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London has long been one of the most visited, most photographed cities in the world – but it still keeps its secrets.
Surprisingly many of these are entire buildings: often vast structures which we walk past every day but somehow fail to notice, or weird architectural extravagances which have somehow become so familiar that we never actually stop to consider just how wonderful and unusual they really are.
Many of the best examples are occasionally open to the public, if you know who to ask. Others remain strictly off-limits, thereby heightening the sense of secrecy and mystery which surround them. Still others we miss because they are more or less invisible, like the privately-owned tunnel built in the 1860s to run cable-cars under the Thames. Incredibly this is still in use, but hardly anyone seems to notice it despite its conspicuous circular entrance standing right by the Tower of London.
Similarly just yards from the Royal Albert Hall a 300-foot Victorian tower attracts barely a glance (even most locals don’t seem to know it’s there). And in Trafalgar Square the capital’s narrowest building is a tiny one-man police station, whilst its widest – at almost 1,000 feet – has been favourably compared to the Winter Palace at St Petersburg.
Elsewhere one finds a Wren church tower converted into a slim and elegant City pied-a-terre, more than a dozen tube stations no-one’s heard of even though their ticket halls can still be seen at street level, colourful artists’ studios made of old shipping containers, and in Chelsea a Cossack peasant’s hut which has been reborn as a multi-millionaire’s private home.
Now one hundred of the best – new ones as well as old – have been brought together in one lavishly illustrated volume.
With each of the buildings newly photographed for this beautiful book, Spectacular Vernacular will appeal to both the first-time visitor and the life-long London resident. Including as it does detailed descriptions of the buildings and their often strange origins – and some lively and entertaining anecdotes about their builders and more recent inhabitants – Spectacular Vernacular offers a fresh and highly individual new look at a very old friend.