Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

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As it is, what he produces is lazy and repetitive, which is a real shame because his prose is top-notch. Occasionally, Beaumont’s style can be cloudily academic, with sentences about “the consolidation of urban capitalism and its attendant class formations” and a generous sprinkling of references to Foucault, Adorno, Benjamin and co, but for the most part it is sharp and precise in its appreciation of London’s messy charms. A mostly very enjoyable and readable account of nightwalking in London from the eleventh century to the 19th, as mediated by literature. However, in actuality, the criminalisation of nightwalking was only applied to the poor and homeless, whilst the prosperous were free to walk the dark streets at will.

Since this book spends so much time on the social history of London, couldn't there have been some room for this aspect?

Even in a newly illuminated city they were thought to carry little pools of darkness around inside themselves. I read an newspaper article with an accompanying review of Lewis-Stempel’s latest title and decided to give it a go, I was not disappointed. The whole work is washed over with modern liberal marxist platitudes, obviously everyone out at night is a political act of the underclasses and everything bad is the middle class's fault and no criminal act is the responsibility of its doer. There was a contrast in tone between many of the poems prefacing the stories and the stories themselves, whose tone I didn't enjoy as much.

As Beaumont argues, the night obscures the visual realm that distracts from the subterranean realities of the land. When one thinks of the London night in the present age, iconic images of Westminster, Piccadilly and the Thames Skyline are usually the first to emerge.So here we have narratives about walking at night, on or near his Shropshire farm or in France, in each of the four seasons. Occasionally it takes on the form of a skulking fox, but otherwise it remains full of mystery and a vague sense of threat.

Away from the “sodium gleam” of street lamps and the strip lights of minicab offices, there are alleys where “the darkness appears to collect in a solid, faintly palpitating mass”. In addition to the differing treatments of rich and poor Londoners for whom night-time conditions were distinctly different, Nightwalking also reveals the divisions between the perceived activities of each gender. It’s not the subject he’s writing about that he wants us to be impressed with, but his own intelligence. Beyond the first two chapters, the majority of the book tends to focus on nightwalkers from the upper end of the social scale, who are referred to as ‘noctambulants’: those nightwalkers whose pedestrianism was of an optional, rather than necessary, nature.A warning note - don't be put off by Will Self's foreword which, as he so often does, equates cleverness and insight with unreadability.