Review of LONDON PERCEIVED
A sooty, eloquent and still relevant tour of a city from the ground up ... best short history of London I have read.
This is a dated but strangely timeless ode to one of the great cities of history. As a true London aficionado, I took to this book like a duck to water. I happened to live a couple lonely years (’79-’80) in a London more like the one V.S. Pritchett describes and Hofer photographs than the one we experience today. The soot had yet to be removed, unions were powerful and a whiff of empire was still barely identifiable. Pritchett’s perfect prose and Hofer’s evocative photographs capture a city (circa 1962) losing its imperial sheen and decades away from its international rebirth. The book is a civic and national history brilliantly structured around the growth of London itself, borough by borough, village by village, fire by fire, pandemic by pandemic and royal by royal. One realizes that our fixation on the royal family and the narrative history of England has obscured the real wonder of London – its organic growth since Roman times. Its deep, smelly, and wildly profitable relationship with its river. Its endless layers of subcultures often contained within neighborhoods that can still be glimpsed within its 21st century sheen. London contains multitudes and this book capture it with the elegance and wit it deserves.
London Perceived
By V.S. Pritchett
(photographs by Evelyn Hofer)
1962 214 pages
NOTE: The Godine edition … David Godine publishe
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