Just when you think you’ve met every eccentric in Stoke Newington, along comes another one: in this case, lifelong Stokey resident Dominic Greyer, professional film cameraman and a man so obsessed with unusual British place names that he spent five years of his leisure time photographing their signs. Er, strange, you might think, but the result is one of the funniest and, indeed, most poignant illustrated books I have come across for a long while.

Far from Dull is a small, landscape sized collection of black and white photographs (a text is unnecessary) of these wacky place names, with the humour partly in the names themselves but mainly in the adroit juxtaposition of the names on each spread. 

So you have Farewell (Lichfield) opposite Retire (Cornwall), Clench (Wiltshire) twinned with Six Mile Bottom (Cambridge) and Swine (Gloucestershire) nestling alongside Lower Slaughter (Yorkshire)… you get the idea. The pictures, however, are not mere snapshots; rather, they convey a sense of pathos and wistfulness, suggesting that even the signs themselves realise the ridiculousness of the names they are permanently forced to bear. And the composition of each picture appears, to my untrained eye, to be both professional and sympathetic, as if the photographer understands and empathises with the existential gloom of his subjects.
Growing up in the Highlands of Scotland, I never found Tongue (Sutherland) or Mid Yell (Shetland) even remotely funny.

In this book, they are. Likewise, someone hailing from Cuckoo’s Knob (Wiltshire) would probably not understand the odd snigger when mentioning their birthplace (particularly when it appears on the same spread as Dancing Dick’s (Essex)). Familiarity breeds indifference. But then you come across Labour In Vain Hill facing Gasper (both Wiltshire)…
Before I give too much away, I suggest you rush out and buy this book, a perfect Christmas present for all your anarchic and surrealistically-minded friends, who will find it a hoot.

Given the well - researched etymological history of each place name and the colour map of their locations at the end of the book, you could pretend it serves a serious educational purpose. But, really, it’s a rare example in contemporary British publishing of an original wit at work.

Far from Dull, Dominic Greyer, Sort Of Books, £8.99. ISBN 095 42217-7-X. Available from the award-winning Stoke Newington Bookshop and other inferior bookshops.

London Stories

By Anne Beech

I should declare an interest: in another life, I worked as Hilda Kean’s editor at Pluto Press, in the early 1990s. It was, as I remember, a bruising encounter for both of us. So I approached her new book, London Stories, with caution. I needn’t have worried.

London Stories is about Hilda’s family history – but it is also about everyone’s history, about the continued importance of a sense of self and place, about our own stories as much as her’s. In that much wider sense, it is a fascinating and haunting account of the ways in which she pieced together her own remarkable and yet unremarkable genealogy, through objects (her mother’s ‘stuff’, sorted as she moves to a retirement home), family anecdotes, official histories, graveyards, minute books and registrars’ record

Part detective story, part the work of a determined professional historian schooled in the honourable traditions of the History Workshop, and part, too, the homage of a daughter to a family she knew and the families she didn’t know but wanted to ‘bring into the present’ – as part of her past.

As an East Ender born and bred, Hilda traces her family back to the Black Country and Shropshire, possibly Germany, certainly the hopfields of Kent. Kean, the surname, was a semi-literate forebear’s misspelling of an earlier family name: Keen. Other family names – Mankelows, Eickes, Sallnows – weave through the narrative. 

Minor scandals – an aunt consigned to a lunatic asylum, an uncle, unacknowledged and dead at sixteen, possibly of epilepsy, the faintest suggestion of abuse - are countered by the respectable lives of people of modest means, slowly and steadily drawn to London as part of the great migration of the second half of the nineteenth century. No firebrands, perhaps, but a singular and intriguing ancestry none the less, given new life and resonance in Hilda Kean’s thoughtful and reflective account. 

Generations of silk-weavers, carriers, farmworkers, brickmakers, furniture makers and market gardeners populate a fascinating personal past – but also illuminate the history of a present-day London that belongs to all of us: the layers of what is personal and particular that make up our larger public history.

Hilda Kean, London Stories: Personal Lives, Public Histories (Rivers Oram, 2004) ISBN 1 85489 149 9 (£12.95) Available from good local bookshops or contact Rivers Oram Press, 144 Hemingford Road, London N1 1DE (020 7607 2776)