“Streets of London” was written by the English folk singer Ralph McTell. It grew out of his experiences busking and hitchhiking around Europe, especially in Paris, and the individual stories in the song are taken from Parisians. McTell planned to call it “Streets of Paris,” but settled on London once he realised that was whom he was singing about; another song, “The Poor People of Paris,” was also in the way.
McTell left it off his debut album, Eight Frames a Second, because he thought it too depressing, and recorded it only when his producer Gus Dudgeon persuaded him, for his second album, Spiral Staircase, in 1969. He re-recorded it for a UK single in 1974. That record reached number two on the British singles chart, at one point sold 90,000 copies a day, and won him the 1974 Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.
The lyric is a set of portraits. The singer asks whether you have seen the old man shuffling through a closed-down market, the woman who walks the streets with everything she owns in carrier bags, the man sitting alone in an all-night cafe making a cup of tea last an hour, and the old man outside the seamen’s mission with a medal ribbon on his coat. The refrain answers someone who claims the sun does not shine for them: the singer offers to take them by the hand and lead them through those streets.
Roger Whittaker recorded a version in 1971, and McTell has noted that there are 212 known recorded versions. Tony Rice sang it on his 1983 Sugar Hill album Church Street Blues, where it sits alongside songs by Bill Monroe, Bob Dylan, Jimmie Rodgers and Norman Blake.
