The New Londoners is a powerful celebration of London's unique cultural richness, and of the diversity that is the hallmark of this great and fascinating city. Over the last four years leading British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins has photographed and interviewed 164 families from 188 different countries, all of whom have made their homes in London. These are beautiful and powerful portraits, with each family photographed in their homes. Through insightful interviews we learn of the varied experiences of these families from across the globe.
Both devastating and funny, The Lonely Londoners is an unforgettable account of immigrant experience - and one of the great twentieth-century London novels At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo? But the irrepressible newcomer cannot be cast down. He and all the other lonely new Londoners - from shiftless Cap to Tolroy, whose family has descended on him from Jamaica - must try to create a new life for themselves. As pessimistic 'old veteran' Moses watches their attempts, they gradually learn to survive and come to love the heady excitements of London. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Susheila Nasta. 'His Lonely Londoners has acquired a classics status since it appeared in 1956 as the definitive novel about London's West Indians' Financial Times 'The unforgettable picaresque ... a vernacular comedy of pathos' Guardian
“A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . . Delightful. . . . In Taylor’s patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators.” -- New York Times Book Review Londoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities–a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforgettable stories told by the real people who make the city hum. Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor has spent years traversing every corner of the city, getting to know the most interesting Londoners, including the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub doorperson, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard at Buckingham Palace, and a couple who fell in love at the Tower of London—and now live there. With candor and humor, this diverse cast—rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)—shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before. Together, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London in all its breadth, from Notting Hill to Brixton, from Piccadilly Circus to Canary Wharf, from an airliner flying into London Heathrow Airport to Big Ben and Tower Bridge, and down to the deepest tunnels of the London Underground. Londoners is the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.
A number of lives captured at a particular time creates a record that enables us to see just how the circumstances of Londoners are changing and evolving, though perhaps for the luckiest or unluckiest few, nothing ever seems to change very much. In addition to addressing the question, 'WHERE do we live?', perhaps the most obvious dimension of Londoners at Home, the project goes on to consider, through 64 topics, 'WHO do we live with?', 'WHAT do we do?', 'WHENCE did we come?', and 'HOW are we different?' and a wide variety of sitters has contributed to the substantial commentary that now offers extensive and illuminating answers to these existential questions. However, Londoners at Home always aimed to comprise wholly non-judgmental observations of some of the denizens of our vast, capital city and the accumulated images and stories have, as was originally hoped, built into a fascinating tableau of the way we Londoners live now, in the second decade of the 21st century. The Photographer, Milan Svanderlik, is a veteran observer of the extraordinary diversity and beauty of nature, people and life in general. Londoners at Home: The Way We Live Now is the final part of a major project, The London Trilogy. Part I, 100 Faces of London, was exhibited in central London in 2012, with Part II, Outsiders in London, following in 2015. Gerald Stuart Burnett was born to émigré Scottish parents in a small Cheshire market town. Graduating from the University of Stirling, he went on to the University of Nottingham before pursuing a long career in the Education Service. Gerald's project role has been primarily as editor, painstakingly reworking the text of each 'story' into its current form.
While looking through his contact sheets in 2007 Harvey Benge noticed that one of his pictures reminded him of a Friedlander, another of an Atget, yet others of a Tillmans, a Baldessari and Adams a Picking them out he decided to make what leading UK photography critic Gerry Badger describes in his opening essay as an 'anthology' of contemporary photography featuring some of its biggest names. The result is a sharply curated and perfectly formed collection of intriguing, beguiling and seductive images, sure to delight the photography aficionado and newcomer alike. 'Of course they are all genuine original Benges. And it is important that they are all good pictures, not mere pastiches of the "originals" of which they gently but insistently remind one. This may be a game, but games can be very serious, and this is both as serious and light-hearted exploration of photographic style.' - Gerry Badger
This is London in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers, witch-doctors and sex workers. This is London in the voices of Arabs, Afghans, Nigerians, Poles, Romanians and Russians. This is London as you've never seen it before. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2016 Shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage 2019 'An eye-opening investigation into the hidden immigrant life of the city' Sunday Times 'Full of nuggets of unexpected information about the lives of others . . . It recalls the journalism of Orwell' Financial Times 'Ben Judah grabs hold of London and shakes out its secrets' The Economist
