If you’ve been reading about bookish London on this site, Virginia Woolf has already come up more than once — the bust in Tavistock Square, the bombed house in Mecklenburgh Square, the Bloomsbury Group operating out of the same few streets and producing work that still matters a hundred years…
William Shakespeare wrote somewhere between 37 and 39 plays. Scholars still debate the exact number, and at least one play (Cardenio) is considered lost entirely. He also wrote 154 sonnets and several longer poems. He did all of this between roughly 1590 and 1613, which is the kind of output…
My grandfather was a Dickens man. Every novel on the shelf, read and re-read, spines cracked, pages slightly yellowed — and all of it completely available to me from a very young age. Which is how I ended up having finished the complete works before I turned ten. Not a…
If you’ve read anything on this site, you already know how I feel about Sherlock Holmes. He is, in my entirely unbiased opinion, the most London thing to have ever not existed. And the fact that he didn’t exist has never really stopped him from feeling completely real. The canon…
If you’ve spent any time on this site you’ll already know that London is deeply embedded in the Harry Potter universe — King’s Cross, Leadenhall Market as Diagon Alley, the Millennium Bridge (which I still refuse to cross, and if you know you know). But before you go looking for…
Being a Sherlock Holmes fan is unlike belonging to any other fandom. Because Holmes didn’t just exist in stories. He, to this day, exists in this city, on streets that are still here, in buildings that are still standing, in a London that you can still, if you look at…
For the late-night Etsy browsers. You know who you are. Let’s get something straight: bookish shops are not bookshops. A bookshop is where you go to buy books. A bookish shop is where you go at 11pm when you should absolutely be asleep, fall into a rabbit hole, and emerge…
There are a lot of “best bookshops in London” lists out there. Most of them cover the same five shops in the same order with the same photograph of Daunt Books’ reading room. They’re not wrong, exactly — but they’re also not telling you much you can actually use. So…
There is something oddly predictable about watching people arrive in London for the first time. You see it at airports, at train stations, outside Tube exits. The slight pause. The scanning of familiar landmarks. The instinctive reach for a phone camera the moment they spot a red bus, a black…
London has always been a city that reads. You don’t have to go looking for literary London. It finds you; in the pub name you walk past every morning, in the square you cut through on the way to the tube, in the hospital you pass without knowing it appeared…