Output details

Diamond Street: the hidden world of Hatton Garden

Diamond Street: The Hidden World of Hatton Garden is the second in a trilogy of books focused on the history of London street markets, and follows on from Lichtenstein’s 2007 On Brick Lane (shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, 2008). The trilogy will be completed by a third book centred on Portobello Road Market. As a distinctive form of creative non-fiction writing, Lichtenstein’s work may be partly situated within a recent British literature of place. Unlike, however, the ‘psychogeographical’ writings of Iain Sinclair (with whom Lichtenstein collaborated on her first book, Rodinsky’s Place, 1999), or Robert McFarlane’s poetics of natural landscape, Lichtenstein’s writing is more directly research-led, combining oral history, archival work and detailed attention to material culture, as well as on-site walks and visits, so as to give literary form to the singularities of location and placed identity. Intimately connected to the area through her family, Lichtenstein’s writing takes its narrative form from a documentary-style practice in which the historical story of a specific urban place is unfolded through the first-person narration of Lichtenstein’s own journey through the area and its history. In this way, narrative plotting through space is ‘mapped’ onto the uncovering of temporal-historical layers over the course of the book as a whole. As well as the extensive historical research required for a project of this type, Diamond Street also involved, for example, considerable technical research into assaying techniques and bullion refinement as part of the book’s endeavour to describe the workings of Hatton Garden’s commercial activity. Equally, its focus on the ongoing disappearance of the street’s previous traditions and communities engages with much recent research in urban and cultural studies (as well as literature) concerning the dynamics and socio-political consequences of gentrification.