In Search of London

Here H. V.Morton begins his wandering in the City, where Roman London began, and follows, westwards, the course of London’s seventeenth and eighteenth-century expansion. Here is a lasting memento for the overseas visitor, for Londoners in their thousands, and for all those readers for whom H. V. Morton has long been the perfect guide and the most entertaining companion. In this remarkable, living picture of London past, present and timeless Morton explores the City and the Temple, Covent Garden, Soho and all the ‘submerged villages beneath the flood of bricks and mortar’, uncovering layer upon layer of London’s history. Morton follows the leads of imagination and investigation back and forth across the city, tracing unforgettable scenes: the Emperor Claudius leading his war elephants across the Thames; the terrible executions at the Tower; the city that Shakespeare knew, and that of Pepys, and Nelson and Queen Victoria, and also the shattered yet defiant city of the Blitz and the post-war London of ‘ruins and hatless crowds’. Morton’s quest for the city’s heart reveals how London’s daily life is rooted in a past that is closer and more familiar than we might think, making In Search of London as informative, entertaining and rich in human colour today as when it was written fifty years ago.