Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

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In Nightwalking Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London-populated by the poor, the mad, the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. The night walks are separated into each season, and are roughly around 15 pages for each, which makes this book a quick and easy read. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

The most surprising revelation of Beaumont’s book is how recently we have come to regard nightwalking with anything other than suspicion and alarm. This results in plenty of cultural history, such as a magazine article from 1780 that gravely advised its readers not to adopt “the sauntering gait of a lazy Spaniard”, but it also means showing how often authors themselves have been creatures of the night. In some ways he was hoping to achieve in fiction what he had already spent many hours doing in person.

Oscillates between interesting insights and thoughtful passages, and feeling like you're on a walk with someone continually implying how clever they are, thanks to a combination of poetry selections and an adept application of assonance. Part literary criticism, part social history, part polemic, this is a haunting addition to the canon of psychogeography. I mean, when did you last think about how much public street lighting must have fundamentally changed public life? Which is about as relevant to nightwalking as including a definition of pulling a moonie, being over the moon etc etc. It's also a weird mix of sentences like those above, and random facts about nature stuck in between.

As it is, what he produces is lazy and repetitive, which is a real shame because his prose is top-notch. A book claiming to "reveal a world bursting with life and normally hidden from view" but really is just a nicely worded description of some owls and a badger that then goes on to make a moralistic stance.

The fore and afterword and "regular" history bits were quite interesting but I found myself flagging hard during the more literary analyses. Since this book spends so much time on the social history of London, couldn't there have been some room for this aspect? Armed with a litre flask of espresso, and fortified by sandwiches from Tesco, eventually they reach their destination, with “an eggshell sky cloudily cracking overhead”, and gaze down at the city below them as it groggily stirs into life.