People Of London

In the eyes of Britain’s heritage industry, London is the traditional home of empire, monarchy and power, an urban wonderland for the privileged, where the vast majority of Londoners feature only to applaud in the background. Yet, for nearly 2000 years, the city has been a breeding ground for radical ideas, home to thinkers, heretics and rebels from John Wycliffe to Karl Marx. It has been the site of sometimes violent clashes that changed the course of history: the Levellers’ doomed struggle for liberty in the aftermath of the Civil War; the silk weavers, match girls and dockers who crusaded for workers’ rights; and the Battle of Cable Street, where East Enders took on Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts. A People’s History of London journeys to a city of pamphleteers, agitators, exiles and revolutionaries, where millions of people have struggled in obscurity to secure a better future.

Acclaimed portrait and documentary photographer Peter Zelewski has spent the past three years capturing the people and faces of the streets of London. His images, which have be seen in the National Portrait gallery and throughout the press, are both intimate and considered and as such are closer to art photography than snapshots. The images are accompanied by arresting quotes that reveal the inner lives of the strangers that make this the world's most colourful city.

The People of East London comprises 50 colour illustrations by Adam Dant that celebrate and gently mock the array of characters you may possibly meet in East London. From Graffiti Tourists, Street Food Evangelists, Flower Market Shoppers to Aggressive Estate Agents, App Millionaires and Bicycle Thieves, Dant has all the stereotypes covered. The book can serve as a visual travel guide for those wishing to explore London’s east end or as comic relief for those who face these ‘types’ on a daily basis.

Due to the limitations of some ereaders, it is not possible to show some special characters.

In the eyes of Britain’s heritage industry, London is the traditional home of empire, monarchy and power, an urban wonderland for the privileged, where the vast majority of Londoners feature only to applaud in the background. Yet, for nearly 2000 years, the city has been a breeding ground for radical ideas, home to thinkers, heretics and rebels from John Wycliffe to Karl Marx. It has been the site of sometimes violent clashes that changed the course of history: the Levellers’ doomed struggle for liberty in the aftermath of the Civil War; the silk weavers, match girls and dockers who crusaded for workers’ rights; and the Battle of Cable Street, where East Enders took on Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts. A People’s History of London journeys to a city of pamphleteers, agitators, exiles and revolutionaries, where millions of people have struggled in obscurity to secure a better future.

This book surveys the lives and experiences of hundreds of thousands of eighteenth-century non-elite Londoners in the evolution of the modern world.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Maps -- 1. The Unhidden City: Imagining Indigenous Londons -- Interlude One: A Devil's Looking Glass, circa 1676 -- 2. Dawnland Telescopes: Making Colonial Knowledge in Algonquian London 1580-1630 -- Interlude Two: A Debtor's Petition 1676 -- 3. Alive from America: Indigenous Diplomacies and Urban Disorder 1710-1765 -- Interlude Three: Atlantes 1761 -- 4. "Such Confusion As I Never Dreamt": Indigenous Reasonings in an Unreasonable City 1766-1785 -- Interlude Four: A Lost Museum 1793

In 1902, Jack London purchased some secondhand clothes, rented a room in the East End, and set out to discover how the London poor lived. His research makes shocking reading. Moving through the slums as one of the poor; eating, drinking, and socializing with the underclass; lining up to get into a flophouse, London was scandalized and brutalized by the experience of living rough in Britain's capital. His clear-eyed reflections on the iniquities of class are a shaming testament to the persistence of social inequality in modern times.