In Europe only Paris and Constantinople were larger. In 1660, London seethed with a population of 300,000. it radiates throughout that quality so essential in a good historian: infinite curiosity' I expect this was a publishing decision rather than an authorial one (and probably for cost reasons) but it was frustrating for me as a reader. There are some photographs included but in a book that so often mentions a stately home that's a good example of 17th century architecture or a piece of furniture in the V&A museum there really need to be pictures of those items - it's frustrating to put the book down every few pages to try and google something as I ended up doing. The only negative comments I can make about the book are the lack of maps and the inclusion of too few drawings or photographs.

I had never stopped to think how they went about rebuilding London after the Great Fire and the chapter on childbirth really made me shudder. Peter Ackroyd describes her writing as “absorbing and revealing in equal measure.” Liza died in London at the age of 94.Based almost entirely on primary sources, Picard has written a book that looks at almost every area of day to day life in Restoration London: from medicine to housing and social life to waste disposal, anything that can be gleaned from contemporary accounts has been.

Martin’s in the US. In her last, Chaucer’s People (2017), she used the characters in the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as ‘hooks’ on which to hang a vivid description of English life in the fourteenth century. Liza was the author of four highly successful, bestselling and critically acclaimed books about London’s history, Restoration London, Dr Johnson’s London, Elizabeth’s London (a Sunday Times bestseller) and Victorian London, all published by W&N in the UK and St. I am a lawyer by trade, and an inquisitive, practical woman by character.”

In an interview in the Guardian, she told John Cunningham “I am not a properly trained historian. Only after her retirement did Liza begin to write the kind of social history books that she had been trying to find: books that described the everyday life of ordinary London people – if people are ever ‘ordinary’. She was called to the bar by Gray’s Inn in 1949 but never practised after various jobs, including a spell in East Africa in the Colonial legal service, she found a job in the Solicitor’s Office of the Inland Revenue, where she stayed until her retirement in 1987. Liza Picard (1927-2022) was born in Essex and read law at the London School of Economics.

Restoration London by Liza Picard