From its origin as the Roman city of Londinium through to its latest incarnation as a super-diverse World City in the twenty-first century, London’s history and culture has been shaped by migration. This book expresses and celebrates the plurality of the capital’s cultures and affirms the importance of migration in the making of the modern city through thirty-three short essays written by academics, artists, broadcasters and curators. Subjects range from the mediaeval to the contemporary: buildings and institutions, individuals and communities, objects, visual art, street performances and literary texts. Some contributors focus on famous people and places, like Shakespeare and St Paul’s, while others explore less well-known subjects, like the Free German League of Culture (1939-46) or Ignatius Sancho, the eighteenth-century musician, grocer and man-of-letters.
It is not only London’s cultures which are diverse, migration is also plural. This book engages with the very many human migrations from across the globe and within the British Isles that have taken place over the last two-thousand years, as well as with the movements of plants, animals, and ideologies from other countries and continents, and the movement of natural resources and manmade toxins into and through the city.
Composed of a vivid collection of snapshots, the volume offers a kaleidoscopic vision of the city and provides new insights into the successive migrant communities that have come to London and made it their own.
Table of Contents:
Frontmatter
Author Biographies
Introduction, Charlotte Grant and Alistair Robinson
CENTRAL
1. St. Erkenwald and the Hidden Histories of St Paul’s Cathedral, Alastair Bennett
2. Ignatius Sancho: Musician, Man of Letters, Grocer, Markman Ellis
3. The ‘Black-birds’ of St. Giles: Community and Place in Eighteenth-century London, Nicole N. Aljoe and Savita Maharaj
4. Styling the Other: Hazlitt’s ‘The Indian Jugglers’, Uttara Natarajan
5. Begging Places: Poverty, Race, and Visibility on Ludgate Hill, c. 1815, David Hitchcock
6. 13 Red-Lion Square: The Mendicity Society, 1818–76, Oskar Cox Jensen
7. The Chinese Aesthetics of the Admonitions Scroll at the British Museum, Kent Su
8. ‘A terrain on its own’: Elizabeth Bowen and Regent’s Park, Heather Ingman
INFRASTRUCTURE: WATER
9. London’s Water: City Comedy, Migration and Middletons, Susan J. Wiseman
EAST
10. Shakespeare in Shoreditch, Daniel Swift
11. Hostile Environments: Disinterring a Lascar Barracks in Nineteenth-Century Shadwell, Eliza Cubitt
12. 19 Princelet Street, Spitalfields: A Case Study in the Architecture of Migration and Diversity, Dan Cruikshank
13. The Slot-Meter and the East End Avant-Garde, Alex Grafen
INFRASTRUCTURE: WASTE
14. Blockage and Recuperation: Sewer-Hunters in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Naomi Hinds
SOUTH
15. Culture and Horticulture in Lambeth from ‘Tradescant’s Ark’ to Vauxhall Gardens, Charlotte Grant
16. The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, Sydenham, and St Petersburg, Catherine Brown
17. 87 Hackford Road: The London of Vincent Van Gogh, Livia Wang
18. Writing London: Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Ruvani Ranasinha
INFRASTRUCTURE: TRANSPORT I
19. Existing Triply: Race, Space and the London Transport Network, 1950s–70s, Rob Waters
WEST
20. Scotch Hornpipes and African Elephants: The May Fair in 1700, Alistair Robinson
21. Feathered People in Enlightenment London: Queen of the Bluestockings meets Cherokee King, Elizabeth Eger
22. Prince Eugen in Kensington: Anglo-Scandinavian Artistic, Networks and the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897, Eva-Charlotta Mebius
23. ‘What a relief to be back in London’: The Silences of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Edmund de Waal
24. Tricksters of the Water: Sam Selvon's West London and the Migrant Experience, Peter Maber and Karishma Patel
25. Arabian Nights on the Edgware Road: Hanan al-Shaykh’s Only in London, Susie Thomas
26. The Grand Prince of Kyiv in Holland Park: The Statue of Saint Volodymyr, Sasha Dovzhyk
27. ‘Is real mas outside’: Community, Resistance and Notting Hill Carnival, Leighan Renaud
28. ‘Where the City Dissolves’: Suburban Diasporas, Psychosis and Reparative Writing, Martin Dines
INFRASTRUCTURE: TRANSPORT II
29. A Bus for Everyone: The Role of the London Omnibus in Enabling Access to the City, Joe Kerr
NORTH
30. John Keats and London: Nature, the City and the Suburbs, Flora Lisica
31. The Battle for an African Space in London: WASU Hostel and Aggrey House, William Whitworth
32. Northview: A Snapshot of Multiracial London during the Second World War, Oliver Ayers
33. Exiles of NW3: The ‘Free German League of Culture’ in Upper Park Road, David Anderson
Select Bibliography
Index
