Bloomsbury Boy

Synopsis

The lost London of a Bloomsbury boyhood, in six unforgettable decades.

Martin Chilton was born in 1964, in a flat opposite Great Ormond Street Hospital, in the heart of literary Bloomsbury. His father was a Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter who played with George Melly; his mother ran the legendary Bloomsbury Bookshop. In Bloomsbury Boy, Chilton recalls a now-vanished London – of Italian mobsters, Sabini razors and Gamages at Christmas – then ranges across six decades and seven worlds: books, music, journalism, education, football and the NHS. By turns hilarious and elegiac, this is the warm, sharp-eyed memoir of a true Londoner, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what has been lost – and gained – along the way.