Songs of Seven Dials

Beginning with a rancorous libel trial of 1927, in which a Sierra Leonean café owner and his wife confronted the racist newspaper that destroyed their business, Matt Houlbrook offers a compelling history of Seven Dials, one of London's most fascinating yet unsung neighbourhoods.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Seven Dials was home to migrant and working-class communities, as well as bohemian clubs and cafes. But business leaders and city planners were appalled by what they saw as a dangerous, unsavoury neighbourhood, right in the heart of the city. Houlbrook traces how the tensions that simmered on the streets and finally exploded in court betrayed the politics of urban 'improvement' and the 'colour bar'. Underlying the trial was a series of troubling questions that would come to define Britain in the twentieth century - about race, class and the boundaries of belonging, gentrification and the kind of city London would become.

Imaginative, powerful and deeply moving, Songs of Seven Dials is an important new history of London in the 1920s and 1930s.

Matt Houlbrook is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-57 (2005) and Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (2016).