Will Self, sloppy and wrong
My friend Russ Willey has written the London Gazetteer, a brilliant book which explores all of the lesser known nooks and crannies of this city. Russ is a life-long obsessive about ‘Hidden London‘, and if ever someone was born to write a book like this, he was.
On October 12, Will Self wrote the following in his Evening Standard column:
HOW COULD THEY FORGET TOKYNGTON?
IT IS with sadness that I censure the London Gazetteer. This handylooking tome was sent to me by its publisher, Chambers. It claims to be “An A-Z guide to the famous and hidden quarters of Britain’s capital”. However, the very first quarter I looked up, Tokyngton, wasn’t in it.I myself have never actually been to Tokyngton but I’ve often noted its peculiar name while perusing my bog-ordinary A-Z map. Now it’s been so unjustly neglected by Chambers I feel an almost insuperable urge to travel to what a website describes as “the most populated part of Harrow”, albeit in the medieval era. The “farm of the sons of Toca” was first mentioned in 1171, so it seems rather shabby that it doesn’t make it into Chambers’s Gazetteer 900-odd years later.
Except that, er, Tokyngton is actually right there in the book, and fills nearly half a page between the entries for Three Mills and Tollington. Perhaps Will Self is alphabetically-challenged, but you’d think he and an editor would have double-checked this claim before slamming a book whose success depends on being viewed as comprehensive and authoritative. Having had the error pointed out, no correction has been issued by Self or the Evening Standard.
Sadly, it’s not likely that as many people will read any correction as have read the original, prominent damning column - even if Self does the right thing and makes the correction in his next column.
If you are interested in the obscure corners of London, I would urge you to check out a copy of the London Gazetteer. Russ has worked very hard on it for the last several years, and it shows. It’s a brilliant gift for anyone who thinks they know London like the back of their hand, or who wishes they did.
Good on yer, Jackie. This is something that drives me mad about newspapers in the UK: they don’t just print untruths, they build articles, editorials, whole freakin’ campaigns around them.
Earlier today I was going to link to P Z Myers of Pharyngula and noticed that he uses an article about him from (what I might be incorrectly assuming is) a provincial US newspaper as his blog profile. Not only was it accurate enough in the first place for him to do that, but they took the trouble in it to correct their error in it of reporting that he was named after his father rather than his grandfather. Can you imagine a paper in the UK doing that?