Up All Night - by Imogen Willetts (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From the glamorous depravity of Studio 54 to the underground cabarets of Weimar Berlin, from Georgian London's gaudy pleasure gardens to techno's beginnings in post-industrial Detroit, a brilliantly researched and celebratory history of nightlife, showing the fascinating and underappreciated evolution of how humans have gone out after dark

There is a specific energy to a Saturday night. Cafés and shops close their shutters. Market traders dismantle their wares. "The air begins to tingle", as John Dos Passos wrote about '20s New York. "If you drink enough, talk enough, walk far enough, the train of magical events will begin."

Nightlife began in the 17th century, when Edo and London built commercial environments designed for after-dark hedonism. Since then, nightlife has been at the frontier of popular culture and self-expression. It has defined cities and generations, bred moral panics and iconic countercultures, and gone from demimonde to global phenomenon, yet its sweeping history has been left untold.

Up All Night provides a guided tour of history's most captivating nights out--from the luxurious pleasure quarters of samurai-era Japan, to the saloons of turn-of-the-century New Orleans and the speakeasies of twenties Harlem. Whisking readers through underground dives, mega-clubs, raves and experimental cabarets, cultural historian Imogen Willetts takes us behind the velvet rope of history's hottest nightspots to show how they changed the world around us.

About the Author

Imogen Willetts is a historian and was Senior Creative Producer at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where she led its cultural programs of live events and festivals. This included leading the sell-out RA Lates series, after-hours gallery events that reimagined the nightlife behind iconic artistic movements, as well as an annual summer party that took inspiration from Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Imogen lectures in cultural and urban history at Kingston University's School of Art and at Central Saint Martins. Up All Night is her first book.