Twenty-eight years after its original release, The Clash’s London Calling was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame as a “recording of lasting qualitative or historical significance.” It topped polls on both sides of the Atlantic for the best album of the seventies (and eighties) and in publications as wide-ranging as Rolling Stone, VIBE, Pitchfork, and NME, and it regularly hits the top ten on greatest-albums-of-all-time-lists. Even its cover—the instantly recognizable image of Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar—has attained iconic status, inspiring countless imitations and even being voted the best rock ’n’ roll photograph ever by Q magazine. Now the breakthrough album from the foremost band of the punk era gets the close critical eye it deserves. Marcus Gray examines London Calling from every vantage imaginable, from the recording sessions and the state of the world it was recorded in to the album’s long afterlife, bringing new levels of understanding to one of punk rock’s greatest achievements. Leaving no detail unexplored, he provides a song-by-song breakdown covering when each was written and where, what inspired each song, and what in turn each song inspired, making this book a must-read for Clash fans.

The Thames Gateway plan is the largest and most complex project of urban regeneration ever undertaken in the United Kingdom. This book provides a comprehensive overview and critique of the Thames Gateway plan, but at the same time it uses the plan as a lens through which to look at a series of important questions of social theory, urban policy and governmental practice. It examines the impact of urban planning and demographic change on East London's material and social environment, including new forms of ethnic gentrification, the development of the eastern hinterlands, shifting patterns of migration between city and country, the role of new policies in regulating housing provision and the attempt to create new cultural hubs downriver. It also looks at issues of governance and accountability, the tension between public and private interests, and the immediate and longer term prospects for the Thames Gateway project both in relation to the 'Olympics effect' and the growth of new forms of regionalism.

BYRON IN LONDON is a collection of essays by leading authorities on Byron, charting both his life in London and his writings about the capital. Byron emerges from the different perspectives given as one of English poetry’s leading urban and metropolitan writers. Chapters are on Byron and the London boxing fraternity, Byron and the London stage, and Byron’s attitude to the newly-emerging London coterie of women writers. There is one chapter on his relationship with John Murray, his London publisher, and another on Ugo Foscolo’s life in London. Other chapters place Byron in the English verse tradition of urban writing; and nearly all make reference to the way he describes London in Don Juan.