Intimacy, in terms of both subjects and methodologies, is having something of a moment in historical studies. Whether insignificant or exceptional, those who were once left out of our analyses are again being rescued from the condescension of posterity, just now with a greater appreciation for the emotional and subjective nuances of their lives. The mass digitization of genealogical data has undoubtedly been a major enabler. Some scholars may belittle what they see as the sentimentality or conceptual narrowness of ‘family history’, but others are realizing the benefits of more easily being able to find a bewildering array of individuals at the click of a button. This latest turn towards intimacy has also been marked by the boldness with which writers are creatively filling in the gaps with their own feelings and speculations – a fruitful result of getting so familiar with their subjects. The modern city is a natural setting for such histories. It is there that the bureaucracy of the state has left the piles of material needed to weave together complex stories, where the contrasts of life were arguably most striking and where the ramifications of the past on the present are so clear. Matt Houlbrook’s Songs of Seven Dials: An Intimate History of 1920s and 1930s London is a remarkable achievement in this growing field: vibrant, humane and readable without sacrificing academic insight or rigour.

The focus of the book is very much on an intimate micro scale. Seven Dials, with its nineteenth-century slum legacy, has usually been ignored in favour of much more famous neighbours like Bloomsbury or Soho. Still poor and declining for most of the twentieth century, Seven Dials was briefly home to a notably multicultural working-class community that was nonetheless denigrated by outsiders as the ‘Black colony’. Its central location also made it ripe for ambitious but ultimately failed private and municipal improvement schemes. Part of Houlbrook’s desire is simply to give this multifaceted place the full treatment it deserves. But if ‘the stories it tells are small’, as the book’s introduction admits, ‘the histories are big’ (p. 9). By drilling down into the conflicts and culture of one district, we gain a broader insight into how the city was remade by capitalism and its politics, and how urban residents negotiated that process. Instead of being squeezed by the late Victorian to Edwardian highpoint of London as an imperial capital and the transformations that accompanied reconstruction after the Second World War, the 1920s and 1930s deservedly emerge as essential to this tale of the making of modern London.

Houlbrook’s almost fanatical desire to reveal the intricacies of forgotten lives is another feature of the book’s intimacy. He creatively draws on digitized sources, like the 1921 census and the 1939 England and Wales Register, which provide granular snapshots of urban life, alongside livelier ego documents such as diaries, letters and memoirs. Out of these disparate materials he conjures a colourful cast of vividly drawn characters. Two unlikely entrepreneurs are the reader’s first introduction to Seven Dials. Jim and Emily Kitten, a Sierra Leonian migrant and his English wife, briefly ran a café in the district that became a hub of ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’. Providing for those on the margins of metropolitan life was not popular with property developers nor puritans, however, and brought the Kittens into the firing line of John Bull. Their brave decision to legally challenge the vicious, racist campaign of this rabidly patriotic magazine is the hook for a deeper rumination on who London is really for: the precarious from all over the world who make the city their home or those who seek ever-increasing profits? Ultimately, the question is answered with a melancholic ‘denouement’ chapter that laments the realization of a gentrification set in train several generations before.

Readers of this journal will be especially pleased by the attention given to the institutions and fabric of the city. Whether it is the real estate venture of the Shaftesbury Hotel, the philanthropic politics of the St Giles Buildings or the Art Deco ambition of the Cambridge Theatre, Houlbrook captures the means by which the modern urban landscape came into existence. He also evokes beautifully the sounds, smells and sights of metropolitan rhythms, from the curries served in the Kittens’ café to the crowds who hung around outside. Echoes of the author’s foundational work on Queer London appear in a fresh depiction of the infamous Caravan club and its painted boys, people of colour and the more middle-class men who chased them. Much of what the book covers will provide inspiration for those who study other cities; Houlbrook’s deconstruction of the bohemian slumming adventures of the Bright Young People, for example, and their patronage of the racially and socially exclusive Cave of Harmony, reminded me of the similar duality of the venues of mid-century Harlem.

Whether it is the young men of Seven Dials killed during the First World War, elderly women who sold flowers around the West End or aspiring thespians who walked the same streets as card-carrying communists, compassionate personal sketches mark every chapter. These are really the Songs of the book’s title, and both haunting and harmonious they are. The result is a triumph: a new benchmark for how academic urban historians can write for much larger audiences and evidence of the rich rewards when they do.