Historic London
An Explorer's Companion
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
There is hardly a city in the world with richer historical and cultural assocations than London. It is a place where history has been made for thousands of years, and where it is still being made today. It is not a city frozen in time, preserved in its ancient medieval pomp but a place that has been at or near the centre of national life for a thousand years and at the forefront of international political, cultural and economic history for each of the past five centuries. Here Stephen Inwood, bestselling author of A History of London, and a lifelong student of the city's rich and vibrant history, offers an explorer's guide to London's past. As you walk the streets of the capital, whether you live in the city or are just visiting it, Inwood will show you London's history all around you: stretches of Roman wall; medieval churches and Tudor houses that survived the Great Fire; monastic buildings that survived the Reformation; street markets first established centuries ago that survive today; Georgian streets and squares that were spared the wreckers' ball; Wren churches; Victorian terraces and Inns of Court that survived the Blitz. He takes you to the London of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Samuels Pepys and Johnson; Dickens and Darwin, T.S Eliot and George Orwell. It is the perfect book to have in your pocket or your bag as you go about your business in this most fascinating of cities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If one is going to walk through 1000-plus pages about a city, the guide had better be reliable and entertaining. Inwood, a lecturer at England's Thames Valley College, completely covers one of the millennium's major cities, but with somewhat more reliability than flair, albeit with a considered subtlety of thought and evenness of prose rare in a work of such length. As Roy Porter (England: A Social History) notes in his introduction, Inwood's London is a social London, and much of the book is spent recounting who did what when, and how much it cost them, from the Roman Londinium that waned as the empire did to the "Divided City" of 1965 to the present. He incorporates numerous short quotes, from Swift and Smollet to the builders, clerks and minor politicians who worked behind the city's scenes. But in the main, the book reads like the large-scale compendium of secondary sources and cullings from the public record that it is, rather than a thick description of the historically evolving qualities of London life. Although few will accompany Inwood straight through the entire trip (which he says was nine years in the preparation), the discrete chapters will be immensely useful to those to those seeking an evenhanded account of, say, the leisure activities of all classes in the 19th century or the developing London marketplace of the 14th and 15 centuries. History Book Club selection.