Queer City, Peter Ackroyd
Queer City, Peter Ackroyd
List: $20.99 | Sale: $14.70
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Queer City
Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Author: Peter Ackroyd

Narrator: Will Watt

Unabridged: 6 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 02/03/2026

Synopsis

In Queer City, the acclaimed Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way—through the complete history and experiences of its gay and lesbian population. In Roman Londinium, the city was dotted with lupanaria (“wolf dens” or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels), and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks, and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music, and the horror of AIDS. Ackroyd reveals the hidden story of London, with its diversity, thrills, and energy, as well as its terrors, dangers, and risks, and in doing so, explains the origins of all English-speaking gay culture.

About Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet, and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River, and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Nicolas on May 30, 2017

Some years ago, I started to read Ackroyd's biography of London. I went about half way through before giving up on it. It felt very light on facts but full of hot air, mostly smelling of shit and rotten produce, as I recall. Queer city is just the opposite: so crammed with facts that it becomes almos......more

Goodreads review by Will on January 31, 2018

This work of popular history, which attempts to chronicle the history of queer London, has its shining moments. Ackroyd loves scandal, and when he's in his element, Queer City is a page-turner. His liberal quoting from old ballads and his jaunty writing style give Ackroyd's work a nice clip. Unfortu......more

Goodreads review by Morgan on January 10, 2018

Having just moved to London, I decided to educate myself about my new city by picking up Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day. As a trans (pop) historian, there seemed no better way to get to know the streets and neighbourhoods of London than through its LGBT history. On the one......more

Goodreads review by Lottie from book club on June 25, 2020

mint throughout, and then at the end decided to be grumpy and pessimistic about where “we” are now as a “community” rather than happy that no one is being arrested, pilloried, murdered, ruined, ad naus anymore like they were for the previous 250 pages. weird flex dude......more

Goodreads review by rebecca on June 23, 2017

Feeling torn about this book – it both disappointed and pleasantly surprised me. On the one hand, the "queer history of London" is essentially a queer history of England with a lot of unknown street names thrown in, though Ackroyd does occasionally explore the link between urbanity and non-heterosex......more

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