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.

His way of reading London began in fiction. Hawksmoor (1985) interweaves a contemporary murder with the churches Nicholas Hawksmoor built in the city in the early eighteenth century, and suggests that places retain a memory that repeats across centuries. That book placed him alongside Iain Sinclair in the current of London psychogeography, which walks the city in search of the traces that maps and history books do not record.