Welcome to SideStreets

Hi there!

I’m Alan Hertz, Professor emeritus of Humanities at Hult International Business School. I was American once, and still have the accent, but I have been prowling London and teaching its past for over 40 years.

SideStreets will not attempt a narrative history of London. It will instead focus on out-of-the-way places, meet little-known people, and tell good stories. It will use them, I hope, to illustrate important patterns and principles in that history and maybe even in the history of all cities. I hope -- to quote William Blake, one of the greatest of all Londoners -- to “see a World in a Grain of Sand”. So I won’t try to map the beach, but I will try to focus on significant grains…