Product Description

This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance. Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance - commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92627 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Sally Cousins, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH (19.6.05)
'this is an enthralling history of the urban world of the 1800s.'

Review
'this is an enthralling history of the urban world of the 1800s.' (Sally Cousins SUNDAY TELEGRAPH (19.6.05) )

David Kynaston, FINANCIAL TIMES MAGAZINE (19.6.04)
'Hunt's grasp of architectural, intellectual and high cultural history is assured.'

Customer Reviews

Interesting topic, badly conveyed
I bought Hunt's book because I'm interested in urban history. However, I was assured by other readers that this was an accessable book. I found this not to be the case in fact. It's too academic, and I feel at times Hunt is grappling with confused arguments in his own head. Rather like thinking aloud, but rather awkwardly. Which is apt really, since this is a rather awkward book. However, others may find it a little more readable. 3 stars go largely to the introduction which I found the most interesting part of the whole book.

A Great Read
This is a fascinating book. Scholarly, well-written and full of surprising and entertaining stories. Hunt evokes life in Britain's great Victorian cities better than anyone else I've read. I loved it!

Well-researched, but flawed, account of Victorian cities
Hunt, a university lecturer and government adviser, has written a considerable work, based on years of research, but flawed by its pro-Labour, anti-working class perspective. He quotes John Prescott, "We are all middle class" - true enough of Labour Ministers and their cronies.

But the world's first industries and the world's first industrial cities were built by the world's first working class. In this book, trade unions are almost invisible - a walk-on part when Manchester Town Hall opened in 1878, a demand for better conditions for Glasgow's tramworkers, but Hunt cannot see the working class's role in creating industry, only 'restrictive labour practices'.

He approves the Victorian economist James Mill's arrogant and idealist claim that the capitalist class contains 'the heads that invent, and the hands that execute' and 'the men who in fact think for the rest of the world'. The reactionary diatribes of Carlyle, Pugin and Ruskin, and the bourgeois triumphalism of a Macaulay, were equally idealist.

Too often, Victorian capitalists had prestige projects built, at the cost of urban development, putting palaces before people. Self-styled merchant princes, seeing themselves as the new Medici, romanced 'Saxon self-government' and smugly rejected planning for public health.

The Victorian ruling class saw London as the imperial city, with its irredeemable natives. Hunt sees people's moves to the suburbs and to garden cities as wilful failures to solve London's problems, and joins Betjeman, Orwell, Williams-Ellis and Priestley in snobbish hatred of the suburbs, despite acknowledging that many people do want to live there.

Hunt calls for a restoration of local democracy, noting that in the 1890s, Londoners elected 12,000 of their fellow-citizens to run hospitals, schools and transport; now 36,000 quangocrats decide for us. Successive governments' rate capping, surcharging and cash limits have weakened the 'innovative local government and civic pride' that Hunt celebrates, yet he ignores completely the biggest current threat to local (and national) democracy - Labour's EU-driven regionalisation policy.

He applauds the knowledge economy - though isn't all productive work knowledge-based? But we also need steel, ships, vehicles and clothes, which we should be producing ourselves, instead of relying on imported goods.