An aural education to London after dark

British writer and academic Matthew Beaumont takes a stroll through the shadowy streets of London in his new book Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. A historical guide to the capital, Beaumont details everything including the 'villainous' common nightwalkers and prostitutes of the middle ages and Charles Dickens’s time as an insomniac – where he would trek through the city in the wee hours, turning his travels into an essay titled Night Walks. Below, Beaumont guides us through the city’s soundscape – from drinking coffee with Jarvis at Soho's Bar Italia to pumping your body full of narcotics with Dave the Drummer.

THE CLASH – "FIRST NIGHT BACK IN LONDON"

“'To see my lovely town / That always brings you down.' Originally scheduled to appear on Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg, the double album that finally got boiled down into Combat Rock, this song describes a ride back from Heathrow in a taxi cab which is promptly stopped and searched by the police. It's a pared-back, dubby track with a crepuscular, if not dystopian, atmosphere.”

PULP – "BAR ITALIA"

“'You can't go home and go to bed because it hasn't worn off yet...' Jarvis Cocker reconstructs the nights in which he wandered around the streets of central London after the clubs had closed and ended up drinking coffee, as the sun rose, at Bar Italia in Soho, 'where the other broken people go'. With characteristic subtlety, he stirs memories of both the insecurities of this insomniac existence and his fragile sense of solidarity with others in the same undead condition.”

FRANK SINATRA – "LONDON BY NIGHT"

“'Lovers love London at night,' Sinatra croons. His version of Carroll Coates's song is sentimental, of course, and its cityscape of river, parks and squares is picture-postcard central London, but there's a delicious, almost post-coital laziness to its mood that makes it deeply evocative – as if these lovers have tumbled out of bed at twilight and sauntered out into streets softened by lamplight.”

KATE TEMPEST – "BAD PLACE FOR A GOOD TIME"

“The poet and rapper Kate Tempest, who grew up in Peckham, conjures up the atmospherics of late nights and early mornings in South London – the mist and the mess – with an exquisite sense of sadness. ‘Good Place for a Bad Time’, she sings too.”

DENNIS BOVELL – "MANHUNTER"

“One of the mighty Dennis Bovell's instrumental tracks for the film Babylon (which features some remarkable compositions from Aswad, before they embraced Top of the Pops). Distinguished by its plangent saxophone part, this is the haunting score to Brinsley Forde's nightwalk in Brixton, which ends with him being chased through the local streets and estates, then beaten up by racist cops.”

DAVE THE DRUMMER – "ONE NIGHT IN HACKNEY"

“'This is the story of a young man who visited London for the first time...' The young man in question wanders for hours through 'the urban sprawl' before coming across an abandoned warehouse throbbing with beats. He pumps himself full of ecstasy, ketamine, speed and cocaine, and stays there till Monday. A relentless techno track that conjures up the rave scene in East London with almost monomaniacal intensity.”

THE POGUES – "RAINY NIGHT IN SOHO"

“Here, Shane MacGowan recalls sheltering from the rain with his lover while 'the wind was whistling all its charms'. It's a sentimental song, with rather lush orchestration and a ghostly trumpet, but it's as soaked in regret and a sense of tragic loss as it is in cheap Irish whiskey.”

LAURA MARLING – "NIGHT TERROR"

“'I woke up on a bench on Shepherd's Bush Green...' Sounding not unlike P.J. Harvey, Laura Marling floats through a mysterious, fragmentary story about being trapped in a nightmarish, somnambulant state. An eerie, if not terrifying song, which mixes sex and death to toxic and unsettling effect.”

POET AND THE ROOTS – "FIVE NIGHTS OF BLEEDING (FOR LEROY HARRIS)"

“'5 nights of horror and of bleeding...,' Linton Kwesi Johnson intones in this brooding evocation of the desperate, cutthroat character of nightlife for London's persecuted black community in the late 1970s. The third night is set outside the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, on an occasion when a soul night at this music venue erupted into violence as skinheads and the police attacked the clubbers.”

CRYSTAL FIGHTERS – "I LOVE LONDON"

“'I wanna go to the friends' party, the friends' party / In Willesden, Harlesden, Watford Junction, Junction, Junction.' An irresistible buzz-saw beat drives this track, the joyous energy of which is so crazy and uncontainable it threatens to propel the listener through these north-west London locations to far beyond the orbit of the M25.”

Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, published by Verso, is available from 9 March