Table of Contents

Going Back to Dalston: Preface to the Oxford Edition
Part One: The Undemolished World of Dalston Lane
1: Street-Corner Vision
2: Around the World in Three Hundred Yards
3: All Cats are Grey by Night
4: Down in the Dirt
5: Dalston Lane Becomes a Downland Track
Part Two: Brideshead and the Tower Blocks
6: Brideshead Relocated
7: Abysmal Heights
8: Rodinsky's Place
9: An Unexpected Reprieve
Part Three: Scenes from the Privatized City
10: The London Bus Queue Falls Apart
11: The Vandalized Telephone Box
12: The Man with a Metal Detector
13: Drinking Water in a Toxic State
Part Four: Tales of Conversion
14: The Park that Lost its Name
15: Remembering London's War
16: The Bow Quarter: Six Hundred and Seventy Luxury Flats in an Old Victorian Hell-House
Part Five: Visions of the New Dawn
17: Excellence: From Fifth Avenue to Hackney Town Hall
18: Refounding the City with Prince Charles
Afterwards...
19: Down Among the Gentrifiers
20: A Night to Remember
21: Brick Lane's Day of Killing
22: Don Giovanni (and Business Planning) Come to the Hackney Empire
23: Siraj Izhar's public lavatory
Notes
Index

About the Author

Patrick Wright is a writer and broadcaster with an interest in the cultural dimensions of modern life. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed best-selling history books, including The Village that Died for England, Tank (described by Simon Schama as 'a tour de force'), and Iron Curtain, which John le Carre described as 'a work of wit, style and waggish erudition.'

He has written for many magazines and newspapers, including the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Independent, and the Observer, and has made numerous documentaries on cultural themes for both BBC Radio 3 and 4. His television work includes The River, a four-part BBC2 series on the Thames.

He is also a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University, and a fellow of the London Consortium.

Reviews

`Essential reading
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iD
`Astute and imaginative... An immensely heartening book... Here is a city dweller with the gusto of Baudelaire and the eye of Jane Jacobs who, undeterred by dog shit and bullshit, enjoys the chaotic humanity, the ironic architectural juxtapositions, the esprit de jeu of late twentieth century London.
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David Widgery, Independent on Sunday
`Sheer good writing, sense and humanity

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Andrew Saint, Times Literary Supplement
`A funny and perceptive book which is part oral history and part journalism, part generalization and part scholarship - an intriguing and attractive amalgam.
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Peter Ackroyd, The Times
`There is no space in a short review to give more than a hint of the intellectual delights of this book. Witty, well written and superbly stimulating, it is a must for everybody's reading list.
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Victor Belcher, English Heritage Magazine
`Patrick Wright is a wandering, disestablished scholar whose method is to walk and talk.

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Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books
`This is a formidable polemic that describes a realist's vision of a Britain under private affluence amid public squalor.
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Matthew Bray, Financial Times
`Patrick Wright is an incisive thinker, a man of laudable principles and a skilful writer of punchy journalistic prose.

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Charles Bourne, Hampstead & Highgate Express
`Wright belongs in a select club of literary sleuths who have imagined London as a labyrinth of strange affinities... A pin-sharp miniaturist who can see the world in a grain of sand.

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Boyd Tonkin, Observer