Cultures of London

Legacies of Migration

Charlotte Grant, Alistair Robinson, Charlotte Grant, Alistair Robinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781350242012
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350242043
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

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

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Central
• 1 St Erkenwald and the Hidden Histories of St Paul’s Cathedral
• 2 Ignatius Sancho: Musician, Man of Letters, Grocer
• 3 The ‘Black-birds’ of St. Giles: Rethinking Place and Community in Eighteenth-Century London
• 4 Styling the Other: Hazlitt’s ‘The Indian Jugglers’
• 5 Begging Places: Poverty, Race and Visibility on Ludgate Hill, c. 1815
• 6 13 Red-Lion Square: The Mendicity Society, 1818–76
• 7 The Chinese Aesthetics of the Admonitions Scroll at the British Museum
• 8 ‘A Terrain on its Own’: Elizabeth Bowen and Regent’s Park
• Infrastructure: Water
• 9 London’s Water: City Comedy, Migration and Middletons
• East
• 10 Shakespeare in Shoreditch
• #11 19 Princelet Street, Spitalfields: A Case Study in the Architecture of Migration and Diversity
• 12 Hostile Environments: Disinterring a Lascar Barracks in Nineteenth-Century Shadwell
• 13 The Slot-Meter and the East End Avant-Garde
• Infrastructure: Waste
• 14 Blockage and Recuperation: Sewer-Hunters in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor
• South
• 15 Culture and Horticulture in Lambeth from ‘Tradescant’s Ark’ to Vauxhall Gardens
• 16 The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, Sydenham and St Petersburg
• 17 87 Hackford Road: The London of Vincent van Gogh
• 18 Writing London: Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
• Infrastructure: Transport I
• 19 Existing Triply: Race, Space and the London Transport Network, 1950s–1970s
• West
• 20 Scotch Hornpipes and African Elephants: The May Fair in c. 1700
• 21 Feathered People in Enlightenment London: Queen of the Bluestockings meets Cherokee King
• 22 Prince Eugen in Kensington: Anglo-Scandinavian Artistic Networks and the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897
• 23 ‘What a Relief to be Back in London’: The Silences of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper
• 24 Tricksters of the Water: Sam Selvon’s West London and the Migrant Experience
• 25 Arabian Nights on the Edgware Road: Hanan al-Shaykh’s Only in London
• 26 The Grand Prince of Kyiv in Holland Park: The Statue of Saint Volodymyr
• 27 ‘Is Real Mas Outside’: Community, Resistance and Notting Hill Carnival
• 28 ‘Where the City Dissolves’: Suburban Diasporas, Psychosis and Reparative Writing
• Infrastructure: Transport II
• 29 A Bus for Everyone: The Role of the London Omnibus in Enabling Access to the City
• North
• 30 Moorgate, Enfield, Edmonton and Hampstead: The Cross-City Migrations of John Keats
• 31 The Battle for an African Space in London: WASU Hostel and Aggrey House
• 32 Northview: A Snapshot of Multiracial London during the Second World War
• 33 Exiles of NW3: The ‘Free German League of Culture’ in Upper Park Road
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright