The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink

Front Cover
Tim Hitchcock, Heather Shore
Rivers Oram Press, 2003 - History - 256 pages
The street is the social arena that we share above all with our forebears. Now, as then, the street forces the rich to rub shoulders with the poor, the housewife with the prostitute, and the pick-pocket with his mark. The juxtaposition can be mundane or startling and the streets have fascination and horror for both modern Londoners and their predecessors in the seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. In The Streets of London historians bring to life a variety of the peoples and behaviours which could be found in those streets, with insights into questions such as: How did you find your way in a badly mapped London without formal addresses? What graffiti would you come across? From brawls to duels, what form did street fighting take? Who were the men and women caught having sex in public? Where did they find a safe (or not so safe) spot for their dalliances? Has the London cabbie changed at all? What do trials at the Old Bailey tell us about street crime and shoplifting? Was there a criminal class and where did criminals meet and live? How did the homeless live?

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Contents

A Map or Grovndplot of the Citty of London since the last
1
At ShakespearsHead OverAgainst CatharineStreet in the Strand
10
The Polite Town
27
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Roy Sydney Porter was born December 31, 1946. He grew up in a south London working class home. He attended Wilson's Grammar School, Camberwell, and won an unheard of scholarship to Cambridge. His starred double first in history at Cambridge University (1968) led to a junior research fellowship at his college, Christ's, followed by a teaching post at Churchill College, Cambridge. His Ph.D. thesis, published as The Making Of Geology (1977), became the first of more than 100 books that he wrote or edited. Porter was a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge from 1972 to 1979; Dean from 1977 to 1979; Assistant Lecturer in European History at Cambridge University from 1974 to 1977, Lecturer from 1977 to 1979. He joined the Wellcome Institute fot the History of Medicine in 1979 where he was a Senior Lecturer from 1979 to 1991, a Reader from 1991 to 1993, and finally a Professor in the Social History of Medicine from 1993 to 2001. Porter was Elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994, and he was also made an honorary fellow by both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Roy Porter died March 4, 2002, at the age of 55.

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