Dan Carrier’s book Untold London is out now
MAYBE correspondent-at-large would be his best title. Sometimes nobody has a clue where he is and then he’ll pop up with a wonderful story that you can’t possibly not put in the newspaper.
At other times you’ll find him in his chaotic cavern corner of the newsroom regaling colleagues with a thousand perfect anecdotes. A bundle of energy, there’s no point trying to be an editor to Dan Carrier: you just let him roam and see what happens. For a long time now, this has all been to a great benefit to Camden.
Not only has his restlessness brought us great scoops and interviews, it also led him to set up the food aid van which took provisions to people isolated during the Covid crisis, and later to the edge of the warzone in Ukraine where he took our donations to refugees dashing into Poland.
There was no chance that he was going to sit indoors during those lockdown days and instead he used his “daily exercise” and press pass well, walking the city and writing about his tour in the diary page of our sister paper, the Westminster Extra. As the weeks turned into months, he was amassing too much for a column and hence the book, Untold London, which is released this week.
He calls it a love letter to London but I think his romance with our city has advanced well beyond first base. Within the first 20 pages, we’ve learned about the crocodiles that once called St James’ Park home and how we are all wrong every day when we think the statue in Piccadilly Circus is of Eros. “Ah-ha, but here’s the thing…”, his explanation that it is actually meant to be the Greek god’s brother Anteros begins, and it feels like he’s telling it to me across the office.
His skill with this stuff is that he makes history so accessible, switching with ease from dusty tales from the Civil War through to the legends of 1960s and 70s London, and then up to the present day: an ever-evolving city documented in this lovingly stitched patchwork of stories.
Every corner has a story, and so does every pub. It is probably good that he didn’t sink a pint in every one mentioned here, but it must have been sad to see so many places which provide so much fun – bars, theatres, nightclubs – shut to curb the spread of the virus.
There are laments about buildings we have lost altogether, lost cafes, lost shops and more than a couple of mentions as to how money has often been the root reason for tearing down places that were loved, even if they were not the greatest profit generators in the world.
Perhaps one of the segments that best sums up Dan’s mentality is the story of the fountains that used to flow outside Centre Point, Grade II-listed modernist features designed by Jupp Dernach-Mayen. Maybe you remember them, although they were circled by traffic – so even though the swimming pool-blue must have meant children were desperate to splash in them, they always appeared cut off and a curiosity if anything.
Most of us probably forgot them when the redevelopment facelift around St Giles began and they were removed. Not Dan. He recalls here how he tracked the fountains down. Half of them were in a barn in Norwich, the other half left forgotten in a lock-up in Wembley. This didn’t seem right and Dan helped persuade the powers that be to allow them to be transferred to the grounds of the Architectural Association in Dorset.
It’s a little vignette which captures in one the character of the book, and its author. Some of the walks detailed here will take you to places you already know but might need reminding of, others will head off into new parts of Westminster worthy of exploration.
For years now, I’ve been walking down the road with Dan and you cannot get 10 yards without someone saying hello or asking about a street party he is organising or a party he is DJing at.
You won’t get another 10 yards without him pulling out some outrageous fact about a lost watering hole or something hidden behind a faded facade With this book, now everybody can take a stroll with him too. You’ll have a lively old time.
Untold London: Stories From Time-Trodden Streets. By Dan Carrier. The History Press, £19.99
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