London Particulars
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
A richly textured portrait of a vanished city, London Particulars transports the reader back to the teeming, fog-laden streets of early twentieth-century London through the keenly observed memories of C.H. Rolph — the pen name of Cecil Rolph Hewitt — a man who lived and worked at the heart of the metropolis for decades. Drawing on his childhood in Fulham and his long career in the City of London Police, Rolph chronicles the textures of everyday life with an insider's precision and a storyteller's warmth, reconstructing a world of street vendors, music halls, and the rhythms of working-class London that the modern city has long since erased. Written with the quiet wit and forensic clarity that distinguished Rolph's celebrated journalism for the New Statesman, London Particulars stands as both a memoir and a work of social history, illuminating the sweeping transformations that reshaped urban Britain across the twentieth century. Rolph's prose is deceptively unassuming — anecdotal in surface, yet deeply authoritative in its command of time and place — and his eye for the telling detail gives the book a novelistic vividness rare in personal memoir. For anyone who has ever wondered what the capital truly felt and smelled and sounded like before the age of television and the motorcar, this is an indispensable, quietly unforgettable account.
Author: C.H. Rolph
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
A richly textured portrait of a vanished city, London Particulars transports the reader back to the teeming, fog-laden streets of early twentieth-century London through the keenly observed memories of C.H. Rolph — the pen name of Cecil Rolph Hewitt — a man who lived and worked at the heart of the metropolis for decades. Drawing on his childhood in Fulham and his long career in the City of London Police, Rolph chronicles the textures of everyday life with an insider's precision and a storyteller's warmth, reconstructing a world of street vendors, music halls, and the rhythms of working-class London that the modern city has long since erased. Written with the quiet wit and forensic clarity that distinguished Rolph's celebrated journalism for the New Statesman, London Particulars stands as both a memoir and a work of social history, illuminating the sweeping transformations that reshaped urban Britain across the twentieth century. Rolph's prose is deceptively unassuming — anecdotal in surface, yet deeply authoritative in its command of time and place — and his eye for the telling detail gives the book a novelistic vividness rare in personal memoir. For anyone who has ever wondered what the capital truly felt and smelled and sounded like before the age of television and the motorcar, this is an indispensable, quietly unforgettable account.