Vanishing Streets reveals an American writer's twenty-year love affair
with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry, it offers
an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing some of London's
most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders deliriously in "the
world's most visited city," he rediscovers and reinvents places that
have changed drastically since he was a student at Cambridge in the
1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham
Greene, and the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement. He offers
a new way of seeing familiar landmarks through the lens of film history,
and reveals strange nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places,
from a lost film by John Ford supposedly shot in Wapping to the beehives
hidden in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an area haunted by a translation error
in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz.
This book blends deeply personal writing with a foreigner's observations
on a world capital experiencing an unsettling moment of transition.
Vanishing Streets builds into an astonishing and innovative
multi-layered project combining autobiography, movie madness, and
postcard-like annotations on the magical properties of a great city.
Tyree argues passionately for London as a cinematic dream city of
perpetual fascinations and eccentricities, bridging the past and the
present as well as the real and the imaginary.
