Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City

by Ana Kinsella

This is a book about the joy of city life. The joy that comes from chance encounters, unexpected sights and sounds, glimmers of beauty flashing out from the grey and the rush of the everyday. The mix of people, shoulder to shoulder, sunbathing in parks, having a coffee, jumping on a bus, daydreaming on a bench. From this theatre of life, from this thrum of activity and private spots of solitude, can be drawn inspiration, emotion, memory.

Exploring the delight to be found in everyday interactions and chance observations, Look Here will chart an affecting map of London, navigating ideas of anonymity and identity, freedom and space (and who has access to these things), and community, while reflecting on whether the never-ending carousel of clothing we see on strangers holds some deeper meaning.

Wherever she goes, Ana Kinsella looks around her with a keen eye for small, illuminating details, and a love for variety and emotional connection. Look Here is a gorgeous, layered portrait of a city and its people, a book that urges us to slow down, look closer and find beauty.

Genres: Nonfiction, London, Travel, Essays, Cities

240 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2022

Reviews

[Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walking the City
Review of the Daunt Books paperback edition (May 2022)

I very much enjoyed reading Ana Kinsella's essay Wayfinding about London city walking and observing in the non-fiction literary journal collection of TOLKA Issue 1 (May 2021) and made a note to watch for the full-length book Look Here, which is now also published.

Look Here travels further afield than just London and includes Kinsella's observations of her home city Dublin, life in New York City, life in Palermo, etc. as well. So it also functions as somewhat of a memoir including stories of her earlier career as a fashion and style writer. I particularly enjoyed the passage about the Passeggiata in Palermo, Sicily:

'Passeggiata' is the Italian word for the leisurely, pleasurable stroll taken in the golden light of the evening. It is a social activity. This is not a stroll taken for health or exercise so much as an opportunity to see your friends, and to be seen by all and sundry. Interactions that might usually take place in private homes, or at least in semi-private spaces such as restaurants or bars, are part of the public realm here. If you find yourself on a busy Italian street just before dinnertime, especially on a Sunday evening, you'll notice that people dress up for passeggiata. They make the most of the flattering evening light in the clothes they want to show off. If you are a tourist who ends up in the melee on her way to grab a beer in her shorts and sandals, skin sticky with old sunscreen, well, you're going to feel a little underdressed.

Look Here includes extended essays, 'regular' people interviews, short observational vignettes about observing city life and style throughout. It also has somewhat of a celebratory air for the return to mostly normal city life after the ravages of the pandemic, although it also observes the deserted city streets during the worst of it. Anyway, I'm a bit biased in my 5-star rating for its being somewhat of a journal for that era, for being a memento of what and whom we lost, but also for the knowledge of what and whom we still have and love.

Trivia and Links
Ana Kinsella wrote a recent newspaper column introduction to her book Look Here at the Irish Times, June 22, 2022.

There is a combined review and interview at A London Walk with Ana Kinsella by Madeleine Feeny, The London Magazine, May 31, 2022.

Ana Kinsella also writes a blog with her occasional views of style and city-spotting at The London Review of Looks (Note: that's LOOKS, not BOOKS).

[Georgia · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don't want to repeat every other review of this book by calling it 'a meditative ode to the city' but what else is there to say? i hope one day i become friends with ana and we can eat olives at noble rot together and she can explain to me what palimpsest means

[Luiza Fundătureanu · Rating 3 out of 5]

My boyfriend bought this book for himself when we were in London but while in the tube, I got bored and started reading it. I finished it being back in Brussels and it prolonged my London trip with its tales. It's basically a memoir of a girl that made her life in busy, beautiful and unique London. It's a so called ode for the city and the lives we built in them. Sometimes I wished I knew London better to be able to grasp all feelings the author was explaining on the different streets, corners and squares. She is a great observant of people and places that explores her city as much as I did myself moving to Brussels. It was a nice read to remember that!

[Sara Aylward-Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reflective, meditative book about the way we see our cities (especially London), the people who make them, and ourselves. This book is carefully, delicately written that although I would already describe myself as someone who people watches as I was reading it I realised I had begun to notice people more-the way they dressed and interacted with the world around them.

A subtle, nuanced and tender exploration of cities, from the mundane to the gargantuan effects and the complicated beauty of making your home in one.

[Lulufrances · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actual rating 4,5

If you visit London and there's just space for one single book to take back home with you, make sure it's this one. (I managed to squeeze six new books into my carry on, but not everyone has my talents, or my priorities.)
If you want to be extra cool, pick up your copy from Daunt Books in Marylebone, also the publisher of it. (Or from the Tate Modern museumshop, as I did, not wanting to wait for my visit to Daunt Books.)

Look Here will on the one hand prolong your London trip vibes but on the other make you browse skyscanner for the next cheap flights back so you can follow in Kinsella's footsteps and meander through the city on foot, eyes wide open, noticing all the details that make London London and with special attention to fashion.

It's a soothing narration, and I know many before me have used that word to describe this book, but it really feels that way. I was also alternately reading and checking Ana Kinsella's instagram feed with it's idiosyncratic cool London literature-girlie-vibes with equally cool and stylish friends and meals around ladden tables – you know the type – and googling the people she interviews in between chapters.

Right up my alley, this one.

[Katerina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best read of 2022 so far.

[Sophie Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. So brilliant. Ana is one of my favourite writers about cities and clothes and people.

[Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started reading this back in June and just now finished it. I really, really want to love this book but for whatever reason it jut didn't suck me in. I think the concept is maybe better for a longform journalism format instead of a book but that's just me. The thing is it really was a nice and reflective read! I really like how Kinsella picked up on the tiniest details and I think she is a good writer. She does have me yearning to move to London. Also I stalked her Instagram and wow she has such good style lol.

[Vesna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an enjoyable introspection on walking through and observing a city, considering the way that urban life puts you in intimate contact with thousands of strangers and their hopes/worries/dreams/etc. I was really looking forward to the book, but it did fall a smidge flat for me. At times it felt a bit too meandering, too unmoored for my taste. It passed through issues of race, fashion, pandemic, privatization, etc, but nothing really seemed to tie the whole thing together, except the theme of walking. I recognize that this might have been intentional, but my own preference would have been for some more grounding, perhaps in historical events or even just some more sustained attention or conclusions about the subjects at hand. Still, Kinsella’s writing is beautiful and full of excellent turns of phrase. I look forward to seeing how her writing develops and will be eager to see where her career takes her.

[Aysia · Rating 4 out of 5]

a book written by an irish woman with the kinsella family name who moved to london for grad school and also lived in new york…..

if u love london this is a nice little book about walks through the city, sometimes a little cheesy but london is a city meant to be romanticized i fear

[Madeline Prebble · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really connected with some elements of this book - the notes about small details London life in particular. Didn’t connect as much with the pandemic chapters or the fashion interview sections

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this. It’s what I was hoping Flaneuse would be a few years ago - with the added reflections on city life brought about by the last two years.

[Kate McGhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good in parts, and I really wanted to like it, but I found it quite difficult to connect with this book, as demonstrated by it being one of those back burner books for four months. It was a book I put down often. There was a lot of first person and no discernible structure. “No destination, no purpose, just looking”

While I picked up interesting cultural fragments like passegiata, the changing nature of the fashion industry and the interviews with a transport worker and photographer, for me, it didn’t hang together. It was more like an anthology of hit and miss blog posts or magazine articles.

[Agata · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is not a book about “joy of city” as the blurb on the cover claims. More like musings of a young neurotic girl on, well, everything but mostly fashion. I am not sure why to think about these complete pointless interviews with random people where the author asks very naive questions (about clothes) and gets similarly dull answers.
What a waste of time.

[Jimena · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that will inspire you and change the way you navigate the city.

[Venky · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Look Here” is a candid, studied and panegyric tribute to a city that pulsates unceasingly and is a clash of spectacular contrasts. Journalist and author Ana Kinsella’s London, while home to approximately 9 million, is neither pedestrian nor patient. Delightful and decadent at the same time, London attracts and repels. An absolute paradise for people wishing to traverse the city using their feet, the prosaic nooks and profound crannies of this wonderful city is trod upon by Kinsella, who methodically records not just turns of weather, but also the evolution of human mores in lockstep with time.

As London embraces Kinsella drop by informed drop, it also gets irrevocably assimilated into her, drip by experiential drip. Interspersed with field notes and punctuated by interviews with a variegated inhabitant of the city, Look Here is an unabashed ode to public life and private reflections. One of her interviewers, a fashion designer takes unbridled delight in dressing herself in voluminous and bloated dresses and navigating a packed underground, taking up considerable space in addition to accumulating the ire of many a troubled co-passenger.

The beauty of the book lies in prising out the layers of delightful intricacy that are otherwise enveloped in and ignored as the ordinary. For example, Kinsella alludes to the concept of “Going Time”. Going time simply refers to the countless number of hours spent in traveling in various modes of public transport, queuing up in interminably long lines and spending prolonged bouts of time in planning and scheduling. Yet it is going time that shapes one’s character and lends meaning to the mundane. ‘At a bus stop, my laptop heavy in the tote bag on my shoulder. Walking through Soho after work, weaving in and out of clumps of advertising executives and film people clutching their clammy pints on the pavement. In a dark pub awaiting the arrival of a friend—trying not to watch the door for her entrance, trying to focus on my book….’ All, quintessential examples of Going Time.

Kinsella reminisces on moments of clear and present danger. While heading to the rest room in a pub once she is accosted by a voyeur. ‘I look up, and over the top of the cubicle divider, a man’s face is visible. He holds a phone in one hand, and I hear the artificial click of the phone’s camera,’ she writes. She also pays meticulous attention to the myriad clothes the teeming populace of London is clad in. Not surprising since one of her primary journalistic tasks was covering fashion. Long blue gingham dresses and fine two-piece grey suits share space with scruffy track suit bottoms and coats entirely covered in sequins that fade from violet to magenta.

COVID-19 in more ways than one threw sand in the gear of the phenomenon called walking. Otherwise, bustling venues such as Oxford Circus were reduced to quiet and doleful centres of inactivity. ‘The archetypal city scene, pedestrians striding across the five-way scramble intersection at Oxford Circus with such determination—all gone. No buses now, and only the odd car. And nobody else around barring me and two cyclists, all of us turning incredulous loops in the middle of the road, cameras held aloft in some blank reverie.’

Look Here is also finding oneself and one’s purpose in a city. Whether it be traversing the vast expanse of picturesque Hampstead Heath, a breathtaking expanse of 790 acres that has served as inspiration for many an artist, and literary doyen or the cluttered and cramped Smithfield Market where meat trading commences at an ungodly hour of 2.00 A.M before concluding at an otherwise transitional time of 8.00 A.M. every place has a lesson to impart and a story to tell.

Acclaimed travel writer and critic, Jonathan Raban was a mesmeric chronicler of life in the cities. In his own compellingly poetic words, ‘Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture’.

Ana Kinsella does more than supplement and corroborate the notions of Raban. She adds her own layer of complexity and authenticity which paves the door open for some serious, yet playful exploration.

[Kristelle Batchelor · Rating 4 out of 5]

As somebody who thrives in a city, this book perfectly captures the simple pleasures of existing in an urban setting. For as long as I can remember, nothing makes my heart race faster than seeing skyscrapers, city lights, and all the noise and buzz that come with it. The author shared her experiences of living in both New York City and London—two cities that are, for me, holds the quintessential essence of how city living is. She also shed light on how it is to move to a place you didn’t grow up in but feels like you belong there all along.

This is both a memoir and storytelling of other people’s lives at once. Here she included interviews of city dwellers from different walks of life, as well as some of her mere observations while walking through certain parts of London. It’s basically a visual walkthrough of the city. London is a place I grew up reading about in young adult novels and being able to visit it now as an adult, this book accurately voiced out how I feel towards it.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book, and would probably give it 4.5/5 stars. As someone who has also moved to London and tried to make it my home, it is very relatable and captures the nuances of enjoying living in London whilst also finding it challenging sometimes. One big take I had was that your experience of this city is dependent upon what you choose to notice and appreciate. It is beautifully written and I think she writes about many sensitive topics really well, such as the pandemic, privilege, money, loneliness and community, fashion and your image, and mental health and therapy. One of my only critiques is that most of the interviews were not interesting to me and I thought they didn’t add anything to the book; maybe if there was some analysis written based on the responses I would have understood why they were there. But overall an enjoyable read, which I have just bought for my sister as I think she will relate to it as well.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was chosen by my local book club for August. I read a lot of travel books so was excited to read this one. But after a couple of chapters in, my excitement began to wain somewhat.

Yes I agree that this book does portray the joy that the author finds in the city of London, but more often than not, it is her random thoughts that are being written down. I didn’t like the interviews with random people that were threaded throughout the book, nor did I see the need to include ‘Filed Notes’’.

I have rounded my rating up to 3 stars, as whilst I didn’t really enjoy what the author was saying, I did think that the quality of her writing was good. Overall I was disappointed with this book, but I am looking forward to hearing what other people thought, especially noting that this book has got 4+ stars from other readers.

[Lucy Condon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I found this book strangely soothing! Effectively a collection of observations and musings from the author on her travels around London but widened out to other destinations and events in her life as she reflects on what she sees and experiences - so we also end up at the Lido, in NYC and Sicily briefly as well. It is still rather London-centric despite this however having done a stint in the Capital then the book took me straight back to those years. In a parallel universe I had wandered the streets of London taking photos for many an hour and so I could relate to that feeling of giving yourself up to the City to see what you could find.

I am not sure if the interviews with others added much to the book? Also there was an undertone of plot is which ai did not care for and thought spoilt the essence of the book, but otherwise I enjoyed the meander with Ana.

[McKenzie Millican · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this while in London because I thought the premise sounded like a good fit for my whirlwind trip there. And look - I like moody observations about places I’ve been. I (barely, but) have a newsletter about places I’ve been. But I think the author had an idea for an essay and not an idea for a book. I felt the book had a lot of showing AND telling - she’d describe a scene that would evoke certain feelings or imply her interpretation of the scene, and then in the next breath say “this thing made me feel X”. Anyways - maybe I’m just touchy because I read this book and thought “hmm, I feel like this is how I write” and also thought “hmm, I don’t think this is very skilled writing” so perhaps I’m projecting and need to become a better writer myself. Whoops!

[Ana Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went into this book expecting to learn more about London and the benefits that walking through a city. Well, the book did provide that, no really scientific points were actually made and that was something that I was looking forward to but the author did made their case in terms of the different perspectives and things that she has learn not only in London but also in other cities that she has learned and that was content that I did enjoyed reading.

Something that might be a plus for some people was the fashionable take on clothes and designs that the author has throughout the book, while not bad is simply not something that is a major interest for me.

So while I’m happy that I read this book, it was an interesting read, I don’t believe that it will be something that I will rush into a reread any time soon.

[Lauren Myatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of this book are gorgeous with piercing and quiet observations about life in London. It made me remember why I’m so obsessed with the city and want to get out and explore even more areas. I particularly liked the concept of ‘Going Time’ and the field notes on different seasons.

Didn’t love: I would have preferred if the pandemic featured less prominently and didn’t realise this from the blurb (I would read another book by the author set in a different context), the interviews section - many of the questions felt repetitive, the ‘At Trafalgar Square’ chapter and protest observations felt quite condescending.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

cozy, relatable, beautiful snippets of city life in London. :) people recommended this in haley nahman's maybe baby newsletter when haley was preparing for a solo trip to London, so I started reading this during my solo trip in London! Finished the last 1/3 of it on Christmas morning and easily got sucked back in.

One note would be that the interviews with other people can break me out of the story, it would be nice to preface the interviews with more context: who are these people, why share their story?

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book subtly reminds one to appreciate the little things in life. It withholds beautiful observations of a Londoner exploring the vast city. The reader is placed in a position to be awe-inspired; by nuances of the present, opportunities in front of our eyes and by the things least expected. Great or small, this book captures moments we too often look over, and romanticizes the beauty of now.

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book about finding a city and yourself along the way. A flaneur’s eye meets a journalist’s writing. The writing was so brilliantly concise. The narrative pace akin to the pace of a long city walk, scenes changing constantly but the interconnected is felt. Aside from being a nice overview of life in London, the author really captures the loneliness of constructing a nuanced love for a city which visitors can’t truly share or grasp, and the totality of falling in love with a place.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking stream of consciousness love letter to London and the minutiae of city living generally. The perfect book to make you fall in love with London again and notice new things in your own "private city." I also loved Ms. Kinsella's observations on privately owned public spaces, which I will carry with me as I explore places like Coal Drops Yard and Battersea Power Station (and all the other future developments to come).

[Niamh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few years ago, a therapist asked me what was stopping me from moving out of the house I grew up in and to London, where my industry is based. It came down to two things - money and fear. The money problem hasn't been solved, but reading 'Look Here' reminded me that I don't have that fear anymore. And what may seem scary and unsure and odd to an outsider, really, is something different. I felt so calm reading this book, it's just wonderful

[Becky Bowler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love Daunt Books on Marylebone High St in London, where I bought this book, and Daunt are the publishers. It's one of my very favorite books that I've read in several years. While ostensibly about London, the "essays" are about so much more. This is the kind of book that leaves you thinking long after you put it down. Highly recommend.

[Hannah-Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

(H) This book was the perfect welcome to London book to read on the tube. It’s meditative and introspective, poetic and observant, and so beautifully written. I can’t wait to read it again in a year and see how my perspective on London has changed. Highly recommend to anyone with ties to London, or anyone who lives in any city and wants to ponder the lives of those around you.