The Heart of London

In the neon-tinged twilight of 1920s London, H. V. Morton walks the city's cobblestones with the eye of a poet and the curiosity of a detective. This collection of essays captures a London that existed only briefly: before the Blitz, before the motorbus crowded out the horse, when Petticoat Lane still whispered of the Orient and the docks still smelled of empire. Morton finds heartbreak in a Kensington garden and romance in a Bow Street prison. He eavesdrops on fishmongers at Billingsgate, contemplates Cleopatra's Needle as fog rolls off the Thames, and sits in cafés watching the peculiar rituals of Londoners who have no idea they're being observed. The city unfolds as a living organism, each essay a different organ: the beating heart of Westminster, the nervous system of Piccadilly Circus, the memory of ancient churches tucked between modern buildings. What emerges is not a tourist's London but a lover's London, written with wit, tenderness, and an almost painful awareness that cities, like people, are constantly dying and being born. For anyone who has wandered a city's streets wondering who its strangers are and what secrets they carry.