This publication explores a history of 'public pleasures' that arose in the Edgware Road neighbourhood, starting from the 19th century to the present, documenting social shifts on the street and the surrounding areas. Arab, Iranian, Irish, Kurdish and other businesses and groups produced a particular history of film, video, music and street life that often clashed with existing legal and proprietary structures. A tumultuous few decades of these struggles form the heart of this book, offering on the one hand, images and narratives of a pleasure filled Dionysian street-life, and on the other tales of bureaucratic containment that limit and regulate various emergences of public life.