John Hillaby's London [antikvár]

Foreword Good fortune enabled me to explore strange lands from the fringe of the Arctic to equatorial Africa. But age and ambition have frontiers of their own. Where would I now travel if I were younger, fancy-free and passports and other national restrictions were unknown? The evasive answer is not as far as I have done in the past. Experience teaches the traveller that people are the living elements of geography and the fascination of learning more about what less well-travelled people do and dream about is irresistible. A suggestion from Ben Glazebrook, my publisher, that I might consider exploring the build and shape of London, its inhabitants and what they have meant to me professionally put a brake on romantic notions about going back to the Barrens around Lake Athabaska or that most theatrical of tropical rivers, the Ishango which meanders round the Mountains of the Moon — especially since I knew that the Redmen I had seen spearing salmon and driving caribou over cliffs no longer exist as self-sufficient tribes, and Zaire is a no-man's-land for whites. By contrast, although I have walked the streets and open spaces of this enormous city for well over forty years, what did I know of the tidal restlessness of its teeming millions, its prehistoric past buried under the West End, and its architectural splendour which has been chopped about and ii