Robert Elms has seen London change beyond all imagining: the house he grew up in is now the behemoth that is the Westway flyover, and areas once deemed murder miles have morphed into the stuff of estate agents' dreams, seemingly in a matter of months. Elms takes us back through time and place to myriad Londons. He is our guide through a place that has seen scientific experiments conducted in subterranean lairs, a small community declare itself an independent nation and animals of varying exoticism roam free through its streets; a place his great-great-grandfather made the Elms' home over a century ago and a city that has borne witness to epoch- and world-changing events. 'This is a shape-shifting city, happy to shed its skin of brick and stone for steel and glass, to jettison the unprofitable unsentimentally, to abandon the unfashionable and discard the undesirable. London is a giant kaleidoscope, which is forever turning. Take your eye off it for more than a moment and you're lost.'