UCL in the News: Urbane legend

A remarkably youthful 75-year-old, Hall shows no sign of letting up. He says he feels fine and somehow manages to fit in his "day jobs" in Britain - Bartlett professor of planning and regeneration at UCL, chairman of Blackpool's urban regeneration company, regular columnist in specialist magazines, prolific writing elsewhere, and with a rate of globetrotting that would make younger men tremble. …

The fruits of his labours, closer to home, will be unveiled shortly in a new book, London Voices, London Lives - Tales from a Working Capital, to be published soon. Hall, who has written well over 30 books - including the masterly Cities in Civilisation (1998) - has charted the "extraordinary changes" in the capital over the last 50 years. The book's genesis lies in a project, undertaken with a team, that included 130 interviews for an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project. "They were fascinating when transcribed," he says, "but we only used a fraction of the material and, at the end of it, we said to ourselves: 'This is fascinating stuff. Shouldn't we make another book out of it?'" …

"It brings out the differences between one part of London and the other. We started out in Reading, because we thought this was a typical Thames Valley boom town. Then we jump over to Hounslow, which we call airport city, and is also a big area of Indian sub-continent settlement, mainly Gujurati from the 60s and 70s. Now many of them are saying: 'Oh, we don't like it here (now) because of the immigrants. We need to go to Surrey.'"

But it is Gants Hill, near Essex, that Hall finds "absolutely fascinating", as 1930s suburbia, which was very largely Jewish. "They came out from Whitechapel and now they are being replaced by people from the Indian sub-continent who have come from Whitechapel." …

London Voices, London Lives - Tales from a Working Capital, is published on July 10.

Peter Hetherington, 'The Guardian'