Product Description

Do you remember the West End of London during the 1950s? Did you live or work there? If so, I want to hear from you ...This was the advertisement author Pip Granger placed in a local newspaper, and the response was immediate. Soon she was hearing from people who recalled what it was like when sweets were rationed; from families who'd been bombed out of their homes during the Blitz; from men who'd worked in the flower markets of Covent Garden; and, from the son of a family of immigrants who'd opened one of the very first delicatessens in Soho. All had extraordinary stories to tell. Based on the author's own memories and dozens of interviews and written testimonies, "Up West" evokes a unique and vibrant community, and a way of life that is vanishing fast.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22346 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

About the Author
London's West End has always been bestselling author Pip Granger's spiritual home. While still a baby, she and her father would haunt Soho's bars, cafe's, and bookshops. When he moved to Old Compton Street, she and her family lived above the 2I's Cafe, which allowed her to experience this cosmopolitan community as an insider. She is the author of four novels, all set in Soho. Her autobiography, Alone, was a Sunday Times bestseller,

Customer Reviews

Lively and fascinating
An essential read for anyone who loves London. Up West brings alive the range of experiences of the many ,varied and fascinating characters who lived, worked and played in the West End during and after WW2. A very well written, entertaining and instructive book, which I wanted to finish, but at the same time I did not want to end. A mixture of enchanting voices and experiences, all of which I loved, and some of which reminded me of my own childhood. I am sure new readers will be surprised and enchanted by Pip Granger's vivid and lucid new book.

Pip's best so far!
Pip Granger is nothing if not versatile - she has shown herself capable of producing delightful novels and excellent non-fiction. "Up West" is a very well-written, thoroughly researched, historically valuable and highly readable book. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could better it as a record of Soho in the mid-20th century, in all its aspects; it has an inescapable air of being a truthful record but manages to avoid the paralysing dryness of some works of this type - Pip's irrepressible wit and sense of humour are well to the fore. She has succeeded in vividly describing every facet of Soho life in the 40's and 50's, as remembered by herself and others, men and women she interviewed at length, who thought of this unique little area as home. There are recollections of great hardship, sometimes, but so much else besides. I was fascinated to read about Pip's personal memories of the many celebrities she encountered in person as a child - including the wonderful Goons; I laughed out loud at the descriptions of some of the local "characters" - and felt very glad not to have encountered the more sinister. I do not know London at all well, so "Up West" holds no personal nostalgia for me, but despite this, the book held my interest, and I am sure anyone who reads it will find much to enjoy.

A poignant multi-memoir
This is much more than another oral history, and more, too, than a strictly personal reminiscing. Pip Granger's own vivid memories of her stamping ground in London's postwar Soho, and her novelist's gift for language (never florid, never overstated) enhance the stories told by a series of 'ordinary people' (always a patronising phrase, but these are tales of the everyday existence of otherwise uncelebrated denizens of that cosmopolitan corner).Up West brings back to life the furniture (figurative and literal), the accessories, the flavours -all the minutiae - of a life that few of us now remember clearly. For me this work is even more powerful than Pip Granger's fictional revisitings of her childhood, combining as it does the moving and illuminating real-life experiences of real people, and the author's penetrating commentaries on that strange mix of the exotic and the humdrum that was Soho in the Fifties, a unique setting, ahead of its time, precursor of the multiethnic, trendy London of the 21st century.