betjeman.
