No Free Parking: The Curious History of London's Monopoly Streets

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And because everyone else has forgotten how dreary the world’s most famous board game is, and is too stuffed with turkey and trimmings to do anything else, we meekly acquiesce.

The author’s love of London and its history are infectious - reading his evocative descriptions will send you (and your children) out exploring, looking up at the face of buildings and imagining what was once there. From the Roman marching along the ancient Old Kent Road to the rattling newspaper presses of Fleet Street, from Dickensian iron and fog to the neon lights of the twenty-first century, the game of Monopoly has painted London’s story across cheerful coloured tiles. This is a clever way of publicising the author's worthy and important crusade for London's heritage and against ill-thought planning authority proposals. In a city of rags and riches, where folk hero Dick Whittington believed the streets were paved with gold, anything could happen - and everything has. All in all, a good and interesting book that I will be keeping on my shelf in case I need to refer back to it.

A mind-numbing hour later some bumptious child is gleefully piling hotels on Mayfair and everyone else is desperately trying to go bankrupt and get the wretched ritual over for another year.

I love reading about London and this is an engaging and fresh way to do so (especially if like me you were brought up in the Old Kent Road). To take London’s Monopoly streets as a starting point for an evocation of London urbanism is a witty conceit but it also provides a solid anchor for any constructive understanding of how we human beings live in our streets. As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. In a city of rags and riches, where folk hero Dick Whittington believed the streets were paved with gold, anything could happen – and everything has.But those Monopoly streets live and breathe – they open up whole new ways of thinking about our history.

I did enjoy it, once I adjusted my expectations from 'interesting fun, fact book with history' to 'history book'. Lots of quirky stuff and fantastic quotes plus also some hugely thought-provoking big picture stuff about how London has grown in the way that it has. He has written for the Spectator, Evening Standard, Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, The Critic, etc etc, and been interviewed across TV and radio. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.He has lectured internationally, written for the Spectator, Evening Standard, Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph and Guardian, and been interviewed across TV and radio. I think based on the cover or the title I expected something more conversational or more colloquial.