London is known around the world as a metropolitan, ordered city full of tourist attractions and exclusive shops, but the real face of the city – disordered, chaotic, sprawling, vigorous, untamed – remains unseen and unexplored.London from Punk to Blair is a richly illustrated portrait of Europe’s foremost capital. An array of contributors, including poets, journalists, teachers, historians, wanderers, drinkers, photographers and foodies, offer a selection of personal and subjective readings of the city since the late ’70s. Using maps, journeys, pictures, narratives and signs, the contributors chart a variety of literal and metaphorical explorations through modern and postmodern London, showing how it works, and how it fails to work; what makes it vibrant, and what makes it seedy. From West End galleries to strip pubs in Shoreditch; from millionaires’ loft apartments to buses and suburban Tube stops; from film, fashion and gay clubs to punk bands, ruinous factories, pigeon filth and the vagaries of weather, London from Punk to Blair embraces the city like no other book has before.London is too complex and fragmented for any one person to comprehend fully, but this book goes a long way to help you discover what lies outside, and inside, Zone 1. The book will open your eyes to parts of London that you have never seen, or even knew existed.Contributors include: Phil Baker, Michael Bracewell, Christopher Breward, John Davis, Tom Dyckhoff, Allen Fisher, Charlie Gere, David Gilbert, Fiona Henderson, Patrick Keiller, Sarah Kent, Roger Luckhurst, Nicholas Royle, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Patrick Wright.

Product Description: With particular reference to the field of architecture, this text examines the economic and political consequences for Britain of the post-war Anglo-American 'special relationship', providing detailed studies of key buildings and urban planning initiatives, blended with a wider theoretical analysis of socio-economic and cultural developments...read more

Product Description: The reach of the car today is almost universal, and its effect on landscapes, cityscapes, cultures – indeed, on the very fabric of the modern world – is profound. Cars have brought benefits to individuals in terms of mobility and expanded horizons, but the cost has been very high in terms of damage to the environment and the consumption of precious resources...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Unknown City takes its place in the emerging architectural literature that looks beyond design process and buildings to discover new ways of looking at the urban experience. A multistranded contemplation of the notion of "knowing a place," it is about both the existence and the possibilities of architecture and the city...read more

Product Description: What do our cities mean to us? How do we experience them? Some of the answers (and many more questions) are to be found in the unexpected spaces of the metropolis. Urban living - the ways we use and inhabit places and the ways our lives are shaped by those places - is illuminated in the series of provocative views presented here...read more