From Heathrow to Brick Lane, London in Words

The city-lit London Guide is a Prose Anthology in Fact and Fiction

Oct 22, 2009 Mike Gerrard

Writers including Virginia Woolf, Alan Bennett, Will Self, Jan Morris, Peter Ackroyd, Ruth Rendell and Monica Ali describe London, the Olympics 2012 city, in words.

London is the city of the 2012 Olympics, of Buckingham Palace, Heathrow Airport, Oxford Street shopping, and London taxis. All these and more are covered in an exciting new prose anthology, and these familiar London features are often described in fresh and unexpected ways. The book is city-lit London, a collection of fiction and non-fiction from some of the finest writers, whether they be long-time residents like Alan Bennett or a city visitor like Dostoyevsky.

The city-lit Series

The city-lit books are new kinds of travel anthologies, which started with Paris, and now London, with titles in the pipeline on Berlin, Amsterdam, Dublin, New York, Istanbul, Mumbai and many more. Many travel writing anthologies concentrate on older books, mainly because they may be out of copyright and don't cost anything to use. These enjoyable city-lit guides, though, include the best modern writers too. Here writing on London, for example, are Ian McEwan, Helen Simpson, Monica Ali, Iain Sinclair, Joseph O'Neill, Geoff Nicholson, and Will Self. That's just a few of the many fine modern writers who appear in city-lit London.

Royal London in Words

The city-lit London anthology is divided into themed sections covering subjects such as Old Father Thames, East Enders, Up the West End, London Transport, Whatever the Weather, and Pomp and Circumstance. This last covers royal and aristocratic London, and includes a marvelous brief extract from Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, the hilarious short novel in which Bennett imagines the Queen's slow discovery of the joy of books. Also here is Richard Eyre, describing his experience being knighted at Buckingham Palace, with extracts too from Jan Morris, Justin Cartwright, Vita Sackville-West, and Maeve Binchy.

London: Buses and Blogs

As an example of how wide-ranging these city-lit anthologies are, the section on London Transport ranges from Henry James to the blogger, Diamond Geezer. Here too are Muriel Spark, with an extract from A Far Cry from Kensington, H.G.Wells and Kipps, Iris Murdoch, Will Self, and the wonderful Alice Thomas Ellis – an eclectic collection of authors indeed.

The only omission this reviewer noticed from the impressive list of contributors was The Diary of a Nobody, that classic about the north London life of Charles Pooter, by George and Weedon Grossmith. That aside, though, all the usual suspects are here (Peter Ackroyd, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle), and some unusual suspects too, like Xiaolu Guo's delightful and quirky A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and Barbara Cartland's memoirs of upper-class London life, We Danced All Night.

Eclectic and quirky, reliable yet constantly surprising, this is a wonderful collection of fine writing on London – one of the world's greatest cities.

Buying city-lit London

The city-lit London prose anthology costs £8.99 in the UK and is available from Amazon and other online book stores, in bookshops, and from the Oxygen Books website.

Suite101 Links

Read the review of the city-lit Literary Guide to Paris for Visitors

Read about a Guided Walking Tour of the London 2012 Olympics Park

The copyright of the article From Heathrow to Brick Lane, London in Words in U.K./Ireland Travel is owned by Mike Gerrard. Permission to republish From Heathrow to Brick Lane, London in Words in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

London in Words: the city-lit London anthology