"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.
