The Secret Lore of London

As someone who actually bought and read this book, I can honestly say that much of it was a chore to read once you get over how pretty the cover art is.

Note: I'm not a Ph.D candidate or a true Londoner and I've never read the original edition of this book, so maybe I just picked up the wrong book for me personally.

While the book is divided into sections, which sounds lovely and organized, the content is a mishmash of essays (of varying approachability and largely unknown age of original publication) tucked under one section or another with no real cohesion or meaningful progression of topics.

It felt a bit like an non-specific call for papers that just got pasted together despite their sometimes redundant coverage of certain topics. The book was edited to add reference notes in parentheses to refer back to chapters within itself, but these notes fail give it any real cohesion either.

As someone who has never been to London, I found it confusing that the section devoted to a basic walkthrough of the general sites with simple references to the associated lore of each site appears in the middle of the book, rather than the beginning. In the beginning, where you might have expected to see a general introduction to the city in plain english, you get instead a laborious old English style geographical poem excerpt which drags on for 4 pages but then offers nothing in the way of explication or summary. (While the Poly-Olbion is famous and excerpt was topical, it's bloody difficult and a bit painful to read with no context.)

Many of the essays are so high brow only a devoted scholar of that topic could appreciate the “you had to have been there” thesis feel. A few of the essays were genuinely enjoyable and approachable, but many of them dryly repeat the same 4 or 5 bits of lore with varying levels of detail. One essay had a fantastic story in it... but then, disappointingly, had no provided references and I couldn't find anything else to support it anywhere.

Overall, I did enjoy the book and certain essays within were an absolute delight (Chapters 6, 10, and 11 offhand and a few others I can't recall at the moment), but it's largely unapproachable for the layman and feels a bit messy because of the pasted essay format. But again, my criticism may just be a result of having different expectations of the book and having no foreknowledge of the locale or lore.