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Book of the Week: Craig Taylor - Londoners

Book of the Week: Craig Taylor - Londoners: Episode 2

Londoners

Episode 2

Craig Taylor - Londoners

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Craig Taylor - Londoners, Episode 2

Featuring the Wiccan priestess, who casts the remnants of her spells into the Thames.

London through the voices of Londoners - a Wiccan priestess and a rickshaw rider. Read by Lesley Manville and Tom Brooke.

By Craig Taylor. Abridged by Pete Nichols.

Craig Taylor's book has given new voice to Londoners; the rich and the poor, the native and the immigrant; men and women. It continues an oral tradition that goes back to Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, published in the mid-nineteenth century.

Taylor gives us the squatter and the teacher; the bicycle mechanic and the registrar; the plumber and the rickshaw rider; the lost property clerk and the Wiccan priestess, who casts the remnants of her spells into the Thames.

These remarkable snapshops of the city dwellers are moving, funny and informative.

"What makes Londoners as valuable as any sociological treatise is Taylor's appreciation of the ways in which his subjects are themselves surveying, analysing and theorising the turbulent city in which they live.... At more than 400 pages, the book could easily have been twice as long... But this remains a remarkable volume, from the heaving, contradictory energy of its countless funny, terrifying, epic stories" Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian.

The Wiccan priestess ..... Lesley Manville
The rickshaw rider ..... Tom Brooke


Producer: Karen Rose
A Sweet Talk Production for BBC Radio 4.

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Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

A portrait of London told through the voices of those who live there

A portrait of London told through the voices of those who live there - young and old, rich and poor, men and women

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