Here’s a great book for anyone wanting to learn more about the buried past of London, the weird and the wonderful to the downright horrors of crime and war.

Ed Glinert gives a postcode guide to the streets that have given us so many infamous stories as well as nuggets of history otherwise buried deep within the walls of former drinking dens, brothels and houses. He takes a street and details houses which were homes to authors, rock stars, politicians and actors with Denmark Street proving a hotbed of musical genius from Elton John working there as an office boy to Jeff Beck shopping for guitars, the street where Melody Maker was first launched and where David Bowie met his first band at La Gioconda Restaurant in the early sixties. Less glamorous was the job centre there which employed the serial killer Dennis Nilsen who brought a huge cooking pot to their 1980 Christmas party in which he had previously boiled the heads of some of his victims.

From the Jubilee Street Anarchists Club which saw Lenin and Stalin grace the area to the Blue Gardenia-an illegal drinking club which hosted The Beatles first London gig to the Cafe de Paris where Marlene Dietrich once sang, there seems to have been a club on every street where legends were made in the depths of the night and each entry by Glinert encourages the reader to discover more.

This is more than a street guide, you don’t have to be a Londoner to fully appreciate it, at its heart, it proves what an incredible history this city has. The sense of history oozing from the walls and pavements onto the pages is palpable and one wonders what folklore and history is being created today to match that of yesteryear? With the increasing sanitisation of the city coupled with an ever decreasing sense of social belonging it’s difficult to imagine another updated version to this one.

Cover painting by David Gentleman

Further reading:

London Orbital

Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou

David Gentleman’s London