The companion guide to London

Many guide books are long on information and short on readablility.This book by David Piper,who was for some time the head of the National Portrait Gallery is both erudite and witty.He covers all the essentials but puts on a gloss of wit and lards his facts with sotries and comments which compliment the text.His chapters on the Wallace Collection and St,Pauls would be hard to beat.I lived in London for many years and read many books about it.There are some very fine guide books on London but this is among the best that I have read.If you take a chapter you can generally walk the chapter in one to two hours and although some of the landmarks that he mentioned in the earlier editions have since gone, thank God the Salisbury is still there on St.Martin's Lane although sadly the Lyoon's Corner houses have quite disappeared as has the cafe where Yeats wrote his poem.In the fifties this cafe was owned by Cypriot and was a local working class restaurant known to LSE students at the nearby Pasfield Hall as the Greasy Spoon.The owner infuriated my American and Canadian friends by bringing water without ice(wanting ice on an English winter day seemed bizarre to we Brits)and smothering the apple pie with custard.After they had tasted English ice-cream at the time the gladly went back to the custard.