RaveTimes Literary Supplement[John] Davis writes that he has \'long had misgivings about attempting a linear history of a city as complex, diverse and multifaceted as London\'... He offers instead a series of sixteen standalone essays, some of which have been published in academic journals over the past twenty years...Whether this is temerity or wisdom is very much a matter of taste, but the essay format does leave scope for gaps, as Davis confesses...The biggest is education, where the politics of the Inner London Education Authority after 1965, and where parental anxieties over inner-city schooling, fueled the suburban drift and population decline that Davis charts elsewhere, offering another convincing bolster to his proto-Thatcherite theme...Another silence comes in Davis’s consideration of race...He focuses almost entirely on the Notting Hill area and says nothing about the Bengali migration to the inner East End...This was the district where, after Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in April 1968, there were skinhead race riots and racist murders, with violent resistance by white residents to Asian families moving into council estates... Indeed, \'white flight\' out of London’s central districts is a significant factor in the city’s net population loss (some 76,000 a year in the 1970s)... There could have been more on this, in the East End chapters especially...Even so, John Davis charts the complexities of these important decades in London\'s recent history with great brilliance...His approach is unapologetically academic, but he writes with a light touch and dry humour...Time after time the reader is drawn into arcane narratives about planning policy or the decline of Soho\'s sex trade or the dereliction of London\'s docklands, and finds Davis to be a sure-footed and unrivaled guide.
