Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-207) and index.

Preliminary material -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: Chorography—Antiquarianism and the Epistemology of Place -- Chapter 2: ‘Inconstant Rabble’—Renaissance Dramas, Queenborough, Political Imaginaries -- Chapter 3: War Stories, 1667–1942 -- Chapter 4: Estuary Gothic and the Modern Metropolis -- Chapter 5: Estuarine Sociology and the Making of an Underclass -- Chapter 6: ‘Eating Gull since Friday’—Estuary Grotesque, Seaside Noir -- Chapter 7: The Estuary Writes Back -- Postscript—Post Brexit -- Select Bibliography -- Index of People -- Index of Subjects and Places.

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Writing London and the Thames Estuary is an ambitious study of place and identity which resonates deeply against the troubled politics of contemporaneity. Drawing on a broad range of cultural materials including novels, film, theatre, tourist literature, topography, chorology and sociological writing, Len Platt traces the making of the estuary as margin by a metropolis that has been dependent on this region, sometimes for its very survival. Drawing on writers and artists ranging from Middleton, Defoe, Pepys, Dickens, Conrad and T.S. Eliot through to such contemporary figures as Iain Sinclair, Nicola Barker, Tracy Emin and Billy Childish, Platt offers a fascinating insight into the formation of ‘estuary grotesque’, the social dismissal out of which post-Brexit politics have emerged to such controversy.