London: A Short History

Description

The structure of the book is chronological, with digressions. From Roman and then Norman London, we move on to Chaucer's London - the city of the Peasants Revolt, Dick Whittington and the great Livery Companies. In Tudor and Stuart London many believed the city was being wrecked by over-population, over-building and the greed of speculators. Eighteenth-century London witnessed the South Sea Bubble, gin, highwaymen and the Gordon riots; but also banking, hospitals, and the elegant design of everyday things. In the nineteenth century, expanding vigorously, the city resisted any overall make-over. With Queen Victoria came the Railway Age, which made and unmade the city. Chartism, anti-semitism, overcrowding and cholera. But engineering triumphs too. If the First World War was a nightmare happening elsewhere, the amazing six years of 1939-45 were the city's finest hour. Post-1945, property developers took over, with disastrous results. The author celebrates the cosmopolitan city that mobility and immigration have created, while deploring the moronization' of the city, exemplified by the Millennium

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950. He was Literary Editor of the SPECTATOR 1981-83 and the EVENING STANDARD 1990-97. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is the author of more than a dozen novels and several works of non-fiction

Wilson talks with passion and authority about architecture's effect on the populace * Independent on Sunday * What shines through is Wilson's love for the city and his anguish at what he sees as the missed opportunity of the post-war period * Mail on Sunday * A. N. Wilson's contribution is genuinely a short history, with the main text falling just shy of 150 pages, showing his customary lucidity and zest * Times Literary Supplement * His short history of the city ... offers a fresh and persuasive perspective ... With the same verve that we have come to expect from his newspaper columns, Wilson shows us how London has "entered a phase which is completely new" ... Wilson's history ... captures some of the city's energy, which crackles across its pages -- Alastair Sooke * Catholic Herald * Engaging ... As each era superimposes itself on the ones before, he conjures up the vanished human history, hidden like the rivers flowing beneath, that is so much part of London's atmosphere * Irish Times * In his analysis of contemporary London, he elegantly skips from property prices to shopping ... This is a history of London even for people who don't readily venture into history or London * Glasgow Herald * Tantalisingly excellent * Islington Tribune *