There are far too many books about London. Amazon can sell you 79000 of them. There are more and more in our bookshops every week, clogging up that special set of shelves labelled "London". Here you can find anything from erudite literary tracts to weedy wafer-thin pamphlets, but particularly that special breed - "lots of nuggety facts about London reassembled together in a slightly different order". There's only so much London trivia to go round ("Sweeney Todd lived in Fleet Street", "Buckingham Palace has 240 bedrooms", "The Ritz sells expensive sandwiches") but it's amazing how many times locals and tourists are willing to buy this stuff. Well, this week there's another historical trivia book out, packed with London facts, which claims to be a bit different. And it's called...
I saw a copy of the book in Foyles, and checked out the back cover to see if it might be interesting. "Neasden is the home of the largest Hindu temple in Europe." Yes, I blogged that last month. "Britain's oldest and largest tidal mill can be found at Stratford in East London." Yes, I know, I live just up the road. "...wedding cake... St Brides..." Yeah, yeah, yeah. "Vauxhall gave its name to the Russian word for station." OK, that's a bit different. So I took a look inside, and flicked through a bit, and noticed lots of things I didn't actually know (in amongst the stuff I did). The book has lots of geographically arranged sections, each containing meaty textual chunks, and it's rather nicely illustrated too. All the big facts are picked out in capital letters to make them easier to spot, and there are plenty of them. I've picked ten of the more interesting ones to test you out, and to test the book out. Do you know the places in question, or are they things you never knew about London?
1) LONDON'S NARROWEST ROAD BRIDGE 2) LONDON'S ONLY CROSS-EYED STATUE 3) BRITAIN'S FIRST OFFICIAL ROUNDABOUT 4) THE NEAREST WINDMILL TO CENTRAL LONDON 5) THE FIRST PUBLIC STATUE IN THE WORLD TO BE MADE FROM ALUMINIUM 6) THE ONLY LARGE LONDON PARK NOT TO BE ENCLOSED BY RAILINGS 7) THE OLDEST RAMPED MULTI-STOREY CAR PARK IN BRITAIN 8) THE OLDEST MANUFACTURING COMPANY IN BRITAIN 9) LONDON'S OLDEST PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL CLUB 10) THE OLDEST MULBERRY TREE IN BRITAIN [Pick one, if you know it, and identify its location in this comments box]
So anyway, I bought a copy of the book and took it home and had a good read. There was lots on the City, and Westminster, and Chelsea, and Southwark, and... hang on, not all of London has been included. All the riverside boroughs from Wandsworth to Greenwich are here, but only the bits of those boroughs that are sort of near the river. The Old Bailey is here, but the British Library isn't. Canary Wharf gets in, but Stratford doesn't. Hang on, the back cover suggested that the tidal mill at Stratford was in the book. It lied. It also lied about Neasden, because the nearest the book gets to the big Hindu temple is a railway depot in East Acton. Or, in other words, half of the facts flagged on the back cover don't actually appear in the book at all. The publisher's website contains similar lies ("unearth the original Big Brother house in Bromley" - not included) ("See the Brentford river views that inspired Turner" - not included) which is a bit naughty. Or perhaps even downright deceptive. The book would be better titled "I Never Knew That About Central Riverside London". Sorry Barking and Dagenham, sorry Havering, you're miles away from being included.
I've emailed the publishers to tell them that I think the information published on the book's back cover (and on their website) is highly misleading. I got their Out of Office. Maybe I'll have better luck hearing back from the author. It's a shame, because this is actually an interesting and informative book, and a good one to file away on your own "lots of historical triviaabout London" bookshelf. Just don't buy it expecting to read very much about Greater London. Maybe someone else'll have to write that one.
