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London: A Travel Guide Through Time by Dr Matthew Green
Dr Matthew Green explores the sights and sounds of London through history. This is a fascinating and unique guide to the capital that takes the reader off the beaten track and into unexplored territory. This book allows the reader to travel through time to six key periods in the history of London. From Shakespeare to the plague, medieval London to the swinging 60s, readers can totally immerse themselves in the sights, sounds and smells of our capital at each particular moment.It's vividly written, and after reading this book you'll never rush through the streets of Covent Garden or St Paul's again without pausing for at least a moment to think of all the mad characters and epic lives that ran through the same streets centuries before.Whether you are a tourist looking for an alternative way to see the city, or a Londoner that wants to learn more about the world around you, this is a must-have guide.
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First published June 18, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 83 reviews
November 4, 2015
SO good! Absolutely brilliant in fact. I'm pretty stingy with my 5 star reviews but there's no question about this one, surely a contender for my book of 2015.
I've read a fair few 'time traveller' history guides. This one is a little different in that it takes us to the same place (and sometimes the same streets) over 6 different years. These are 1390, 1603, 1665, 1716, 1884 and 1957 so for example we get to witness Shakespeare's London, some of the horrors of the Plague in the 17th century, and a taste of the huge monster London has become in Victorian times.
I thought I'd like the earlier periods of history best, but the 1957 chapter was superb in that it captured a city still recovering from the Blitz (bomb sites everywhere) but already showing the first signs of the colourful psychedelic period to come.
The whole time travel idea is brilliant executed. Green writes like an absolute dream. I know it's a cliché to say this is history brought alive but I'm going to say it anyway!
I've never heard of Dr Matthew Green before but the book jacket shows a surprisingly young man. Great! Plenty of time for him to get cracking with plenty more books like this!
I've read a fair few 'time traveller' history guides. This one is a little different in that it takes us to the same place (and sometimes the same streets) over 6 different years. These are 1390, 1603, 1665, 1716, 1884 and 1957 so for example we get to witness Shakespeare's London, some of the horrors of the Plague in the 17th century, and a taste of the huge monster London has become in Victorian times.
I thought I'd like the earlier periods of history best, but the 1957 chapter was superb in that it captured a city still recovering from the Blitz (bomb sites everywhere) but already showing the first signs of the colourful psychedelic period to come.
The whole time travel idea is brilliant executed. Green writes like an absolute dream. I know it's a cliché to say this is history brought alive but I'm going to say it anyway!
I've never heard of Dr Matthew Green before but the book jacket shows a surprisingly young man. Great! Plenty of time for him to get cracking with plenty more books like this!
September 29, 2021
Oh boy, where to start. This book was one of the best I’ve read this year and I’ve read many good books in 2017.
The atmosphere was perfect for each time travel. After walking around last week in 21st century London, I found so many of the houses and streets described in this book.
It gives a whole new perspective who one walks through London, at least for me.
From the gruesome curfew in medieval London, to Shakespeare‘s times and the devil year 1666 to the Hannover and Victorian Times and lastly the late 50s of the last century. London was in constant change and it still is. The city fascinates me and I really wish that there was an audiobook so that I could walk around the streets he mentions in his walks and walk where he walks. I guess I have to make one myself 😄 I was instantly engulfed in the past times. At one point I smelled tobacco although nobody smokes in my home.
If you love London and want to learn more about the city, read it!
The atmosphere was perfect for each time travel. After walking around last week in 21st century London, I found so many of the houses and streets described in this book.
It gives a whole new perspective who one walks through London, at least for me.
From the gruesome curfew in medieval London, to Shakespeare‘s times and the devil year 1666 to the Hannover and Victorian Times and lastly the late 50s of the last century. London was in constant change and it still is. The city fascinates me and I really wish that there was an audiobook so that I could walk around the streets he mentions in his walks and walk where he walks. I guess I have to make one myself 😄 I was instantly engulfed in the past times. At one point I smelled tobacco although nobody smokes in my home.
If you love London and want to learn more about the city, read it!
March 26, 2019
I totally judged this book by its very pretty cover when I bought it, and then didn’t read it for quite some time because I feared it would be too dry and boring inside. Well, I’m happy to admit that I was very much mistaken about that. It’s interesting, engagingly written and a very very nice read. I learned a lot about one of my favourite cities in the world and really had the feeling of wandering down the streets of London while reading. As a bonus, it is a very beautiful book and shows that sometimes the contents can match the outer appearance ;).
January 29, 2024
Wonderfully interesting and evocative. Green is an expert in creating an atmosphere through sound, smell and touch, even taste, giving the reader an extremely real experience. The comparisons through time are also absorbing for the history buff or simply any lover of London.
February 29, 2016
It does what it says on the tin. Very enjoyable:
This book allows the reader to travel through time to six key periods in the history of London. From Shakespeare to the plague, medieval London to the swinging 60s, readers can totally immerse themselves in the sights, sounds and smells of our capital at each particular moment.
In particular, I loved the chapter on the Great Plague of 1665. You would not want to swallow any of the medicines on offer at the time. Not surprising, but scary!
This book allows the reader to travel through time to six key periods in the history of London. From Shakespeare to the plague, medieval London to the swinging 60s, readers can totally immerse themselves in the sights, sounds and smells of our capital at each particular moment.
In particular, I loved the chapter on the Great Plague of 1665. You would not want to swallow any of the medicines on offer at the time. Not surprising, but scary!
December 31, 2019
I have been reading this over the last couple of years. Slow I know but wonderful to keep coming back to. Absolutely fascinating on so many levels. A book I would gift to others and recommended to me by dear Penny Hull.
February 3, 2021
I savoured this one, reading it in stages as the book takes you through 6 periods of London history, it was very well written and extremely interesting. I would loved to have been able to pop up into the city to find some of the places that still exist, plan to do that once this bloody COVID is gone. How about this for practically the last paragraph of the book though? “Wonder whether the city would deal with another deadly outbreak of contagion - Ebola fever for example - more competently than it did the Great Plague” ...hmm, think the answer to that is quite clear now.
August 4, 2024
Brilliant! A guided tour through historical London from several different time periods. Shakespeare’s men, blitz recovery, Chaucer’s Inn. I learned so much. I can’t wait to go back to London with my new found knowledge.
October 10, 2021
A great read for those who love London and are interested in its history. Very readable, whilst giving loads of interesting historical information, some amusing and some quite grim with many surprises thrown in for good measure. I enjoyed it.
January 21, 2024
Interesting way of looking back on a fascinating city.
February 5, 2024
London is one of my favorite cities on the planet. I have long been fascinated by its history. This book has interesting info but at times a hard slog. It’s about 150 pages longer than necessary.
May 27, 2022
I am an Anglophile and love London. The book is very informative but I think it lacks a coherent narrative. It covers 6 periods from 1400 to 1957. My favorite period was the author's coverage of Black Death/Fire and Victorian period; battle of Britain was interesting too. The author states that press and printing actually led to hardening of criminal justice system in 1700, so you could be hanged for cutting tree, stealing or joining a protest; this reminded me of impact of social media in our time. Also it challenges whig theory of history. The name So Ho came from hunting call!
Also looking for Walter's
My Secret Life, which apparently covers most honest reflection of the sexual life of Victorian society - Grove has a good edition! Another interesting thing, it was common during Shakespeare time to plagerise other works or folk story and Hamlet was one such case. But Shakespeare made them more natural and added loads of new dialogue/words. Aldwych was near Port. The previous London bridge was a gem with houses. And I did not know Defoe's plague years were written 100 year after the event. That chapter on plague is very illuminating and close to our response to Covid.
Last point, this book was written by Green when he was getting married and his parents were alive and so the tone of the book is very positive even when covering sad topic. His other book , Shadowland, which I loved, was written post divorce/death of father and deals with dead city/town of UK and has a melancholy tone. Interesting!!
Also looking for Walter's
My Secret Life, which apparently covers most honest reflection of the sexual life of Victorian society - Grove has a good edition! Another interesting thing, it was common during Shakespeare time to plagerise other works or folk story and Hamlet was one such case. But Shakespeare made them more natural and added loads of new dialogue/words. Aldwych was near Port. The previous London bridge was a gem with houses. And I did not know Defoe's plague years were written 100 year after the event. That chapter on plague is very illuminating and close to our response to Covid.
Last point, this book was written by Green when he was getting married and his parents were alive and so the tone of the book is very positive even when covering sad topic. His other book , Shadowland, which I loved, was written post divorce/death of father and deals with dead city/town of UK and has a melancholy tone. Interesting!!
March 15, 2017
Fascinating, intriguing, well-written. For anyone who knows and loves London today, this book gives a new insight into its past in a fresh and lively style.
July 21, 2015
Wow. What an amazing book.
I live in England and have an interest in London history anyway, but to be honest, this is a truly fascinating book for anyone who's interested in history, cities, facts and figures, but also people that enjoy a nice simple adventure.
The author, who is a London historian, is your travel guide as you slip through time and see London as it was in different time periods. Full of important and little known facts, it teaches you without being the flat and boring wall of text we've come to expect with history books.
It's fun, quirky, beautifully detailed and involving. I cannot recommend this high enough. Seriously, it's an eye opener, and thoroughly enjoyable.
It took me a while to read it, because after each chapter I just wanted to close my eyes and imagine I was still wandering around in whatever time period I'd just been exploring. Read it! Read it now!
I live in England and have an interest in London history anyway, but to be honest, this is a truly fascinating book for anyone who's interested in history, cities, facts and figures, but also people that enjoy a nice simple adventure.
The author, who is a London historian, is your travel guide as you slip through time and see London as it was in different time periods. Full of important and little known facts, it teaches you without being the flat and boring wall of text we've come to expect with history books.
It's fun, quirky, beautifully detailed and involving. I cannot recommend this high enough. Seriously, it's an eye opener, and thoroughly enjoyable.
It took me a while to read it, because after each chapter I just wanted to close my eyes and imagine I was still wandering around in whatever time period I'd just been exploring. Read it! Read it now!
May 9, 2020
I was given this book as a gift a couple of years ago and I finally got around to reading it. It was such a novel take on a city's history. Basically you are like a time traveler who goes to various points in London's history and then the author takes you on a walking tour and shows you how London used to be. Dr. Green makes six stops through London's past from Medieval times all the way through the fifties with stops in Shakespeare's time and a London ravaged by the plague. The author really has done his research and it shows. He gives an in-depth look at each time period and doesn't sugarcoat anything, so there are some very candid descriptions of horrific events. Overall it was a fairly interesting read and kept my attention easily.
June 6, 2018
Boring and as a tourist, I was looking for a book that could cover some important events in London. But this book talks about some mundane stuff that you wouldn’t care for unless you were born and brought up or at least are settled now in London. Also it’s tedious to go through pages and pages of description about something insignificant that happened in 1800s. Not that useful for a casual visitor to London.
January 28, 2024
i read this book for class, not for enjoyment. that being said, it was an interesting way to present historical research, but it was just so so cheesy at times.
September 6, 2020
The central conceit of this book is that instead of Matthew Green writing a chapter on what life was like in London in, say, 1603, he invents portals (down an alleyway, Gladstone's statue on the Strand, in the London wall) that take you into the past. Dr Green describes the entertainments (everything from bear baiting to gawping at the prisoners in Newgate to peering at the Elephant Man), laws, religious attitudes, sights, sounds, tastes and smells (if he could've made this book scratch 'n' sniff he would have) as you walk around London in a day in the life of the 14th, 17th 18th, 19th century and post-war London, impeccably researched (25 pages of notes, 20 more comprising a bibliography) and wittily told. It's a choose your own adventure but Green is doing the choosing - at which point I have to criticise him for selecting the 1600s twice (once for Shakespeare, once for the plague – although this chapter seemed very apt in this Corona-times), whereas there was so much change in the Victorian times and then again in the 20th century (the closing of the docks, for example) that I would have preferred more on that, or maybe even going further back, Roman Londinium or the Anglo Saxon founding of Lundenwic, but all in all, this is an engaging and immersive way of presenting quotidian history.
June 30, 2024
4 stars. A clever and interesting way to get a historical overview of London! Instead of a traditional chronological history, this book chooses a few years over the past several centuries and gives us a picture of what London looked like during that particular moment. Each year further gets a theme (e.g. coffee, theatre, etc.) that is woven throughout the exploration. I greatly enjoyed learning about the changing boundaries of London and how the same street took on new/different (or the same!) significance across hundreds of years. And I loved the moments where the author pointed out how certain expressions got their meanings (e.g. "spirited away" and "steal my thunder").
While the book is not a complete history of London by any means, and skips over many time periods, I feel it provides enough broad context with which to appreciate specific sites or moments in history should you pursue further, more focused reading.
While the book is not a complete history of London by any means, and skips over many time periods, I feel it provides enough broad context with which to appreciate specific sites or moments in history should you pursue further, more focused reading.
May 25, 2020
The author writes in 2nd person POV (where the reader -- you -- becomes the main character), giving this history book the feel of a choose-you-own-adventure novel, yet the book is jammed with fascinating facts. He doesn't give you only the expected and ordinary (the Plague, the Great Fire, the Blitz) but slips in a fascinating history of coffee houses (he hates Starbucks), the inventor of the mini-skirt and 60s mod fashion, and the beginnings of mass media on Fleet Street. He has the reader "walk" about London to see the sites, as if on a real walking tour of the city, but he guides his reader through time as well as place.
His notes, found in an appendix in the back, are superb, thorough, and nearly as readable as the book itself.
This is a good choice for anyone interested in London, England, history, and/or travel.
His notes, found in an appendix in the back, are superb, thorough, and nearly as readable as the book itself.
This is a good choice for anyone interested in London, England, history, and/or travel.
November 21, 2022
The author, using original documents, maps, and historical records describes six different periods in the history of London. It is a very interesting book, especially for a traveler to London, who loves walking through different parts of this ever-fascinating city. The conceit of “time travel” and warning to the reader to mind the cut-purses and pickpockets wears thin, but the basic concept is good. I also have no idea why someone decided to put the chapters in non-historical order, as it detracts from the book. I read them in historical order anyway. There is a section at the end of the chapters where the author describes remnants of the period which might be seen by the modern traveler to London. This is also very interesting. It seems there is no end to London’s growth based on the past.
August 25, 2025
4⭐️ for content (the author is so knowledgeable!) but only 3⭐️ for my personal reading experience just because I struggled to get excited about picking up the book.
I picked this up to prepare for my second trip to London in hopes that I would be more aware of the history around me. I think the book succeeded in doing so, but I'm not sure my brain will succeed in retaining info. SO. MUCH. INFO.
For that reason, I'm not sure if it would be better as a pre-trip read or a post-trip read.
I appreciated the author's attempt to make history more accessible outside of academic with the time traveller bit, but I struggled to follow along, especially while getting bogged down in directional details when I really wanted to focus on the amazing people, places and words (etymology!!) of London.
I picked this up to prepare for my second trip to London in hopes that I would be more aware of the history around me. I think the book succeeded in doing so, but I'm not sure my brain will succeed in retaining info. SO. MUCH. INFO.
For that reason, I'm not sure if it would be better as a pre-trip read or a post-trip read.
I appreciated the author's attempt to make history more accessible outside of academic with the time traveller bit, but I struggled to follow along, especially while getting bogged down in directional details when I really wanted to focus on the amazing people, places and words (etymology!!) of London.
July 3, 2018
This is one of the most interesting books on popular history that I have read for a long time. The author takes you on a time travelling tour to different times in the history of London and he makes a fine job of your tour. He links places together along the way including references to the present day. If you have ever spent time exploring London some of these places will be familiar to you. There are so many stories about the details of London life in different ages: the time of Shakespeare, medieval London, the Plague, Victorian times, London recovering from the Blitz and early 18th century London. Highly recommended.
August 5, 2018
This book was really great. Some parts were fascinating, others downright funny. I enjoyed how the narrator acted like a tour guide, and you really felt like you were part of the tour. However, I had to try 2 different times to get through this book. It can be a bit dry and slow at times. I have to admit as much of an anglophile as I am, I am not super knowledgeable of the history of London, which is probably why some things weren't as interesting to me. I also wished the author would have gone back to the earliest time period, then went forward in time instead of jumping around. I also think it would have been even more interesting if more time periods were covered.
September 18, 2022
At the fabulous Jorvik museum in York, you are transported back in time to the Viking era on a magical ride, and whisked into the sights, sounds and smells of another world. That’s exactly what this wonderful social history is like - only we are treated to six historical excursions rather than one.
London is brought to life in such a vivid way that you really can taste the foul dregs of the Georgian coffee houses, and smell the putrid blood from the Shakespearean bear baiting pits. You will learn about amazing things, from the polar bear who fished in the Thames, to the face-melting properties of early make up.
The best history book I’ve ever read.
London is brought to life in such a vivid way that you really can taste the foul dregs of the Georgian coffee houses, and smell the putrid blood from the Shakespearean bear baiting pits. You will learn about amazing things, from the polar bear who fished in the Thames, to the face-melting properties of early make up.
The best history book I’ve ever read.
June 23, 2018
This is a guidebook through London at various points in its long and eventful history, putting the reader squarely in both a time and place with each stop, from the medieval period up to the post-war 1950s. Dr. Green does a wonderful job of capturing the feel of each time period, evoking locations both in the past and present, as well as showing us what society was like at each stop along the way. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it highly to anyone interested in history, London, or England.
April 7, 2021
A unique and thoroughly entertaining book. The author acts as a literary tour guide as he takes us on a walking tour of the streets of London in various bygone eras. We shouldn't underestimate how hard it is to write a book of this kind and I was unsure what to expect but the author's descriptive powers make this as evocative as any film employing elaborate sets and special effects. To use a cliche, you can almost feel that you're walking the filthy disease ridden streets, smelling the armoas and hearing the street noise. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Britsh history.
July 4, 2017
One of the best history books I've read. I didn't give it 5 stars only because it wasn't long enough. Mr. Green visits 6 time periods in London and places you as an actual visitor reacting to everyday events and warning you of possible bad things that might happen. He paints a vivid picture of 14, 16th, 18th, 19 and 20th centuries in the long life of London and fills many gaps about how things got the way they are. Highly recommended.
February 11, 2020
Dr Green's book is a terrific wheeze – rearranging London’s history via a series of time-hopping visits that chuck you directly into the smelly, noisy, filthy action. If the choices are a tad obvious – plague, fire, the Globe theatre etc – it’s still a lot of fun (especially for younger readers) and Dr Green clearly enjoys describing the sights, sounds and smells of the old city and its residents. Even if you know the streets inside out, you'll find something surprising here.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 83 reviews