'London is a giant kaleidoscope, which is forever turning. Take your eye off it for more than a moment and you're lost.' Robert Elms has seen London change beyond all imagining: the house he grew up in is now the behemoth that is the Westway flyover, and areas once deemed murder miles have morphed into the stuff of estate agents' dreams, seemingly in a matter of months. Elms takes us back through time and place to myriad Londons. He is our guide through a place that has seen scientific experiments conducted in subterranean lairs, a small community declare itself an independent nation and animals of varying exoticism roam free through its streets; a place his great-great-grandfather made the Elms' home over a century ago and a city that has borne witness to epoch- and world-changing events.

Author Biography

Robert Elms is a broadcaster and writer, well-loved for his eponymous radio show on BBC Radio London. Elms started out as a journalist, writing for The Face and NME. He is a Londoner through and through, growing up in Ladbroke Grove with contemporaries Martin Kemp and Norman Jay. The Robert Elms Show is a celebration of every aspect of the tumultuous city of London. He interviews Londoners - famous and non-famous - and every week looks at all sides of the city, be that architecture, language, music, clothes and more. Elms is the author of two previous works of non-fiction, The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads and Spain: A Portrait After the General, and a novel, In Search of the Crack. He lives in London with his wife and children. @RobertElms