Things to Do Around Piccadilly

In the 70s, noted American author and record producer Samuel Charters often visited London, a city he had come to know and love. Inspired by walking its streets between recording sessions, he began writing down poems in a small notebook. "As the months went by the poems grew. I never could predict just what it was that I had to get down on the notebook's pages. I only knew that it was something that had an overwhelming sense for me of what London was. What I hoped with the poems was to catch some of London's tumult, some of its silences, something of the sense of history that gave its streets so much of their character..." Many years later he asked an old friend, Londoner Martin Colyer, to collaborate on a compilation of the poems, and to give them a visual counterpoint with his photographs of the city now. The result is a book that will appeal to anyone who never tires of London and who appreciates its "proud vulgarity, its often insistent tastelessness, its seediness, and its dismissal of any concern that it should be anything but what it is."