Making use of every possible contemporary source - diaries, memoirs, advice books, government papers, almanacs, even the Register of Patents - Liza Picard presents an enthralling picture of how life in London was really lived in the 1600s: the houses and streets, gardens and parks, cooking, clothes and jewellery, cosmetics, hairdressing, housework, laundry and shopping, medicine and dentistry, sex, education, hobbies, etiquette, law and crime, religion and popular beliefs.


'There is almost no aspect of life in Restoration London that is not meticulously described in these 300-odd pages' Jan Morris, Independent


'This is a joy of a book. Its style is both simple and evocative...And it radiates throughout that quality so essential in a good historian: infinite curiosity' Roy Porter, Observer


'A pot pourri of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the predictable and the astonishing' Literary Review