Entertaining stories and drawings of a bygone London. Reading this book is like stepping into a time machine for a couple of hours. ( )

Not quite…
… I do, or did. This book is a delightful read, and as it is generously illustrated with the author’s own artwork, is also eye-candy for London-lovers. Geoffrey Scowcroft Fletcher was more known for his art than his writing, but as an author he reads well, entertains and informs. I was delighted to be reminded of a city I once knew well, having lived and worked there for more than a decade and visited hundreds of times since.

There was even a description and charming sketch of a ‘local’, a pub near my London office where I would often go after work with my team for “a swift half”. No such thing of course and given London’s continued rapacious growth there is probably no such thing as this pub, or many more of his delightful views.

With a light wit he describes and offers us a drawing of a famous Victorian “Public Convenience” in Holborn that had glass water tanks for flushing. He is delighted to discover, from chatting to the then current attendant, that the mans predecessor claimed to have actually kept fish in the glass tanks, and Fletcher muses of the confusion those fish must have experienced every time the cistern flushed and their water drained!

This is a book for future re-reading and for dipping into for refreshed memories and to re-enjoy the sketches… and it would make, still, an entertaining guide for any visitor new to London.