London has long been understood through the poetry it has inspired. Now poet Mark Ford has assembled the most capacious and wide-ranging anthology of poems about London to date, from Chaucer to Wordsworth to the present day, providing a chronological tour of urban life and of English literature. Nearly all of the major poets of British literature have left some poetic record of London: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Johnson, Wordsworth, Byron, and T. S. Eliot. Ford goes beyond these figures, however, to gather significant verse of all kinds.

London has long been understood through the poetry it has inspired. Mark Ford has assembled the most capacious and wide-ranging anthology of poems about London to date, from Chaucer to Wordsworth to the present day, providing a chronological tour of urban life and of English literature. The volume includes an introductory essay by the poet.