A History of London (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Roy Porter (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Inwood (history, Thames Valley Univ.) brings the vibrant, tumultuous history of London to a general audience, sketching Londons evolution from Roman times to the present in a lively style that makes for fascinating reading. Londons growth depended on immigration, and the result was not a unified urban center but a series of Londons made up of different groups, sometimes based on ethnicity or religion, engaged in a variety of occupations, and located in different parts of the city. Inwood draws on a huge corpus of literature, both primary and secondary, to weave together the story of the metropolis. Although the analysis of the Roman and medieval city is sparse, compared with later chapters, the book is a well-balanced and enjoyable read. Recommended for a wide readership.Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1111 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers (May 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786706139
• ISBN-13: 978-0786706136
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #216,766 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great overview, May 1, 2000

By	Schwanda (Shoreline, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This book is not only written in an easy and laid-back fashion, but it is laid out in a way that is easy to navagate. It is broken down in to main secions of history (e.g. Mideval London) then further broken down into sections by topic (e.g. Society and Cutlure). This book covers every aspect of the city, from government to economics to housing to transportation. Sure I found some of the sections boring but I was able to skip over those sections of text without losing other valuable information about the city and its history.

This was a very comprehensive book that I read with ease in less than a month. Don't expect grandiose details on any particular monarch, policy or era, for this is just an overview, and an overview of London at that. This is a great way to understand how the little Roman settlement of Lundun morphed into the vast metropolis we know today. A great beginning for further study on this topic. Highly recommended for armchair historians.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Big, but worth every page - and it reads easy, August 22, 2001

By	Craig Matteson (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This books large size is simply due to its large subject. The City of London is a wonderful place that I have been fortunate to visit over a dozen times and plan to visit many more times.

In the states we measure the history of buildings and cities in decades and MAYBE a century or two. In London they measure in centuries and maybe a millennium or two (or three).

Mr. Inwood takes us through that history with lively prose and keeping the focus on the interesting and the informative without weighing us down with the kind of detail academics seem to love to inflict on themselves. No, this book reads like a book half its size because of the fun we have touring the development of the place and the inhabitants who have taken and left its glorious stage through the centuries.

If you know London you will love this book and if you don't know London you will learn to love it through reading this book.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very comprehensive, May 18, 2003

By	FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

This review is from: A History of London (Paperback)

Stephen Inwood has put together perhaps the most complete single-volume history of London to date. While many historians focus on a particular London (and yes, there are many Londons -- literary London, political London, et al.), and Inwood is no exception in taking particular focus at different times, this book touches on all the facets, by concentrating largely on London's inhabitants, and, as they belong to different Londons, exploring their native Londons and the interactions between the differing Londons.

Inwood from his childhood looked upon London as a 'remote and fascinating place'. His father as a London cab driver (as one finds, when living in or visiting London, often those who know the city best). Inwood infuses his memory of this fascination on every page of this 1100 page text, eliminating the remoteness by description and analysis that is excellent. As Inwood says, 'You can still walk the streets that Boswell and Dickens walked, and even, if you look carefully, see some of the buildings they saw.'

Inwood, realising that many histories begin with the 'easy bits', tackled the problem of writing history from the beginning, with Londinium, and even before. 'The first known inhabitants of the Greater London aea were the late Ice Age (8000 BC) hunters whose flint tools and reindeer bones were found in Uxbridge in the 1980s. From there he traces the founding of Londinium through Boudicca's revolt to Flavian Londinium to its virtual abandonment. London again had a revival during Anglo-Saxon times, being rebuilt by Alfred the Great or his son, Edward the Elder.

Edward the Confessor and his briefly tenured successor, Harold, helped intensify the significance of London by building, consecrating and then turning Westminster Abbey into a fundamental symbol of royal power -- the coronation at Westminster Abbey has remained a strong tradition for 900 years. London the city, however, had a love-hate relationship with royalty, and to this day the Lord Mayor has a ceremonial power to refuse the monarch entrance to the city, much in the way the door to the House of Commons is slammed in the face of Black Rod, the House of Lords representative sent to summon the Members to attend the proceedings in the house of peers.

Inwood's sensitivity to issues grand and small is in evidence throughout, by attending to sweeping urban planning issues to taking up a discussion of the role of Gentlemen's Clubs, 'Those who could not gain access to the best dining rooms could enjoy many of the pleasures of London society (the exclusively masculine pleasures, at any event) by becoming a member of one of the West End clubs...'

Inwood makes the observation that 'in the 1990s they could find England's most extreme social and economic contrasts within 5 miles of Parliament Square', and this is true on the whole, for the wealthy and the destitute both tend to flock to the urban scene. London has suffered by not having a central government, the only major city without such government, not that the GLC was effective, but that something needs to be done -- and perhaps the new mayoral initiative will bring some hope. London's 1993 GDP was about 110 billion GBP (180 billion USdollars), bigger than the GDP of Russia - 'a city with the capacity to generate wealth on such a scale does not need to endure overfilled railway carriages, understocked classrooms, decaying social services, underfunded libraries, neglected housing estates or families living in fire-trap bed-and-breakfast accommodation.'

Inwood concludes with an early comment on London: 'The city is delightful indeed, when it has a good governor,' penned by William Fitzstephen in 1173. Of course, today's problems are not unique even to London, as this history demonstrates admirably.

This is a history that is well worth the investment of the time it takes to read.