Product Description

Like all the great historic cities of Europe, London appears to us solid and unchanging. We feel that we can still explore the London of Dickens, Dr. Johnson, Defoe, Wren and even Shakespeare. The very names St Paul's, Smithfield, Charing Cross, St James's, seem to link us with those past eras. But this solidity is an illusion, for throughout its long history London has been changing and evolving. It has been renewing or replacing the streets and buildings at its heart and has been spreading inexorably outwards. This process is vividly illustrated by maps of London that have been drawn and published over the past 500 years; and this book offers a magnificent panorama of London's history by focusing on its maps. The link between London and Westminster; the devastation of the Great Fire; the emergence of the West End as a place of fashion; the opening of the Royal Parks; the building of the docks; the coming of the railway age; the impact of World Wars - all these processes and many more are evident in these historic maps. Approximately 200 important maps from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day are illustrated and discussed. For all those who know London, but who wish to look behind the modern facade, "London, A Life in Maps" should prove irresistible, highlighting the challenge of predicting London's future development and character.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5444 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-17
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

About the Author
Peter Whitfield is a former director of Stanford's International Map Centre. His eight previous books (all published by the British Library) are The Image of the World; The Mapping of the Heavens; The Charting of the Oceans; New Found Lands; Landmarks in Western Science; Astrology; Sir Francis Drake and Cities of the World.

Customer Reviews

Treasures to delight the eye and illuminate the mind
I love maps and I love London: what a combination!

This book is a companion to the exhibition held at the British Library in 2006-07. The book is split into four sections - London before the Great Fire, the age of elegance, the Victorian metropolis, and the shock of the new - and each section has a page or sometimes two pages devoted to particular aspects of each theme. Thus we have various maps and plans of the Tower and Westminster Abbey mixed with representations of Civil War London in the first section; and visions of Wembley and the Festival of Britain in the final section.

The result is akin to a visual version of Peter Ackroyd's biography of the city. You can dip into this marvellous publication at various points and find treasures to delight the eye and to illuminate the mind, be the maps and plans devoted to the underground, Belgravia, Wren's plans for the post-Fire city or Tudor Smithfield. Each page is concise and self-contained, but, taken as a whole, the vision is panoramic.

As one would expect from a publication by the British Library, the quality of impressive. As well as reproductions of maps and plans, there are also engravings, paintings and photographs to enliven the page. Peter Whitfield's commentary is wise and engaging. He is not afraid to comment on the brutalist tendencies of the post-war era, and his text is the perfect accompaniment to the image presented.

No quibbles? Well, there are two: firstly, although detailed catalogue references are given to the illustrated maps, some maps are surprisingly without a date (for example the map of Epping Forest on page 164). My second quibble - I want these maps!

interesting but slightly annoying.
I also love London and love maps, and found this book interesting and informative. However it was possibly not very well edited as on at least three occasions I came across facts that had been given a few pages before. This repetition gave the feeling of the book having been written by several different authors and was almost a collection of short essays rather than a complete piece. Given the title it seemed odd that at least half the illustrations were pictures or photographs rather than maps or plans.

life in maps
This book is very interesting following the history of London via various maps. The prose is very accessible. It remains a useful reference book.