Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [0]
Being Perfect
Loud and Clear
Blessings
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
Black and Blue
One True Thing
How Reading Changed My Life
Thinking Out Loud
Object Lessons
Living Out Loud
IMAGINED LONDON
IMAGINED LONDON
A Tour of the World’s Greatest Fictional City
ANNA QUINDLEN
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Washington, D.C.
Published by the National Geographic Society
1145 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036-4688
Text copyright © 2004 Anna Quindlen
Map copyright © 2004 National Geographic Society
ISBN-13: 978-1-4262-0182-0
ISBN-10: 1-4262-0182-6
Photography Credits: Lawrence Porges; Bettmann/ CORBIS; Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS; CORBIS; Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS; Julien Hekimian/Corbis Sygma
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the National Geographic Society.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Quindlen, Anna
Imagined London: a tour of the world’s greatest fictional city / Anna Quindlen.
p. cm.—(National Geographic directions)
ISBN: 0-7922-6561-0
1. Literary landmarks—England—London. 2. English literature—England—London—History and criticism. 3. Authors, English—Homes and haunts—England—London. 4. London (England)—Description and travel. 5. London (England)—In literature. I. Title. II. Series
PR110.L6Q35 2004
820.9’9421—dc22
2004049958
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For Amanda Urban, in lieu—
at least for now—of a mews house
IMAGINED LONDON
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
On a rather mild early spring morning in 1995, a taxi pulled up to one of the low flat-faced old buildings that make up most of the block of Dean Street just north of Shaftesbury Avenue in London. The driver was perturbed. From the moment he had pulled out of the terminal at Heathrow Airport, he had tried to convince his passenger that no woman would want to be dropped off, suitcase in hand, at the address she had given at 8 a.m. on a Sunday. As he unloaded her luggage from what she called his trunk and he called his boot, he squinted with unconcealed hostility at the front of the house and the small sign that identified it as the Groucho Club, so named because the writers and journalists and other non-clubby types who’d founded it liked the idea, expressed in the words of Groucho Marx, of never belonging to a place that would have them as a member.
There was no one on the street, and no one immediately visible behind the desk in the club, for that matter. The neighborhood was a nighttime neighborhood, a neighborhood of long dinners out and shutting down the pubs and streets crowded at midnight, so that sometimes you had to step off the curb to go on your way. And it had the sad and tired and slightly disreputable look that all such neighborhoods have on a Sunday morning, that look of the morning after