ABSTRACT
Paris and London are majestic world cities, whose names can conjure up countless paired images: the Place de la Concorde and Trafalgar Square, the Rue de Rivoli and Regent Street, the Luxembourg Gardens and St James's Park, boulevard cafés and Victorian pubs, art-nouveau Métro stations and red-white-and-blue labelled Undergrounds, green single-decker buses and red double-deckers. Each city is a national magnet, a political, commercial and cultural giant. But each is at the same time home to millions of ordinary people, most of whom live not in Mayfair or the Faubourg Saint Honoré, Bloomsbury or the Quartier Latin, but in districts known only by name, if at all, even to their fellow Londoners or Parisians. Two such everyday metropolitan neighbourhoods are the subject of this book, which is to our knowledge the first Paris/London ‘tale of two cities’ ever recounted by social researchers.
