Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

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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. In Nightwalking, Matthew Beaumont, co-director of the UCL Urban Laboratory, has written an ambitious and erudite sequel to his co-edited Restless Cities (2010), presenting the London night as a historical and literary phenomenon from the medieval period into the Victorian era.

Beaumont has written a rambling exploration of people rambling in London at night, and particularly those who have written about rambling people in the past. This is a small book, yet it conveys memorably the magnitude and majesty of its subject - a charming blend of nature diary, sound archive and scent library. There's a wealth of fascinating information about London at night from medieval times to the 19th century, not least the history of street lighting and curfews and the slow development of the policing of the night-time streets.The author should have given a special mention in the acknowledgments to Walter Benjamin as he seemed to crib so much of his work esp on Baudelaire. I don't know if there's quite enough to the topic to support the length, and the author does fall into academic blether occasionally, but the medieval history parts and the section on Blake are tremendous, vivid and fascinating. In some ways he was hoping to achieve in fiction what he had already spent many hours doing in person. which is always accompanied by how we view people who've wandered the night over the centuries and of the night itself.

However, as a text that appears to champion the act of aimless wandering over the direct navigation between two points, the central section of the book does appear to suffer from some meandering repetitiveness, although there are still moments of brilliance within those middle chapters. There were some lovely descriptions and interesting anecdotes but this was essentially a jumble of ideas.

If, if, you go out after the decline of the day… As the human world settles down each evening, nocturnal animals prepare to take back the countryside.

Rich in imagery and idea, this is the kind of book that makes readers ask questions and explore further. Aber am Ende gibt es eine Liste von sieben "International dark sky reserves", in denen das noch möglich ist. There are nights of such tranquility and beauty that they salve the soul, make medicine for the mind.Beaumont's ambition, however, is to go beyond his literary expertises into a broader cultural examination of walking by night, with slightly less success. Indeed, for all his close focus on particular authors, it is hard to escape the impression that the main character in Beaumont’s book is not a person but a place. Their number include Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage, who spent impoverished parts of the 1730s engaged in various “midnight rambles”, or what Johnson’s Dictionary would later define as “noctivagation” (“the act of rambling or wandering in the night”), and William Blake, whose nocturnal wanderings seem to have been designed to discover the limits of the Enlightenment.

Although for citizens living away from the main thoroughfares the nights remained “nasty, brutish, and all too long”, as Beaumont neatly observes, for others street lighting completely transformed London. Oscillates between interesting insights and thoughtful passages, and feeling like you're on a walk with someone continually implying how clever they are, thanks to a combination of poetry selections and an adept application of assonance. 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”. The reality of this offering however was a slow, turgid, heavy style of writing which was so ponderous - I got irritated, lost interest, found my whole effort to 'like' the book quite ludicrous.It goes on like this and was just frustrating because the sentences were so bad - how did an editor not sort this? There were some nice scenes and moments (such as him waking up and finding himself surrounded by rabbits), and some interesting things to follow up on based on these stories. 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. Despite a certain serious engagement with historical material (that's clearly somewhat restricted), his approach seems to be guided by the rather more cavalier sweep of cultural studies. The author is obviously the owner of My Big Book of Literary Criticism as the majority of the text reads as an over enthusiastic student's first essay.