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This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern collossus. Roy Porter writes a whole life of this world-renowned place - from the grid streets and fortresses of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror to the medieval, walled "most noble city" of churches, friars, and crown and town relationships. Within the crenellated battlements, manufactures and markets developed and street-life buzzed, enlivened with the cries of hawkers and peddlers. People worked, talked, haggled, and relaxed in London's medieval streets, while craftsmen lived where they worked, nestled trade-by-trade in neighborhoods. London's profile in 1500 was much as it was at the peak of Roman power. The city owed its courtly splendor and national pride of the Tudor Age to the phenomenal expansion of its capital. It was the envy of foreigners, the spur of civic patriotism, and a hub of culture, architecture, and great literature and new religion. Tudor Londoners had an insatiable appetite for new workshops, yards and stores, and comfortable homes; and makeshift quarters for laborers from rural areas began to dot the rising city. London experienced a cruel civil war, fires, enlightenment in thought, government, and living, and the struggle and benefits of empire from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. From the lament that "London was but is no more" to "you, who are to stand a wonder to all Years and ages ... a phoenix," London became an elegant, eye-catching, metropolitan hub. It was a mosaic that represented the shared values of a people - both high and low born - at work and play. London was and is a wonder city, a marvel. Not since ancient times has there been such a city - not eternal, but vibrant, living, full of a free people ever evolving. As no one before him, Roy Porter captures the deep pulse of his hometown and makes it our own. London's fortunes, people, and imperial glory are recaptured with brio and wit. This is a transcendent book for all lovers of London, cities, and the habits and fortunes of peoples.… (more)
User reviews
Certainly he presents the evidence that London grew too fast and too big "like a fungus" and he details the social and human dimension of that massive growth - unstructured, uncontrolled and ungoverned. From the mobs, the riots the plagues and the Great Fire came an unruly tradition that was translated into a totally unplanned sprawl as the people moved up, and away, from the collapsing city's origins.
Given the published date it is appropriate that he concentrates on the hardness of the Margaret Thatcher policy years and the dreadful impact that such laissez faire, "market forces" led attitudes to the city's growingly desperate needs for public housing, transport and infrastructure. The industries that provided the employment - that provided the taxes and disposable income for the city's fitness and survival - fled to the provinces (or over-seas). The redevelopment, Porter explains, did nothing to resolve these problems as the jobs that were created were filled by transfer, the housing that was built was so `upscale' that the indigenous could not afford to live in it and the `gentrification' of the East End and London Docks only provided for the Thatcherites of the "greed is good" generation. Tourism is now how London survives as even its traditional money-based `service industries' evacuate the remaining centers, to internet-commute, diversify, down-size or are sold off to foreign interests.
Porter's pessimism then is perhaps justified? We must hope not ... as Dr. Johnson once remarked; London is life and its crumbling and dissolution would be our collective loss.