<b>Mihir S Sharma:</b> City of books

London used to be a city of bookshops; but it is one no longer. The independent book stores that used to enliven neighbourhoods are disappearing - Charing Cross Road, where you could browse through dozens of them in an afternoon, has lost many to the high rents that are the bane of central London. Even the storied Murder One, one of the largest "genre" bookshops in the world, shut down in 2009.

But, in spite of the bookshop drought, London is still a book-lover's city - if, that is, you choose to use your imagination. Surely no other part of the world has lived through more literary history than central London, and few parts of the world have been more written about, by writers great and middling. How does one get the best out of it?
 

Whenever I travel to a city for longer than a day or two, I have a little ritual - I read a few books, in the week or so beforehand, that I imagine might be particularly atmospheric, and would give me a mental map with which to wander the streets. This time, before a fortnight or so in London, I read (or re-read) an odd combination of books. The greatest, no doubt, was Dickens' Bleak House, which I had been meaning to re-read for years. It is largely set in the legal enclaves in central London - leafy now, but where in the foggy 19th century, to use Dickens' powerful image, the soot served as well as ivy to cover the words. They are as quiet now as then, though, and some of Bleak House's best passages describe the odd feeling of stepping off the Strand into one of the little "courts" off it where lawyers keep their chambers - the sound of the road cuts off instantly, and you could be miles away from the city.

In keeping with the Victorian theme, I also read the late great Terry Pratchett's Dodger, a sort of homage to Victoriana and to Dickens; and Caryl Brahms' and S J Simon's Don't, Mr Disraeli, a quite insane - and incredibly funny - romp through Victorian literature and the streets of London written by a ballet critic and a competitive bridge-player in 1940. I bought that in a second-hand bookshop on my first trip to England as a kid, and I re-read it with almost religious devotion every few years.

And to round off the Victorian age, I read Charles Palliser's magnificent but sadly forgotten Quincunx, published in the 1980s but again Dickensian in style, this time a murder mystery, written on an epic scale - albeit with classic postmodern contrivances, like narrators with their own style and agendas, and multiple layers of interpretation. It too deals with the court system in large part; and it is a reminder, in a way, of how similar today's India, with our capricious and long-delayed justice, is to Victorian England.

But Victoriana is not enough, and one murder mystery is never enough either. Nor did I want to limit myself to central London. So I read a couple of installments of Deborah Crombie's Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James murder mysteries. Enlivened with delightful maps from the illustrator Laura Hartman, they're wonderful guides to entire neighbourhoods, to their histories and unique personalities. One features a murder born of the resentments and angers stirred up by the redevelopment of London's Docklands for the financial sector; another is set in historic Southwark, and yet another follows Notting Hill as it changed from posh post-Victorian address to West Indian ghetto to the yuppie enclave it is now.

Novels give you a sense of place that non-fiction cannot match. But non-fiction, when done well, gives you a breadth that novels will struggle with. The two books that I read on this trip were James Shapiro's brilliant takes on the London of Shakespeare. The first, published 10 years ago, was 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. That was the year Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It; but the book is about so much more than that. It begins with the scene of Shakespeare's theatre company surreptitiously carting off, wholesale, their old theatre in Shoreditch to Southwark instead, to build the Globe Theatre - which you can now stand in front of and admire, since it has been lovingly rebuilt. So 1599 is about the development of the theatre district south of the Thames, but also the growth of publishing, and the back-stabbing of the Elizabethan court. And now, last year, James Shapiro has published a second book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. This Shakespeare is a different, more cynical, but more successful man. Elizabethan certainty has given way to dark Jacobean intrigue under James I, and into this more clouded London Shakespeare brought in 1606 King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

But I ended with another Victorian novel, a forgotten, leisurely Dickensian masterpiece, Joseph Vance - not easily available in print, but downloadable to a Kindle from archive.org. It was written, oddly enough, by William de Morgan, a famous tile-maker and potter, one of the stalwarts of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the late nineteenth century. In Postman's Park, a postage-stamp sized park that is the largest open space in the City of London - made famous by Patrick Marber's play Closer, which then became a great movie - you can see tiles that he made for the painter G F Watts that commemorate acts of "heroic self-sacrifice" by ordinary citizens. I stood there the day after Brexit, as Britain struggled to deal with its own xenophobia, and read the inscription on one beautiful tile: to "John Cranmer, aged 23, a clerk in the London County Council, who was Drowned near Ostend whilst Saving the Life of a Stranger and a Foreigner."