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Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City

Tom Chivers & Martin Kratz (editors)

"Unflinchingly original"

The Great Outdoors

An invisible mountain is rising above the streets of the capital - and at over 1,800 metres, it is Britain’s highest peak. Mount London is a unique and visionary record of the vertical city.

This ingenious new book is an account of the ascent of ‘Mount London’ by a team of writers and urban cartographers, each scaling a smaller hill within the city – from Crystal Palace (112m) to Primrose Hill (78m). The essays and stories in Mount London unpeel London’s history and geography, reimagining the city as mountainous terrain and exploring what it’s like to move through the urban landscape.

Ascents of natural peaks are offset by expeditions to the city’s artificial mountains – The Shard (306m), the chimneys of Battersea Power Station (103m) – the search for ‘ghost hills’ in the back streets, and a descent into the deepest part of the Tube.

 

 

Contributors

Matt D. Brown, Sarah Butler, Tom Chivers, Liz Cookman, David Cooper, Tim Cresswell, Alan Cunningham, Joe Dunthorne, Inua Ellams, Katy Evans-Bush, SJ Fowler, Bradley L. Garrett, Edmund Hardy, Justin Hopper, Martin Kratz, Amber Massie-Blomfield, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Helen Mort, Mary Paterson, Gareth E. Rees, Gemma Seltzer, Chrissy Williams, Tamar Yoseloff.

 

Map of Mount London

 

Our price £12.99
RRP £12.99
Please note: due to the recent change in tax regulations, we are currently unable to ship to EU countries.
Hardback
216 pages
ISBN 9781908058188
Published 28 May 2014
Cover design: Ben Anslow

Reviews

Unflinchingly original ... Tom Chivers and Martin Kratz, with the help of an eclectic mix of contributors, have reinvented and redefined London as a space that is not simply sleepless and overwhelming, but also remote and beautiful
James Reader, The Great Outdoors

A lovely read full of lots of interesting historical and geographical snippets
Jane's London

In London, no matter how high we climb, we will never escape from each other, and from other hills
Peter Watts, The Great Wen

Mount London asks interesting questions about the nature of ascents and journeys, about how we view the city and how other people might view it, and about the history that surrounds us constantly and informs our lives.
Dan Carpenter, The Cadaverine

A catalyst for assessing a city that can mean so many different things to different people ... Any new resident within a London borough is strongly recommended to read it.
Andrew Herbert, Wild Culture

Mount London unfurls a panorama of literary encounters with urbanity as diverse as the city itself ... innovative, exhilarating - and sometimes dark and challenging, but always rewarding.
Martin Kindermann, The Literary London Journal

An eclectic collection about London’s physical and spiritual high points ... What all [essays] have in common is the sense of London’s earth pushing up below the surface, that the city is something alive and to be tackled.
Rachel Holdsworth, Londonist

Mount pleasant: ten lofty facts about London’s hills
Time Out

About the author

Tom Chivers (co-editor) was born in Herne Hill, South London in 1983. His publications include How to Build a City (Salt, 2009), The Terrors (Nine Arches, 2009), Flood Drain (Annexe, 2014) and, as editor, the anthologies City State: New London Poetry and Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2009 & 2012). He has made site-specific, perambulatory and audio work for Southbank Centre, Bishopsgate Institute, the Eden Project and LIFT. An award-winning independent arts producer, he is former co-Director of London Word Festival and currently runs Penned in the Margins from a small office in Aldgate. He lives in Rotherhithe.

Martin Kratz (co-editor) is an associate lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. His poetry has been widely published in magazines including The Rialto, Magma, The Interpreter’s House and The Moth. As a librettist, he collaborates regularly with the composer Leo Geyer, and their projects include the prizewinning song cycle Sideshows. Their chamber opera The Mermaid of Zennor was described by The Times as ‘imaginative and beautifully shaped.’

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