Londoners
The Days and Nights of London Now--As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It
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3.8 • 18 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . . Delightful. . . . In Taylor’s patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators.” -- New York Times Book Review
Londoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities–a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforgettable stories told by the real people who make the city hum.
Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor has spent years traversing every corner of the city, getting to know the most interesting Londoners, including the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub doorperson, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard at Buckingham Palace, and a couple who fell in love at the Tower of London—and now live there. With candor and humor, this diverse cast—rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)—shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before.
Together, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London in all its breadth, from Notting Hill to Brixton, from Piccadilly Circus to Canary Wharf, from an airliner flying into London Heathrow Airport to Big Ben and Tower Bridge, and down to the deepest tunnels of the London Underground. Londoners is the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Playwright Taylor (A Million Tiny Plays About Britain) provides an ambitious, wide-ranging compilation of oral histories by the people who live, work, and, even quit the city, with a lively, unvarnished sense of the feelings the city inspires. In Studs Terkel fashion, Taylor tries to let the voices emerge with a distinctive timbre, revealing myriad backgrounds and motivations an Iranian immigrant was smuggled in illegally by hiding in a lorry via Dover in 2007; a BBC woman recounts how she was hired to make the London Underground recordings ("Mind the gap" and so on); an accidental member of the Queen's Household Cavalry initially signed up only because he wanted to learn to drive; an old-timer from North London named Smartie depicts how gritty the city used to be in the late 1970s and '80s; some savvy market traders at New Spitalfields negotiate sales of fruits and vegetables in rhyming slang ("Tom Mix" means six); the ubiquitous taxi driver recounts taking the grueling Knowledge of London exam ("The Knowledge") among dozens of others. Taylor groups his accounts under general headings about what people do, such as "Keeping the Peace" (e.g., police officer, barrister) or "Gleaning on the Margins" (skipper, angler). Readers will be happy to see the map of the 32 boroughs. Although the work embarks initially on a depressing remembrance by "Former Londoner" Simon Kushner ("I suddenly realized that if I stayed in London, I'd be in exactly the same place in 10 or 20 years"), Taylor builds to true heights of civic virtue, as in Lost Property clerk Graig Clark's account of restoring lost objects to their owners, like umbrellas and a "slice of gateau."
Customer Reviews
Entertaining
Takes a while to get into the movement of the book. As the author says, it's been done before, i.e. StudsTurkel with Chicago, etc. It is well edited; way to much of the population of London seems so articulate, including drug addicts, the poorly employed and actress dancer plumbers. They seem a little too carefully selected. That said, they become interesting as the collection moves on and I began to be interested in them. Most of them would be good dinner guests. You shouldn't read this if you want to maintain a rosy view of what it would be like to live in the city. I'm surprised the author didn't interview more people who wanted to move away.