Diamond Street

Diamond Street
Diamond Street
01/01/2016 Rachel Lichtenstein

Diamond Street: The Hidden World of Hatton Garden

(Hamish Hamilton, 2012)

Diamond Street intimately describes London’s secretive and mysterious jewellery quarter. In this ‘fascinating’ and ‘sparkling book’ you’ll meet diamond dealers and goldsmiths, jewellers and lapidaries as well as sewer flushers, artists, geologists and visionaries such as Iain Sinclair, as Rachel Lichtenstein reveals the history and stories that bring this vibrant Clerkenwell street and its environs to life. Intimately connected to the area both personally (through family) and professionally (as an archivist of London streets), Lichtenstein is uniquely placed to explore the extraordinary stories of this historic part of old London. She visits the London diamond bourse, underground gold vaults and Dickensian-looking jewellery workshops, as well as subterranean rivers, ancient burial sites and medieval crypts.

  • ‘Diamond Street is a brilliant and moving book, intricate in its form and fabulous in its curiosity. It is poised somewhere between deep history, archaeological dig, archive-quest and contemporary documentary, and it is suffused throughout with Rachel Lichtenstein’s fascination with people and place – a fascination which approaches a moral quality, really, in its tenderness, diligence and cultural openness.’
    Robert Macfarlane
  • 'As a transcriber of enthused and warm-hearted interviews, Lichtenstein strikes a tone somewhere between the Victorian Henry Mayhew and 20th century Manhattan’s unsurpassed characterful reporter Joseph Mitchell.’
    The Forward
  • 'Pursuing her quest for the essence of the place... she creates a syncopated momentum that shifts between the personal perspective and the grand picture of history... Lichtenstein’s book is an overwhelming trove of stories with a multiplicity of facets to intrigue.'
    The Observer
  • 'Lichtenstein has brought alive something of London… how one street can be a kind of Tardis, a portal to another world of parallel commerce, codes, rituals, history.'  
    The Times
  • 'A fascinating examination of the area’s famously insular diamond trade... the great joy of Lichtenstein’s books is that she encourages us to look again at the places we take for granted.'
    Saturday Telegraph
  • ‘The oral historian Rachel Lichtenstein, one of the few prominent female figures operating within the fuzzily defined field of contemporary psychogeography... finds in the Hatton Garden workshops... the fragmented narratives that, allied with diligent archival trawls, she assembles into this fascinating and much-needed account.’
    The Guardian
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