Imagine Samuel Pepys re-incarnated as a 20th-century woman lawyer, and looking back at 17th-century London not as a diarist but as a social analyst. Imagine P. D. James deciding to set a thriller in the time of Charles II and assembling her background materials ... There is almost no aspect of life in Restoration London that is not meticulously described in these 300-odd pages

This is a joy of a book. Its style is both simple and evocative ... and it radiates throughout that quality so essential in a good historian: infinite curiosity

An encyclopedic overview of the London of Pepys and Wren ... Answers all those questions about the Great Fire of London you wanted to ask but never knew where to look for the answer

Anyone who enjoys the minutiae of life in the past will have great fun exploring

A beautifully produced reference work ... [an] entertaining historical bran tub

A densely textured accumulation of physical detail for the period, a history of the prosaic written with clarity and modesty ... An engagingly eccentric book which adds texture to existing accounts of the time