Most of these essays are developed from papers given at the seventh annual Literary London conference, ‘Liminal London: Country/City, Work/Leisure, Past/Future, and States Between’, organised by Brycchan Carey, Nick Hubble, Lawrence Phillips and Philip Tew; hosted by the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW) and the Department of English at Brunel University from 2nd - 4th July 2008 with financial support from the British Academy. The call for papers cited writers as diverse as William Cobbett and J.G. Ballard in order to sketch out a partial history of London’s liminality and included the following passage
