Peter Ackroyd

London: The Biography (2000) breaks with conventional urban history. It does not move chronologically but through thematic chapters: noise, smell, drink, children, suicides, money, fires, ghosts. As a result an eighteenth-century riot sits next to a Victorian one and a contemporary disturbance, and the reader sees what chronology hides — that certain behaviours return again and again to the same spot.

That is his thesis, and it is deliberately arguable: Ackroyd holds that London has a personality outlasting its inhabitants, and that each district's character persists for centuries despite fires, bombing and demolition. The streets that held Elizabethan theatres and brothels are today's nightlife zone; the quarters that took in Huguenot refugees later took in Jews and then Bangladeshis.

A British novelist and biographer born in London in 1949, Ackroyd has written lives of Dickens, Blake, Turner and More, alongside a large body of fiction. His knowledge of London's literature runs through the book: the city appears in the records as much as in the novels, the engravings and the songs.

Thames: Sacred River (2007) does the same for the river, and London Under (2011) for the underground: the buried rivers, Bazalgette's sewers, the tube, the shelters and the crypts. Academic historians reproach him, with reason, for thin referencing and a taste for the picturesque. But as a portrait of a city understood through its everyday experience, the work has no equivalent.