With four walking tours and illustrated chapters on plague pits, lost burial grounds, historic graveyards, hidden cemeteries and Jewish burial grounds, Robert Bard looks at where and how London buried its dead.

From Boudicca to the Blitz, this compelling history of the City – London’s ancient core – records its fortunes and misfortunes, its highlife and lowlife, and the merchants, politicians, hucksters and hacks who have shaped it.

From Sir Thomas More’s mansion built around 1520 to the artists’ studios and pubs and clubs of the 19th century, Barbara Denny traces the places, events and personalities of Chelsea’s colourful history.

The Stock Exchange began in a London coffee house, as did Lloyds; fish and chips was invented in Victorian London; and Fortnum and Mason supplied Florence Nightingale in the Crimea and Parry's expedition to find the North-West Passage as well as innumerable aristocratic picnics. This history of London's food is full of such milestones and outstanding personalities, described in chapters on how London has been provisioned, its markets, shops and restaurants, foreign imports and the eating habits of Londoners.

The residence of William III began the fashion for Kensington as a place to live, and the Great Exhibition of 1851, and subsequent building of museums, further defined the character of the area, attracting smart residents to grand houses and later to mansion flats. Slightly off-mint.

There was little development in the area now known as Camden Town before 1791, but it quickly grew and – thanks to the railways – soon became polluted and overpopulated. Recent times have seen redevelopment while the popularity of the market has made it a tourist attraction.