London in the 21st Century may be an international metropolis, which has melded together a whole series of villages and communities.  However, in his latest book, West End Chronicles, Ed Glinet has decided to focus on a specific area of the city and explore its evolutionary path. It's a heritage rich in glitz and glamour, scandal and sex, crime and culture.

Glinert is very specific about what defines the West End.  It's a amalgam of fours districts: Mayfair, Maryelbone, Fitzrovia and Soho.  Each has its own distinct style and identity which have come about in the last 300 years. Nobility and royalty have lived and played there, but so have gangsters, pop stars, anarchists, writers, prostitutes, spies, mystics, and government ministers.  The past and present come to life though the characters and places, life stories crisscrossing the streets and squares, sheltering in the the homes, institutions, hotels or deparment stores, or bars, theatres and clubs.  It's populated by shadowy memories of the likes of George IV, Lady Astor, Oscar Wilde, The Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Karl Marx, Francis Bacon, Florence Nightingale, Mussolini, Philby and Mclean, Denis Nilsen, the Krays Twins and their gangland rivals. The West End is revealed as not simply the heart of the city, but a seductive magnet for the world too.

A companion piece to his East End Chronicles and Literary London, it's a curiously haphazard in its subjects, a patchwork of tales, which sometimes trip over each other in the enthustasitc rush to be told.  Glinert delves into the rich atmosphere of the place thematically rather than chronologically so we follow Mayfair's high society and rhe rise of late night jazz clubs .There's the rise of Oxford Street's great deparment stores ot the revolutionary activities of Fitzrovia, as well as the constantly changing face of Soho. And every era swims in tales of crime, sex and scandal.  The Profumo affairs brought down a government; blood spilled onto the street in the Gordon Riots, gangland battles of the Krays, the Richardsons, Jack Spot; and more recent triad killings; public hangings at Marble Arch; the booze-soaked world of Jeffrey Bernard; the corrupt world of vice kings, the Messinas.  West End Chronicles is addictive, littered`with lively anecdotes and bizarre facts as we encounter the mystical Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the literary salons of Elisabeth Montagu and the stars of the Swinging Sixties. A kind of London Babylon, this is an affectionate, irreverent, salacious but informative read.