Craig Taylor

Five years in the making, 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.

The Days and Nights of London Now--As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It

Londoners

Fred Rivett

London is an accordion breathing in and out. All these incomers crashed up against its great gleaming slippery wall, trying to get a hold.

In London, I know the answer is never as exciting as I’m not sure but I may have found a way.

There is only one definite I came away with. It was a statement made by a pest control officer I spoke to years ago who said, “The bedbugs in Tottenham look just the same as the bedbugs in South Ken”. Anything else seemed too grand. Anything else could be contested by another voice. “It's too expensive”. “Try Tokyo”. “It rains too much”. “There's always Vancouver”. This city, after all, is eager to see you out. "If you care about mortgages above all, get one elsewhere”. “If you care about your health, there must be better options”. “But I couldn't be anywhere else,” I was told. “This place is mine” I was told, often.

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