Both devastating and funny, The Lonely Londoners is an unforgettable account of immigrant experience - and one of the great twentieth-century London novels At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo? But the irrepressible newcomer cannot be cast down. He and all the other lonely new Londoners - from shiftless Cap to Tolroy, whose family has descended on him from Jamaica - must try to create a new life for themselves. As pessimistic 'old veteran' Moses watches their attempts, they gradually learn to survive and come to love the heady excitements of London. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Susheila Nasta. 'His Lonely Londoners has acquired a classics status since it appeared in 1956 as the definitive novel about London's West Indians' Financial Times 'The unforgettable picaresque ... a vernacular comedy of pathos' Guardian

“A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . . Delightful. . . . In Taylor’s patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators.” -- New York Times Book Review Londoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities–a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforgettable stories told by the real people who make the city hum. Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor has spent years traversing every corner of the city, getting to know the most interesting Londoners, including the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub doorperson, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard at Buckingham Palace, and a couple who fell in love at the Tower of London—and now live there. With candor and humor, this diverse cast—rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)—shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before. Together, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London in all its breadth, from Notting Hill to Brixton, from Piccadilly Circus to Canary Wharf, from an airliner flying into London Heathrow Airport to Big Ben and Tower Bridge, and down to the deepest tunnels of the London Underground. Londoners is the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.

These brief biographies reflect a century and a half of London's history and reflect key events and fascinating adventures drawn from the lives of people from all walks of life who made a lasting impression on their hometown.

London will do for you for now... And I will do for London. London, 1956. Newly arrived from Trinidad, Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver is impatient to start his new life. Carrying just pyjamas and a toothbrush, he bursts through Moses Aloetta's door only to find Moses and his friends already deflated by city life. Will the London fog dampen Galahad's dreams? Or will these Lonely Londoners make a home in a city that sees them as a threat? In the first stage adaptation of Sam Selvon's iconic novel about the Windrush Generation, Roy Williams sweeps us back in time to shine a new light on London, friendship, and what we call home. This edition of The Lonely Londoners is published to coincide with the world premiere at London's Jermyn Street Theatre in February 2024.

In a vivid panorama, Londoner's Larder presents the food of a great city. Annette Hope has used biography, literature and social history to explore the city of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pepys, Johnson, Dickens, Wilde and Virginia Woolf, and to show in lively detail what these writers and their contemporaries might have eaten, where the food came from and how it was cooked. She looks at problems of supply, distribution, nutrition, cooking, and health and hygiene as the city expanded and changed character, and chronicles the effects of social, economic, and ethnic shifts since the end of the Second World War. At the end of each chapter are recipes from the period, written in modern, usable form. From the takeaway pasties baked by the Cook in The Canterbury Pilgrims to dinner at the Café Royal, from John Evelyn's recipes for salads to Mrs Beeton, from the introduction of coffee to the appearance of ration books, this book charts the gastronomic life of London in scholarly and entertaining detail. A discussion of the city as it is at the beginning of the twenty-first century rounds off the picture - a time when Middle Eastern and Oriental food is commonplace, and much of the cuisine available in European restaurants is inspired by that on offer in popular holiday resorts and purely 'British' food is difficult to find. If London beguiles you, literature seduces you, and recipes fascinate you, this pioneering book will intrigue and delight you.

A number of lives captured at a particular time creates a record that enables us to see just how the circumstances of Londoners are changing and evolving, though perhaps for the luckiest or unluckiest few, nothing ever seems to change very much. In addition to addressing the question, 'WHERE do we live?', perhaps the most obvious dimension of Londoners at Home, the project goes on to consider, through 64 topics, 'WHO do we live with?', 'WHAT do we do?', 'WHENCE did we come?', and 'HOW are we different?' and a wide variety of sitters has contributed to the substantial commentary that now offers extensive and illuminating answers to these existential questions. However, Londoners at Home always aimed to comprise wholly non-judgmental observations of some of the denizens of our vast, capital city and the accumulated images and stories have, as was originally hoped, built into a fascinating tableau of the way we Londoners live now, in the second decade of the 21st century. The Photographer, Milan Svanderlik, is a veteran observer of the extraordinary diversity and beauty of nature, people and life in general. Londoners at Home: The Way We Live Now is the final part of a major project, The London Trilogy. Part I, 100 Faces of London, was exhibited in central London in 2012, with Part II, Outsiders in London, following in 2015. Gerald Stuart Burnett was born to émigré Scottish parents in a small Cheshire market town. Graduating from the University of Stirling, he went on to the University of Nottingham before pursuing a long career in the Education Service. Gerald's project role has been primarily as editor, painstakingly reworking the text of each 'story' into its current form.