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Hello to T.S. Eliot it was the unreal city to wordsworth earth has not anything to show more fair

But to Shelley how is the city much like London at the start of this 21st century the capital city covers an area of

625 square miles

It's home to seven million bodies and even souls and has an economy which at more than

115 billion pounds is larger than that of Saudi Arabia island or Singapore is this modern metropolis

Still the place the poets described can there be such a thing as a history of a city

Which in each generation sucks in its communities from around the country and around the globe in a city whose buildings have been raised whose people have been

Decimated and worse and whose borders have dramatically been redrawn

What is there that connects it to its own past with me to discuss the character in history of London is Peter Accroyd author of London

The biography which comes out on October the 5th the product and culmination of many years of research on the city

Also with Miss Claire Tomlin who's writing a biography of the great London Chronicle Samuel peeps and with a

Stewardsian Sinclair poet and novelist who's made London the theme of such books as liquid city and lights out for the territory

Peter Accroyd you write what you call a biography of London. It's long. It's rich. It's hugely enjoyable

In the sense of this biography, where does it start when was London born?

Well, if you think of London as a living organism with its own laws of growth and change and development then we'd have to say that it began at the very beginning

There are historians who believe that London was invented by the Romans my own belief that it was invented by the British and

Celtic tribes who emerged before the Romans on the banks of the Thames

But its life has always been one of

Trade it's built upon trade and commerce upon power upon mercantile aggression and it's retained that identity for more than

2,000 years what evidence is therefore there being a Celtic settlement of note here?

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