Londoners by Craig Taylor

Londoners by Craig Taylor

"A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . . Delightful. . . . In Taylor's patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators." -- New York Times Book Review

Londoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities-a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforgettable stories told by the real people who make the city hum.

Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor has spent years traversing every corner of the city, getting to know the most interesting Londoners, including the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub doorperson, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard at Buckingham Palace, and a couple who fell in love at the Tower of London--and now live there. With candor and humor, this diverse cast--rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)--shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before.

Together, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London in all its breadth, from Notting Hill to Brixton, from Piccadilly Circus to Canary Wharf, from an airliner flying into London Heathrow Airport to Big Ben and Tower Bridge, and down to the deepest tunnels of the London Underground. Londoners is the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.

Dr. Craig David Taylor has been a Lecturer at the University of York since 1998, after teaching part-time at the Universities of Oxford and Sheffield. He is a member of the Royal Historical Society and the Société de l'Histoire de France.