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Looking at urban history, this work balances statistics with the words of historians, diarists and novelists, poets and churchmen such as: Pepys, Boswell, Fielding, Walpole, Blake, Mayhew, Wells, Woolf, and Spark. It is a celebration of the city and also an elegy for its decline, with statistics and anecdote, from Boadicea to Betjeman.