Primrose Hill : A History

Primrose Hill exercises a hold upon the imagination of everyone who climbs it. The site of William Blake's vision of the sun, and the subject of one of W.H. Auden's earliest poems, it is a green sanctuary offering superb and ever-changing views over London. Long before it became a public park in 1842, Primrose Hill attracted duellists, poets, revolutionaries, soldiers and sportsmen, as well as prospective developers and large numbers of ordinary Londoners. Martin Sheppard's scintillating history of Primrose Hill, one of London's great landmarks, recounts the many remarkable events on the hill over the centuries. He also conveys the everyday experience of visitors to it since it first became a popular place of excursion in the eighteenth century.