Often a revelation, it's invariably a pleasure - Michael Kerrigan * SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY *Īn exuberant book. For all the easy-going tone, this is a work of impressive learning, full of details of everyday practicalities that most recent history books ignore. From birth to death, and everything in between, Picard has given us a wide-ranging survey of London and Londoners in an earlier age - Lucy Moore * DAILY MAIL *įrom traffic congestion to cures for kidney stones from water supplies to wood panelling from etiquette to immigrants from gardening to childbirth: it's all here in this captivating portrait of one of the world's greatest cities in its greatest age. Elizabeth's London is, like its predecessors, a storehouse of fascinating information. Publisher: Orion Publishing Co ISBN: 9780753817575 Number of pages: 368 Weight: 357 g Dimensions: 196 x 133 x 30 mm MEDIA REVIEWS Liza Picard's wonderfully skilful and vivid evocation of the London of Elizabeth I enables us to share the delights, as well as the horrors, of the everyday lives of our sixteenth-century ancestors. Cares could be forgotten in a playhouse or the bull-baiting of bear-baiting rings, or watching a good cockfight.

But food and drink, sex and marriage and family life provided comfort. Plague, smallpox and other diseases afflicted them. Then the Londoners of the time take the stage, in all their amazing finery. Liza Picard surveys building methods and shows us the interior decor of the rich and the not-so-rich, and what they were likely to be growing in their gardens. It begins with the River Thames, the lifeblood of Elizabethan London, before turning to the streets and the traffic in them.

'Reading this book is like taking a ride on a marvellously exhilarating time-machine, alive with colour, surprise and sheer merriment' Jan MorrisĮlizabethan London reveals the practical details of everyday life so often ignored in conventional history books.

Elizabeth's London by Liza Picard