LET ME TAKE YOU BY THE HAND

Sub-titled 'True Tales From London's Streets', the book is an x-ray of life and stories in their own words of those who live and work in our capital. On the surface, the streets of London in 1861 and in 2019 are entirely different places, but dig just a little and the similarities are striking and in many cases shocking. Taking Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (available product code 56595 to compare) as inspiration, Jennifer Kavanagh explores the changes and continuities by collecting and mapping stories from today's London. Beggars, street entertainers, stalls selling a variety of food, clothes, second-hand goods, and thieves and the sex trade are all still predominant. The rise of the gig economy has brought a multitude of drivers and cyclists, delivering and moving goods, transporting meals, food and people, all organised through smartphones but using the same streets as Mayhew's informants. The precarity faced by this new workforce would also be familiar to the street sellers of his day in terms of resources; gone are the workhouses, alms-houses, pauper's lunatic asylums, and enter day centres, shelters, hostels and food banks. There are still many kinds of market like the privately run farmer's markets which are doing especially well, typically open once a week with a trend towards healthy and organic food. There is a pair of builders pictured in a line art illustration, street food sellers and in local streets shopkeepers and long term residents know each other and the Big Issue seller around the corner. There is getting around, going out in the fresh air, Fitzrovia (a favourite for film and period dramas), Hassene an Algerian street sweeper, Victorian railway stations and parks. According to the 1861 census, the population of inner London was 2,808,494. In 2011 it was 3,231,901 - not such a great difference. In 1851 over 38% of Londoners were born somewhere else and in 2011 37% is made up of different nationalities and now London is rightly proud of its multiculturalism. The changing city as seen from the end of 2018 to spring 2020 which leads us through the streets of London and to places we would never find for ourselves. 395pp, paperback. Illus.