Craig Taylor's first few months in London were not easy. The city's geography was unfathomable, and the climate was perplexing. Some of his encounters with natives -- a woman running a scam as a lost school girl, a strange man who greeted him on his way home constantly chattering "bruv, bruv, bruv" -- were uncomfortable.

But, when his work visa expired, the Canadian writer missed "the pure energy of it," Taylor writes in "Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now -- As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It."

"It was really tough at the beginning," Taylor says. "I remember looking around at all these people, and that neighborhood especially, Brixton, is a huge mix of people. I was curious about how these people lived and how one got by in a city like London."

"Londoners" is the culmination of five years of interviews Taylor conducted with the citizens of one of the world's most famed cities. His subjects include a street cleaner, a hairdresser and a publican, barristers and students, a plumber and a rickshaw driver. There are no official voices in "Londoners," although Taylor does include an insightful interview with Peter Rees, a city planning officer. An interview with London's mayor, Boris Johnson, while possibly insightful, would not have gotten into the marrow of London.

"I felt so lucky to go into this project and have people talking about love and hate," Taylor says.

One of the ideas that emerges from "Londoners" is the sense that the city is still growing. Settled in the first century A.D., the city does not yet have a feeling of permanence. As Rees, the city planner, states, "a finished city is a dead city" and grows strong because of its organic roots.

"Right now, I'm sitting in Washington, D.C., which is an interesting town and very pretty," Taylor says. "But as Peter says, it's a single-period planned city, and it will always have a different energy than a place like London, which is villages and a city of illogical twists and turns, a city of local knowledge, a city of mess. I think what I found in doing this book is there's a real celebration to be had in that mess. No one really knows how it moves along. As Rees says, you can't plan London; you just tend to it. He spoke those words, but a lot of other people in the book felt them."

London was first established as a settlement by the Romans, but has always been a melting pot. The Celts, Saxons and Danes of its first millennium have been replaced by Indians, Nigerians and other nationalities. The population, according to the Great Britain Historical G.I.S, was approximately 7.8 million in 2010, making it the most populous city in the European Union.

But there remains a tribal aspect. Some of the people Taylor interviewed spoke of rivalries between neighborhoods, even on different sides of the same street. Taylor suspects this is not an uncommon occurrence.

"I"m sure you know that in Pittsburgh, people know their neighborhoods," Taylor says, "and, in London, the compass points are always going to be important because, historically, they've denoted so many things: the affluent West, the working-class East. They do mean a lot. You move (to London), and you migrate to the part that suits you."

As London prepares for the Summer Olympics, it is undergoing another facelift. Construction projects dot the landscape, and city officials expect the games to be a boon to economic development. But Taylor found at least one character who could have come from any century and might embody what London has always been. Joe John Avery, a street cleaner, struck the author as a character "who could have been living in London Dickens' time."

"He had this street-level view of it," Taylor says, "and I think he was able to put into words this idea that London and its markets are always shucking stuff off. There's always stuff left over. It moves through so much, it sloughs off so much. If you do think of it as an organic beast, somehow, that's what happens: It consumes, it makes a mess, it keeps going. I definitely think there's a regenerative quality there."

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Capsule review

The title -- 'Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now -- As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It' -- might be a bit unwieldy. But everything else about Craig Taylor's oral history of London is engaging, a treasury of compact vignettes from voices that are rarely heard but come closer to the truth of the city than any travel brochure or official document.

• Rege Behe

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