Matt Houlbrook

The untold story of a remarkable neighbourhood and the battle to define modern London. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Seven Dials was one of London’s most diverse neighbourhoods, home to migrant and working-class communities, bohemian clubs and cafes. But business leaders and city planners had other ideas. Beginning with a rancorous libel trial of 1927, in which a Sierra Leonean café owner and his wife confronted the racist newspaper that destroyed their business, Matt Houlbrook reveals the surprising history of this remarkable neighbourhood. He traces how tensions that simmered on the streets and finally exploded in court betrayed the politics of urban ‘improvement’ and the ‘colour bar’. Underlying the trial was a series of troubling questions that would define Britain in the twentieth century – about race, class and the boundaries of belonging, gentrification and the kind of city London would become. Imaginative, powerful and deeply moving, Songs of Seven Dials is an important new history of London in the 1920s and 1930s.

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