Victorian Cities

Victorian Cities is perhaps the most admired of Asa Briggs’s Victorian Trilogy, dealing with the life, politics, and culture of very different cities: the English cities of Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham. Middlesbrough, and London, and Melbourne in Australia, which he describes as a ‘Victorian Community Overseas’.


This iBook has specially taken photographs and recent video interviews with Lord Briggs at his home in Sussex, in which he talks about writing the original book when he was a professor at the University of  Leeds. 


The cities in the Victorian era were noted for their burgeoning civic pride, the development of the railways, and the spreading of suburbia; public health became an issue, as did the provision of libraries and culture for the working population. Local government versus government from Westminster was a contention in the provinces, and with London’s expanding population going from around 2 million to 6.5 million new forms of governing the city were crucial.


No other historian gives us the breadth and depth, and at the same time the human face, of cities.