LONDON IN MY TIME
By Thomas Burke
Mr. Burke has known London over nearly four decades, the curtain of his "conscious awareness" rising with the Diamond jubilee, and he has seen many changes in every sphere. Beside the still almost-Dickensian metropolis of 1897, our later London seems to him ever more rapidly transposing itself into an almost-Wellsian city of the future. Yet it is one of the chief merits of the book (London in My Time. • Rich and Cowan, 6s.) that he does not sentimentalize his retrospect., welcoming change as often as he deplores it— perhaps more often. London then was "physically dingy," the whole way of life not only slower but heavier ; today it is a brighter, happier and, he contends, less raucous place. Shops are bigger and more convenient (if more tiring), streets are cleaner and brisker, there is less contrast of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. With greater uniformity there is, on the other hand, something less of " character" alike in places and in people, and the cinema Mr. Burke regards as a poor substitute for the old music hall. But the pleasure of his book (which includes an excellent chapter on the War period) is less in his conclusions than his detail ; his knowledge and love of London's intimate particularities have seldom been more engagingly displayed.
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