Chepe, Dogs and Rotten Row

From Cock Lane, Pissing Alley, Houndsditch and Old Jewry to Shaftesbury Ave and Marcus Garvey Way, London's place names serve as documents to its citizens ever-shifting lives and preoccupations. The novelist Maureen Duffy once described London's street signs as an alternative national portrait gallery; and the vicissitudes of England's history can be glimpsed in so many of the capital's names. Chepe, Dogs and Rotten Row: How London Was Named is a book that liberates London etymology from dictionary corner, offering instead a lively, idiosyncratic tour of the whole messy ephemera of the capital's nomenclature. Elborough, by scrutinising names etched into our collective consciousness, provides an insightful and entertaining account of the city's wayward development.