{"id":615371,"date":"2025-12-06T06:26:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T06:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/615371\/"},"modified":"2025-12-06T06:26:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T06:26:14","slug":"lament-for-a-lost-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/615371\/","title":{"rendered":"Lament for a lost London"},"content":{"rendered":"<p role=\"text\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"is_Paragraph font_caslonIonic _dsp-inline _bxs-border-box _ww-break-word _mt-0px _mr-0px _mb-0px _ml-0px _ff-f-family _fw-f-weight-3048 _fs-f-size-18 _lh-f-lineHeigh3500605 _col-c-grey_600 _select-auto _ws-normal\">Seven Dials was regarded as a slum by the Victorians, and after the \ufefffirst \ufeffworld \ufeffwar attracted French refugees, a transient population of sailors, and people from across the British \ufeffempire. It was known pejoratively as London\u2019s \u201cBlack colony\u201d, a term that Houlbrook unpacks through this meticulously researched book. His \u201cpainstaking effort to reimagine Seven Dials as a place of home, work, and play\u201d energises the pages with the bustle of streets that once had a population density double that of the rest of London. These stagehands, fruit and flower sellers, waiting staff, barrow boys, criminals and artisans bustle through the text, haunting warehouses, factories for making boxes, tarpaulins and glue, as well as tailors and dressmakers, printers, pubs, cafes\ufeff\u00a0and a fencing academy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seven Dials was regarded as a slum by the Victorians, and after the \ufefffirst \ufeffworld \ufeffwar attracted French&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[3444,748,2766,393,4884,2348,257,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-615371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-history","14":"tag-london","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115671202644744258","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}