Image: Henry VI was supposedly murdered while at prayer in the King's Private Chapel in the Wakefield Tower. This locomotive and coach are the only surviving vehicles from the first electric underground railway in the world. Due to Beth’s mixed heritage, issues spark up regarding her race, skin colour and privilege which leave her conflicted. Adam is gay and has a partner, Edmond (Richard Angol) while Tony is in a straight relationship with Parminda (Ulrika Krishnamurti).

And in the 20th century, the re collections of JB Priestley were much more gripping than I'd have anticipated. Very good cloth copy in a near-fine, very slightly edge-nicked and dust-dulled dust-wrapper, now mylar-sleeved. As protector of the Crown Jewels, home of the Yeomen Warders and its legendary guardians, the pampered ravens, the Tower now attracts over three million visitors a year.

Batty (1891-1966) was one of the most prolific female artists commissioned by the Underground and London Transport, and created over fifty posters in a variety of different styles. Walk the defensive inner battlements and huge towers that have guarded the Tower of London for centuries. At the heart of one of the world’s great cities, London’s transport performed a vital role in both world wars. Glen says: “Its about a guy and his best friend and how he feels like he has to not be emotional, to be a man, as a man never shows his true emotions as a stereotype”. As an avid Anglophile, I wanted to read this book but also feared it could be overly familiar territory.

London, on the other hand, though it has been battered past being easily impressed, is nevertheless very easily, almost childishly, charmed.Kurtz's 'Islington' reads like a long-form essay on the dangers of gentrification, while Kureishi's 'The Umbrella' features a husband's disturbing preoccupation with pulverising his wife.

Laura Knight was one of the most popular British artists of her lifetime, with her success paving the way for greater recognition of women artists. Often writing against a background of film, art or literature, he unearths unease in the streets of Shepherd’s Bush, Hackney or South Tottenham, and creates uncanny effects with innovative, experimental forms. Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels' foot-prints, crocodiles' hatching places, loosened grains of expression from the visages of blunt-nosed sphynxes, waifs and strays from caravans of turbaned merchants, vegetations from jungles, frozen snow from Himalayas. The postbox is one of London's most iconic sights and is now a way for people to share their own stories far and wide. The Chapel is perhaps best known as being the burial place of some of the most famous Tower prisoners.And it's there, threaded through Dickens' scrambled artifacts, as well as the Hanif Kureishi that closes the cover at the end. During the Second World War Britain formed the Home Guard, a secondary defence force in support of the Army.