“All great art is born of the metropolis.” So said the poet Ezra Pound — and I certainly can’t disagree, given that so many of my favourite books are set in our sprawling city.
From TS Eliot to Patrick Hamilton, creative minds have responded to the urban landscape in the most extraordinary ways. Martin Amis once pointed out that the best authors “heighten and transfigure the world you see, for ever”. That’s definitely true of the books about London that I love the most, which have all shaped my everyday experience of the city.
When I walk through Leicester Square, for example, I’m always reminded of GK Chesterton’s description in The Man Who Was Thursday of an exotic place that’s somehow “so alien” and “so continental”. The sound of Big Ben conjures up Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and a time when our city was so much quieter that the chimes could be heard “in the northern part of London”. And when I’m in a London bakery, I often think of Ormus in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, delightedly scoffing British loaves as he explores our streets for the first time.
This has been a fantastic year for new books — and there were three in particular that I think deserve to be celebrated for enriching our understanding of the city we live in.
First, Slow Burn City by Rowan Moore, which looks at how our metropolis is changing, and the terrible damage being done by soulless corporate developments and volume house-builders. The book argues that London is something like an organic entity that goes through long cycles of expansion and decay. Today, after a period of untrammelled growth, Moore concludes that ambitious action is needed to ensure the city remains healthy and sustainable.
Second, James Shapiro’s majestic 1606, which came out in paperback in the spring. The book tells the story of a fertile year in Shakespeare’s life, in which he wrote Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and King Lear. It’s ultimately also a snapshot of London at that time — an endlessly stimulating place to live, and a deep source of inspiration for Shakespeare and his peers. Shapiro shows how the capital was a dense hotbed of writers, actors and theatres — providing the raw ingredients for innovation to flourish. Modern academics would call it a creative cluster, but whatever the name, the same entrepreneurial energy can still be found in our city more than 400 years later.
Finally, the exhilarating East West Street by Philippe Sands QC, which is a set of inter-connected stories about the Holocaust, family histories and the origins of human-rights law. The action mostly takes place in mainland Europe, and in a sense London is a secondary character: a place of refuge for Jewish emigrés during the Second World War. But the way Sands poignantly depicts the city of Lviv in Ukraine — a once-thriving multicultural city that succumbed to ethnic conflict and xenophobia — reminds us just how fragile London’s diversity truly is, and why we have to fight to protect it.
Any of these books would make wonderful Christmas presents for the Londoners in your life. So if you’re struggling for gift ideas, you could do worse than visiting your local independent bookshop, and picking up one (or three) of these. I promise you won’t regret it.
