Colours of London: The City in Colour

Peter Ackroyd turns his gaze to the colours of London in this fascinating and visually engaging work, exploring how the city's many hues have come to shape its history and identity.  

Think of the colours of London and what do you imagine? The reds of open-top buses, phone boxes and terracotta bricks? The grey smog of Victorian industry, Portland stone and pigeons in Trafalgar square? Or the gradations of yellows, violets and blues that shimmer on the Thames at sunset – reflecting the incandescent light of a city that never truly goes dark. We associate green with royal parks and the District Line; gold with royal carriages, the Golden Lane Estate, and the tops of monuments and cathedrals.

The colours of London have inspired artists (Van Gogh, Turner, Monet), designers (Harry Beck) and social reformers (Charles Booth). Colour is everywhere in the city, and each one holds myriad links to the city's past. And for all the colours still surrounding us today, many are long lost, hidden only in diaries, artworks and in the monochromatic shades of black-and-white photography.

In Colours of London, Peter Ackroyd examines the city's fascinating relationship with colour, alongside specially commissioned colourised photographs from Dynamichrome, which bring a lost London back to life. 

London has been the main character in Ackroyd's work ever since his first novel, and he has won countless prizes in both fiction and non-fiction for his truly remarkable body of work. Here, he channels a lifetime of knowledge of the great city, writing with clarity and passion about the hues and shades which have shaped London's journey thorugh history into the present day.

A truly invaluable book for lovers of art, history, photography or urban geography, this beautifully illustrated title tells a rich and fascinating story of the history of this great and ever-changing city.

Peter Ackroyd, (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices and the depth of his research.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.