General

The London Encyclopaedia edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (Macmillan, rev ed 1993) £30
Comprises some 5,000 entries and over 500 drawings, prints and photographs. Everything that is important in the history and culture of the capital is documented, whether vanished or extant, from its first settlement to the present.
Get this book

A History of London by Stephen Inwood (Macmillan, 1998) £15
A deeply researched book, drawing on a multitude of sources, bringing individuals to life through unfamiliar anecdotes, exploring the whole metropolis from Croydon to Cricklewood, dockers to duchesses.
Get this book

The Annals of London: A year-by-year record of 1,000 years of history by John Richardson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson Illustrated, 2001) £18.99
Following an introductory essay on Roman London and the city's fortunes under the Saxons, Danes and others, year-by-year entries range consecutively from the building of the first Westminster Abbey in 1065 to the Millennium celebrations in 1999.
Get this book

London: A social history by Roy Porter (Penguin, 2000) £10.99
The social history of the environment in which, for several centuries, more people lived, worked, played and died than in any other city in the West.
Get this book

London: The biography by Peter Ackroyd (Vintage, 2001) £12.99
This book by novelist Ackroyd is no chronology. Its chapters take on such varied themes as drinking, sex, childhood, poverty, crime and punishment, sewage, food, pestilence and fire, immigration, maps, theatre and war. It can be dipped into at random, but it also has a skilful and continuous theme throughout, which constantly links past and present.
Get this book

The London Compendium: A street-by-street exploration of the hidden metropolis by Ed Glinert (Allen Lane, 2003)
Packed with stories on every conceivable subject from East End criminals to espionage, music to murder, politics to partying, settings for films and books, this is an entertaining book on England's capital city. Covering the whole span of London's social and political history, it brings the reader up to date with stories on the arts, immigration and architecture.
Get this book

The Oxford Book of London, edited by Paul Bailey (Oxford University Press, 1995). Out of print; may be available at libraries or from second-hand bookshops.
Anthology of writers, poets, historians, artists and simple observers who have chronicled the life and growth of the capital.

Specific periods and people

The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus translated by Michael Grant (Penguin Classics, 1956) £8.99.
Get this book

Agricola by Tacitus, edited by R M Ogilvie and Ian Richmond (Oxford University Press, 1967) £15
Tacitus is the major historical source for the events of the Boudican rebellion.
Get this book

Whitehall Palace: An architectural history of the royal apartments, 1240-1648 by Simon Thurley (Yale University Press, 1998) £60
Traces the development of the palace from its origins, reconstructs various phases of its development and charts the plans of monarchs to replace the building.
Get this book

The Great Plague by Stephen Porter (Sutton, 2000) £12.99
Well-illustrated account of the Great Plague. Porter also describes the impact of earlier outbreaks that swept across Europe in the previous three centuries.
Get this book

The Dreadful Judgement: The true story of the Great Fire of London by Neil Hanson (Doubleday, 2001) £16.99
A panorama of the fire and the human stories of those who lived through it.
Get this book

The London Rich: The creation of a great city, from 1666 to the present by Peter Thorold (Penguin, 2001) £12.99
Looks at the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire and gives an account of social history from 1666 to the present.
Get this book

On a Grander Scale: The outstanding career of Sir Christopher Wren by Lisa Jardine (HarperCollins, 2003) £14.99
In this biography, Jardine takes us deep into Wren's imagination and discovers the unique, exacting nature of his mind and the emerging new world of late-17th-century science and ideas.
Get this book

Dr Johnson's London: Everyday life in 18th century London by Liza Picard (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001)
Fascinating account of everyday realities of life in the city of Hogarth, Fielding and Dr Johnson, based on contemporary evidence.
Get this book

Hogarth: A life and world by Jenny Uglow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002)
Hogarth was highly critical of the growing gulf between the luxurious lives of the ruling élite and the wretched poverty of the masses. He donated paintings to the Foundling Hospital, designed the children's uniforms and persuaded other leading painters, such as Gainsborough and Reynolds, to give their support.
Get this book

Hogarth's Blacks: Images of blacks in 18th-century English art by David Dabydeen (Manchester University Press, 1987). Out of print; may be available from libraries or second-hand bookshops.
Hogarth's images of London life – from the seedy backstreets to the salons of high society – are some of the most compelling images of 18th-century life. This book highlights the often-forgotten black men and women in Hogarth's art, offering a perspective of the lives of black people in England.

The Much-lamented Death of Madame Geneva: The 18th-century gin craze by Patrick Dillon (Review, 2003) £7.99
This book follows the history of gin, or 'geneva', from its introduction from Holland after the Glorious Revolution to its role as the sustenance of the poor – a quick trip to oblivion in the squalid and diseased poverty of 18th-century London.
Get this book

The Thieves' Opera: The remarkable lives and deaths of Jonathan Wild, thief-taker, and Jack Sheppard, house-breaker by Lucy Moore (Penguin, 1998)
Fascinating account of two criminals as famous in their time as Dick Turpin, and of the criminal underworld of London in the early 18th century, which they inhabited.
Get this book

Mother Clap's Molly House by Mark Ravenhill (Methuen, 2002)
The script of Mark Ravenhill's play, which explores the gay subculture of 18th-century London.
Get this book

London at War, 1939-1945 by Philip Ziegler (Pimlico, 2002) £12.50
Based on published sources as well as interviews, letters and diaries, this book describes the 'phoney war', the blackouts, the first evacuations and the horrors of the Blitz, followed in the last days of the war by the terror of the doodlebugs.
Get this book

Lights Out for the Territory by Iain Sinclair (Penguin, 2003) £7.99
Walking the streets of London, Sinclair traces nine routes across the territory of the capital. Connecting people and places, redrawing boundaries both ancient and modern, reading obscure signs and finding hidden patterns, he creates a fluid snapshot of the city, giving us a provocative, enlightening and disturbing picture of modern urban life. And in the process he reveals the dark underbelly of a London many of us did not know existed.
Get this book

Historical and contemporary fiction about London

The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd (Vintage, 2004) £6.99
A gripping novel about murder and religious and political intrigue in 14th-century London. As hinted at in the title, a cap is generously doffed to The Canterbury Tales: several characters and chapter headings mimic Chaucer, and at least superficially, it takes the form of a series of interconnected tales.
Get this book

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (Penguin, 1970) £4.99.
Defoe's vivid account of the Great Plague of London in 1665 has been discounted in recent years as it became known as a complete work of fiction, based on various 17th-century plague tracts republished during a plague scare in 1720-1. However, the historian Paul Slack says that, while it should not be used as a source for the events of 1665, Defoe's account represents a watershed in historical understanding of the issues and social realities of the plague experience.
Get this book

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (Penguin, 1994) £1.50
In Dickens' 19th-century novel, Oliver Twist is an orphan born in a workhouse who, after an unhappy apprenticeship, runs away to London where he falls in with thieves, headed by Fagin.
Get this book

Capital by Maureen Duffy (Harvill, 2001). Out of print; may be available from libraries and second-hand bookshops.
Meepers, the homeless, dishevelled yet enlightened amateur archaeologist, searches to understand the destruction of London in the Dark Ages, and seeks to predict the capital's future.

London Fields by Martin Amis (Vintage, 1998) £7.99
Set in the pubs and streets of West London, this is a murder story for the end of the millennium. The narrator Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, an undesirable public house, and finds the main characters of his drama waiting to begin.
Get this book

Mother London by Michael Moorcock (Scribner, 2000) £7.99
Three hospital outpatients all find that they hear voices – the voices of London's past. As they explore the city of their present day, they also explore its recent past and its forgotten people. Through the lives of those on the fringe of society, we learn what it is like – and what it has always been like – to live in the great, sprawling, polyphonic, multicoloured capital.
Get this book

Brick Lane by Monica Ali (Black Swan, 2004) £7.99
After an arranged marriage, Nazneen exchanges her Bangladeshi village for a block of flats in London's East End. In this new world, where poor people can be fat and even dogs go on diets, she struggles to make sense of her existence – and to do her duty to her husband. But Nazneen submits, as she must, to fate and devotes her life to raising her family and slapping down her demons of discontent. Until she becomes aware of a young radical, Karim. Against a background of escalating racial and gang conflict, they embark on an affair that finally forces Nazneen to take control of her life.
Get this book