Looking at urban history, this work balances statistics with the words of historians, diarists & novelists, poets & churchmen such as: Pepys, Boswell, Fielding, Walpole, Blake, Mayhew, Wells, Woolf, & Spark. It is a celebration of the city & also an elegy for its decline, with statistics & anecdote, from Boadicea to Betjeman.