London book gift guide 2021
Part 1: Non-Fiction
Since we started writing LiB we’ve come across a lot of brilliant, creative people who are capturing London in new and interesting ways. For today’s issue we’ve been back through the archives, pulled out some recommendations and put them into one handy guide that will hopefully inspire you as you embark on the annual ritual of ‘buying people stuff for Christmas’ (or you can add them to your own list for Santa).
Today we’ve got five non-fiction picks (we’ll follow up next week with some fiction) and, where possible, we’ve included a personal recommendation from the author themselves on the kind of person they think would enjoy receiving this book (a massive ‘thank you’ to Sam Roberts, Jenny Lewis and Nick Hunt for doing that - especially Jenny who had the flu but still took the time out from preparing a slideshow for the National Portrait Gallery and organising her son’s birthday party to send us a few sentences!).
A quick note on the links to buy the books: There’s no Amazon links in here, and we don’t make any money from any of these recommendations. Where possible we’ve linked to the publisher’s site and/or Bookshop.org.
Ghost Signs: A London Story by Sam Roberts and Roy Reed
We interviewed Sam Roberts in June for our ‘Where Do You Go?’ feature. Back then his Kickstarter had gone way beyond its target and the book was well on to its way to being printed. Here’s the issue in case you missed it:
Now the book is out and it really is a thing of beauty. Like it says right there in the title, Ghost Signs: A London Story goes beyond the glossy surface of your standard coffee table book and actually tells the story of London in a completely new and fascinating way. By capturing and contextualising the faded advertisements that cling on to the modern streetscape, Sam and co-author Roy Reed have created something more than a book of photography. Reading this book is like taking a peek into a glitching time portal that provides stolen glances into a half-forgotten past. It will also change the way you walk around London.
When we asked Sam to tell us the kind of person who might be glad to receive the book for Christmas, here’s what he told us:
“Ghost Signs: A London Story would be a perfect gift for the person who likes the thrill of the chase, would never consider photographing a wall and would definitely never admit to loving advertising…”
Buy it direct from the publisher.
London Subculture / London Punk & Protest 1979–1981 by Yan Morvan
We are massive fans of Cafe Royal Books here at LiB. There is something about their insane dedication, scope and output (they publish books weekly!) that really appeals to us. We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve dug into their archives of post-war documentary photography to find gifts for people, and they’ve never disappointed.
Just in time for Christmas they’ve brought out London Subculture 1979-1981 and London Punk & Protest 1979–1981 both by Yan Morvan, the French war photographer who moved to London in the late 70s to document how the city’s youth was reacting to the Thatcher’s government.
Tim Adams just featured one of the images from the collection in his ‘The Big Picture’ column for the Guardian and in there he quotes Morvan as saying “The skinheads all tried to punch me in the face and steal my camera. They didn’t like the French. But the punks were always friendly and funny. They liked being photographed.”
If you know someone who religiously keeps all their gig tickets, watches clips from The Tube on YouTube, and follows Twitter accounts like this one, then they’d probably love this for Christmas.
Buy direct from Cafe Royal Books
One Hundred Years by Jenny Lewis
We spoke to Jenny Lewis for our first ever ‘Where Do You Go’ issue back in April of this year, just as her book One Hundred Years was coming out:
This amazing collection features Jenny’s portraits of her Hackney neighbours, with a zero years-old baby on page one, going right through to 100 year-old Renee (who married a gangster who “thought he was Humphrey Bogart”). Each image is accompanied by a small quote or story from the person, so it all adds up to this incredibly rich record of a London neighbourhood as told by its people.
Warning: If you buy this with the intention of giving it to someone as a gift, you may end up buying a copy to keep for yourself. It’s that good. Here’s what Jenny said when we asked to tell us the kind of person she’s recommend the book to:
“I would highly recommend this book to anyone between the ages of 1-100, it was made with you in mind. Kids love looking sifting through all the faces. I had a message from an eight year old who tells me its her favourite book , apparently she pores over it for hours looking at what life can look like so far down the line, she tends to linger on the older glamorous ladies with their coiffed hair and jewellery and when i took the book to Renee my cover girl at 100 years she couldn't take her eyes off the babies and the fresh glowing skin of the children at the front of the book. With just one thought and a portrait from each person you get a glimpse into their lives and are left to imagine the rest.”
Buy One Hundred Years from Hoxton Mini Press.
Or, if it’s for someone you really like, buy the ‘collectors edition’ (presented in a bespoke clamshell box complete with signed and numbered limited edition print).
London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City by Tom Chivers
Tom Chivers is our kind of writer. That is to say, he is the kind of person who not only digs up old boots out of the “thick, black anaerobic mud of the Thames foreshore,” but also films it to put on Twitter:
London Clay, which was published in September, is Tom’s non-fiction debut. Before that he was publishing books of poetry, and it’s that “poet’s ability to compress language into surprising juxtapositions of imagery” (as the FT said in their review of the book) that makes London Clay such a beautiful thing.
Normally the thought of yet another book about London’s ‘lost’ rivers would cause our eyes to roll a little. But this is not another exercise in London nerdery, nor is it a pale Iain Sinclair imitation. Instead it’s a lyrical and geological tour of places like Herne Hill, Hampstead Heath and Stratford told through a very personal lens to create a kind of meandering but utterly charming memoir.
We didn’t have time to get in touch with Tom and ask him for a quote, so instead here’s a quick video he made describing the book for its launch:
The Parakeeting of London by Nick Hunt
On the Wikipedia page for ‘Feral parakeets in Great Britain’ it says that the birds “are wild-living, non-native parakeets that are an introduced species into Great Britain… The origins of these birds are subject to speculation, but they are generally thought to have bred from birds that escaped from captivity.”
What Nick Hunt (and photographer Tim Mitchell) did back in 2019 was take that ‘speculation’ and stretch it into this marvellous, absurd and weirdly beautiful book of ‘gonzo ornithology,’ in which they embark on a journey to uncover the origin story of the London parakeets.
Letting the birds themselves guide them, Nick and Tim travel through parks, cemeteries, riverbanks and allotments, stopping to talk talk to a variety of Londoners on the way (some love the little lime-green invaders, others are less keen) to collect a kind of oral mythology of the London parakeet.
We got in touch with Nick to ask him what kind of person the The Parakeeting of London would appeal to. Here’s what he sent us:
“This book – which follows the ‘flyways’ of London’s invasive parakeets through a series of encounters with people whose lives they have affected – is for lovers of urban legends, punk ecologists, gonzo ornithologists and anyone fascinated by our changing environment. Whether you love them or hate them, welcome them or fear them, regard them as destructive invaders or paragons of diversity, The Parakeeting of London will tell you the wonderfully weird story of London’s brightest new arrivals.”
Honourable mentions
A few books that we didn’t get around to reading (yet), but have heard good things about:
Michael Bracewell’s memoir (except it’s not really a memoir) of 70s and 80s London, Souvenir, got amazing reviews when it came out in September. More importantly, Neil Tennant said it was “The best evocation I’ve read of London in the ’80s”. Buy it here.
To accompany this year’s Open House, Open City produced Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub, “the extraordinary story of London’s pubs” that celebrates “the incredible diversity, design and culture of London’s public houses from opulent Victorian Gin Palaces and homely medieval Taverns to contemporary Micropubs and community-owned breweries.” It’s even got an intro by Sadiq Khan. Buy it here.
Phil Baker’s London: City of Cities is a “stylish, glossy hardback with lavish colour illustrations” which makes it perfect for Christmas. But it’s also “a spritely description of the capital’s development from prehistory to the present, [and] a ruminative study of its condition today.” Buy it here.
If you want a more in-depth London history then Margarette Lincoln’s London and the Seventeenth Century: The Making of the World's Greatest City wil show you (according to the FT’s reviewer) a London that’s both “very samey and very different from a 21st century perspective”. Buy it here.
And the rest…
As we write this it looks like Friday’s tube strike (over a dispute to changes to driver duties for the Night Tube) will go ahead. If it does then the Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria lines will have a “little or no service” for 24 hours from 4:30am on Friday (and again on 18 December). After that, there will be strikes on the Night Tube services on the Central and Victoria lines, starting at 8:30pm on the Friday and Saturdays of December 3-4,10-11 and 17-18.
It was announced this week that the Home Office inquiry into the rape and murder of Sarah Everard, will be chaired by Scotland’s former top prosecutor, Dame Elish Angiolini. The non-statutory inquiry will be made up of two parts: “The first will establish a comprehensive account of Couzens’ conduct throughout his career in policing, including looking for whether any red flags were missed and whether allegations made against him were properly handled. The second part of the inquiry will look at specific issues raised by part one, which will report to the Home Secretary as soon as possible”
New research by Hamptons shows that London is now the only region in the country where it’s cheaper to upsize in a rental home than it was a year ago, “due to the run on one-bedroom apartments this autumn with the return of office workers.”
Brixton Blog has spoken to the artist Jo Gibbs about her “influences, pollution, South London and the joys of Brixton”.
The big London news this week seems to have been the UK’s first Popeye’s opening at Westfield Stratford. The New York Times wrote about it (apparently us crazy Brits are very confused by the ‘biscuits’) and Twitter went into meltdown:
