Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London

by J.M. Tyree

Vanishing Streets reveals an American writer's twenty-year love affair with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry, it offers an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing some of London's most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders deliriously in "the world's most visited city," he rediscovers and reinvents places that have changed drastically since he was a student at Cambridge in the 1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement. He offers a new way of seeing familiar landmarks through the lens of film history, and reveals strange nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places, from a lost film by John Ford supposedly shot in Wapping to the beehives hidden in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an area haunted by a translation error in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz . This book blends deeply personal writing with a foreigner's observations on a world capital experiencing an unsettling moment of transition. Vanishing Streets builds into an astonishing and innovative multi-layered project combining autobiography, movie madness, and postcard-like annotations on the magical properties of a great city. Tyree argues passionately for London as a cinematic dream city of perpetual fascinations and eccentricities, bridging the past and the present as well as the real and the imaginary.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, London

184 pages, Hardcover

Published October 5, 2016

About the author

J.M. Tyree is the Nonfiction Editor of New England Review. He was a Keasbey Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Truman Capote-Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University. He currently teaches as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at VCUarts (Virginia Commonwealth University).

Reviews

[Gette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This odd and arcane little volume did have its moments - so much so that despite arguing with it along the way it creates a haunting portrait of the history of ever changing and history making Londontown. Esp good were the chapter on the pleasures of bookshops, specifically Foyle's on Charing Cross Road ( and their unique adverts) and the Suggested Itinerary. The fil premise of a refugee who arrived with an address but no postal code provides for much bus travel and perhaps mindless mystery. But... I suspect in some way this book has changed forever my view of London.

[Martin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I would have thought it was impossible to write a boring book about London.

Turns out I was wrong.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 3 out of 5]

21st century London makes it difficult for the flâneur to have an uncritical devotion to this city, with its massive ambition, its sometimes dubious contemporary architecture, its commercialism, and its apparent carelessness over the sanctity of neighborhoods. Tyree, who follows in the footsteps of writers like Iain Sinclair and others, has had a long-standing love affair with London ("my mistress"), but his wanderings throughout the city demonstrate the ruthlessness with which London's charms are either being modernized beyond redemption or are being starved into poverty and neglect.

Tyree, who has written mostly about film until now, often walks in the literal footsteps of London's film history, especially the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s, which produced low-budget documentaries that often featured the city's working class. But he also references Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Graham Greene, W.G. Sebald, and other filmmakers and writers whose work used London as a backdrop. He's an astute observer and a good writer, especially when he combines his walking tour with his critical abilities, as he does with Greene's book "The End of the Affair" and the two movies based on the novel (both "botched," in his estimation). He visits the neighborhood where Greene lived at the time and discusses the Nazi bombing of London as he analyses the novel and the films. But too often I wished he would have gone into more depth into some of the subjects he raises.

A surprising aspect of the book, however, are Tyree's photographs. By now, we're used to seeing author-made photographs in books like this. But Tyree has a visual knack for putting the reader on the sidewalk next to him. There's an appropriate sense of amateurishness to his sometimes blurry images, the oddly tilted buildings, and the strange juxtapositions. I suppose this is one way to react as the jarring sights of London clobbered him over the head.

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this one, but it was hard to follow without knowing London better

[Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Figured out early on that this wasn't going to be what I expected but ended up happy. Equal parts frustrating and beautiful, self-indulgent and poignant. An interesting read.

[Samuel Weiss · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tyree desperately wants to be a flaneur.