Harry Mount

Slumming It

East End Chronicles: Three Hundred Years of Mystery and Mayhem

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Penguin 400pp £20 order from our bookshop

Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End

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John Murray 270pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

When I was a smug teenager, idly choosing whether Oxford or Cambridge would be lucky enough to educate me, an even smugger banker said to me, ‘Oh Oxford. To get there, you go through lovely Notting Hill, Holland Park, Chiswick… To get to Cambridge you have to go through the East End!’

Horrid as the banker was, he had a point. Wherever you take as the centre point of London – the City, Apsley House (address, Number One London), Centrepoint – you can move west for ten, twenty miles and your route will be lined with the houses of the rich, and after that, as you pass through Berkshire and Oxfordshire, the fields of the rich.

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