BOOK REVIEWS

The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs Reviewed by Rob Fiehn

The Walker. On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City Reviewed by Roxane McMeeken

Underground Cities - New Frontiers in Urban Living Reviewed By Rob Fiehn

Vic Keegan’s Lost London Reviewed by Don Brown

London’s Mayor at 20: Governing a Global City in the 21st Century Reviewed by Martha Grekos

BOOK REVIEW

THE ALTERNATIVE GUIDE TO THE LONDON BOROUGHS EDITED BY OWEN HATHERLEY PUBLISHED BY OPEN HOUSE £18.99 REVIEWED BY ROB FIEHN

The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs by Open House is a thing of beauty and charm. You wouldn’t expect much less with editor Owen Hatherley at the helm but this achievement is made even more impressive when you realise that the publication was turned around from concept to completion in a matter of weeks, during a pandemic. The premise is simple, there are 33 boroughs in London so each one gets a short essay taken from the individual perspective of the author. It appears as if the 33 writers have been given free rein to represent their chosen location in a format that works for them, which ranges from walking around the Becontree Estate, taking a bus to Brixton or exploring the London County Council archives to understand municipal architecture. These different approaches make the whole book more compelling, as it’s hard to get bored when the style and subject matter varies from chapter to chapter. With such a plurality of voices it was inevitable that I wouldn’t like all of the essays but I was surprised to find myself drawn to the more personal stories, rather than the architectural descriptions. As a resident of Waltham Forest, I was particularly taken with the experiences of Eli Davies as she considers her Chingford background and the area’s relationship to its parent city. She also had to deal with explaining where she was from when at Sussex University, which is something I experienced while at the same institution, albeit from a south London suburban context (I am aware this makes me extremely biased towards this particular chapter). The book was promoted on social media for advance sales and it was clear that it would be a collection of essays but the finished product is much more richly illustrated than I expected. A glorious section of the Barbican accompanies the City of London chapter, while Merlin Fulcher has included his own school photos for the section on Wandsworth, written by Dr Ruth Lang. The end result is a collection of very personal experiences of London that will resonate with a wide audience, whether you are from the capital or not. The stories about families and identity are pretty universal and I would be surprised to find a reader who claimed they couldn’t connect with any of the writing. The varying perspectives on one city reminds me of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo describes multiple locations within Kublai Kahn’s empire but they are all really intimately connected to Venice. Unlike that book, the different authors in the Open House guide provide a lightness that makes me want to pick up my old copies of Granta that feature short stories and introduce me to new writers. The publication itself takes you on a journey, led by people who care deeply about the tour, which in reality is the best part of Open House that some of us can’t experience in person right now.

THE WALKER. ON FINDING AND LOSING YOURSELF IN THE MODERN CITY MATTHEW BEAUMONT PUBLISHED BY VERSO BOOKS £18.99 REVIEWED BY ROXANE MCMEEKEN, ING MEDIA

In this collection of essays Matthew Beaumont explores the politics and poetry of walking in cities. Each chapter examines a canonical author’s writings about lone walks through a city, including Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop and Virginia Wolfe’s Mrs Dalloway. Through these analyses Beaumont weaves a fascinating discussion about the relationship between the metropolis and the pedestrian. The result is an absorbing investigation of the experience of modern urban life. While written just before the pandemic, The Walker is now especially poignant. The way you walk in the city is a product of socio-economic factors, Beaumont argues. Idle wandering is for Charles Baudelaire’s privileged and idle flaneur, while those who work must pace briskly between home and the office, like TS Eliot’s London Bridge automatons. And what should we conclude about a society where night walking in the city is safe only for white men? The psychology of the solitary city walk is explored too. Walking the streets can inspire and energise you, or alienate and exclude. It can provide self-discovery or escape. For Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway, walking through London is a journey through mental states ranging from anonymity to exhilaration and then predatoriness. As wide-ranging as The Walker is, it focuses on London and Paris, and more disappointingly, it is white male biased, with each chapter devoted to a white writer, of which only one is female. There must be another book’s worth of analysis to write about the urban walking experiences and meanings of women and minority communities.

With that caveat, The Walker provokes lots of worthwhile thoughts and can be read at the moment as a guidebook for returning to city centres as we emerge from lockdown. Watch Matthew Beaumont discussing The Walker at a recent ING Bookclub session: https://www.ing-media.com/features/ingmedia-book-club

BOOK REVIEW

UNDERGROUND CITIES - NEW FRONTIERS IN URBAN LIVING EDITED BY PAMELA JOHNSTON, JOHN ENDICOTT AND NANCY F LIN PUBLISHED BY OPEN HOUSE £29.95 REVIEWED BY ROB FIEHN

In Isaac Asimov’s 1954 science fiction classic The Caves of Steel, the author imagines a distant future where the global population has reached 8 billion (we’re almost there now) and humanity has retreated under the surface of the planet to exist in vast subterranean metropolises. The characters in the story are torn between the Medievalists, who long for a return to a traditional life above ground, and the Spacers that promise a more exciting life off-world. Either way, the existence in the sunken precincts is clearly not tenable in the long term – something has to change for people to move forward.

I mention this novel when reviewing Underground Cities: New Frontiers in Urban Living because the roots of subsurface colonization are born out of those same utopian visions that were prevalent in the 1950s and 60s, formed from a belief that technological advancement was the solution to the ills of the world. Asimov’s world is a marvel but also feels unbearably claustrophobic, even if that was not the author’s intention (he was a self-confessed claustrophile). The contributors of this new book from AECOM would like to challenge these preconceptions and reveal the opportunities provided by excavation as climate change and mass urbanisation make us reappraise how and where we live. An accessible and fascinating introductory essay by Pamela Johnson lays the groundwork for the book, where she reveals the stories behind the Minnesota Experimental City and Ecopolis. It seems incredible now that such sunken cities were ever given credence but it was a different age, with more optimism and a dash of naivety. Although the proponents of these radical forms of underground urbanism were idealists, they seemed lost in their visions and failed to make the case for their projects, instead of simply improving life on the surface. Ecopolis founder Guy Rottier argues that “we have to invent the future, not just submit to it,” whereas I think it is now more accepted that the best architectural and engineering designs respond to problems rather than supercede them.

This unfortunate starting point does slightly undermine the rest of the case studies, which make up the bulk of the publication, as the wide-eyed enthusiasm has been replaced with the pragmaticism that is normally associated with below-grade projects – something the authors were setting out to subvert. This is reinforced later in the book with examples such as the tunnels built by Viet Cong soldiers in the 1960s. We might be impressed with the manner in which these routes were constructed but as a product of war they were only created out of extreme necessity. Underground Cities is a fascinating read and clearly the product of years of painstaking research for projects across the globe. It reveals the possibilities opened up by digging down, unlocking places that are suffering from the harshest conditions, which will become ever more relevant during the climate emergency. However, this reader remains convinced that living and working above ground is still infinitely more preferable and we should be focused on improving these conditions before we retire to the caves of steel.

VIC KEEGAN’S LOST LONDON PUBLISHED BY SHAKESPEARES MONKEY REVIEWED BY DON BROWN

Followers of the OnLondon Twitter feed will know that every week, among the pieces on London’s politics, transport and planning, up pops a tweet about London’s history. Vic Keegan’s ‘Lost London’ column has been a feature of the website since its inception, bringing stories of the capital through its built environment. These include London’s oldest structure – 6,000 year old wooden piles in the river at Vauxhall – the huge Northumberland House at Charing Cross, and this week’s offering (number 182), Robert Smirke’s General Post Office at St Martin’s le Grand.

Now – for those of us who prefer reading ink on paper to pixels on screen - the first 160 of these pieces have now been gathered together in a handsome hardcover book, taking us across the cities of London and Westminster, with occasional forays north, south, east and west.

Here we can read about ‘the Exploding Temple of Green Park’, where to find the remains of the first Somerset House, Albion Mills on Blackfriars Bridge (probably the inspiration for Blake’s ‘Dark, Satanic Mills’), get biographies of forgotten characters, trace the outline of long-demolished structures, visit historic pubs and, generally, find out more about our wonderful, everchanging, shape-shifting city. As you’d expect from a former journalist and current poet, the stories flow and the words are well-chosen; the illustrations and photographs bring the past to life and highlight the present, and the map of locations allows you to plot your own walk around London’s lost treasures.

In his preface Vic says that he is finding it more difficult to find places of general interest and wonders whether he will reach number 200. Let’s hope he is being pessimistic and that ‘Lost London 2’ will appear in a couple of years with another 100+ of these delightful and informative vignettes. You can follow Vic Keegan on twitter @vickeegan and @LonStreetWalker

BOOK REVIEW

LONDON’S MAYOR AT 20: GOVERNING A GLOBAL CITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY TONY TRAVERS, JACK BROWN, AND RICHARD BROWN PUBLISHED BY BITEBACK REVIEWED BY MARTHA GREKOS

It is 20 years since London has had a directly elected Mayor and this books reflects on the setting up, running and workings in the mayor’s office, or as Tony Travers describes his chapters the ‘design’, ‘evolution’ and ‘operation’ - naturally ending with an ‘evaluation’ chapter. There is a long list of a variety of contributors (that includes politicians, academics, strategic advisors, architects, journalists, chief economists, policy fellows to name a few), which makes it even more enriching and illuminating as the book covers comprehensively the mayoral powers and policy, provides an academic account of City Hall’s machinery of government, has interviews with Sadiq Khan and Ken Livingstone (though not with Johnson) and there is a wonderful collection of insider stories from prominent participants and observers. All of this reflects on the changed political landscape a Mayor of London and a London Assembly has had on London these past 20 years and what lies ahead. You can also feel that our City is cosmopolitan and that politically is it mainly Labour. There is even a foreword by Tony Blair who rightly starts with the statement “Could we imagine not having a Mayor of London today?” I will leave you to answer that question after you finish reading the book and considering the evaluation chapter, especially under the title ‘The Future’. Not surprisingly, Blair makes his political statement that it was because Labour, who took office in 1997, that engaged as a government in the biggest constitutional reform Britain has ever seen in modern times to create a London mayor, giving this as an example of the change which can be made by progressive politics. It’s a very easy read short book but still touches on many topics (albeit ambitious in its coverage) and it is thoughtfully set out. It is not just a book about Livingstone, Johnson and Khan. It is actually a book about London. The city has always been resilient and has carved its own path and the book will make you think what you want the next Mayor of London to do. What sort of powerful and effective political voice and advocate for the capital, both domestically and internationally, do you want him or her to be? What does the future hold for our modern metropolis? It’s one that is resilient (on many levels) and for that our next Mayor of London needs to be able to handle and deal smoothly with future challenges. He or she also needs to be able to work collaboratively with Central Government to make the changes possible. The future of London is in the hands of those governments, businesses and entrepreneurs who will work together to create a resilient London.

Personally, I feel that the next Mayor of London will need to be a key player in articulating the policy options facing the city post-Covid and post-Brexit. I am a Londoner. I am born and bred here and still live and work here. I want my City to be the best for all. This means that our next Mayor will need to make some tough decisions on things like how to recover confidence in public transport and crowded places; build a mixture of houses in many parts of London; propose stronger utilities and transport infrastructure; take a lead on climate change initiatives; and foster relationships internationally so our city still flourishes with investment domestically but also from abroad.