Overview

Mother of parliaments, seat of empire, style icon and crossroads of the western world, London is both constant and ever-changing. The spirit that saw it through the Blitz still epitomises its ability to, not so much reinvent, as reassemble, itself and carry on much as before. Even Londoners themselves have a love-hate relationship with the place, but the funny feeling they get inside of them just walking up and down still ensures the triumph of the former, even in the face of architectural excess, kettling, rioters, terrorists and career politicians. They've seen it all before. And they wouldn't give you tuppence for the rural idylls of old Cobbett, who saw the place as a growth - a 'great wen' - on the face of the green and pleasant. Although under no illusions, Dickens better understood the draw of the city, and Fleet Street denizen, Samuel Johnson nailed it for all time when he said: 'A man who is tired of London is tired of life.' The metropolis itself was tired in the years following the second world war. Half ruined, dark with soot and rudderless, it took a little time to get its confidence back. But in the short space of twenty years it had become 'swinging London', cultural fulcrum for the op-art, pop-art, pop-star revolution, its bobbies, buses and bridges on the world's tellies, and even Americans converging in droves for 'jawly 'olidays'. Garth Groombridge's photographs and comprehensively readable accompanying text cover the continuing process of deconstrucion and reconstrucion from the waning of the sixties to the waxing of the new century and the city's runup to scoring the first ever hosting hat-trick at the XXX Olympiad. Much has come to pass in that period and, in the inexorable march toward the future of an ever-vibrant and evolving capital, much of what is here will be changed in its turn, but, thanks to Garth's vision, energy and enthusiasm, a small slice of its evolution - the one through which we are living - will not go unrecorded.

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9781904408956

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