Building Jerusalem: The Rise And Fall of the Victorian City - Hardcover

Hunt, Tristram

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297607677 ISBN 13: 9780297607670

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd, 2005

Synopsis

Victorian cities, so long the object of derision as a byword for deprivation, are now celebrated as an urban ideal. They are widely heralded among modern planners and politicians for their active citizenship, local democracy, and civic spirit. 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 reaction led by Macaulay and Mill, who were repelled by the faux medievalism of the early Victorian years and who championed progress and industry; 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, especially in Joe Chamberlain s Birmingham; 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.

About this title

About the Author

Made his name on BBC TV presenting a series about the English Civil War, which led to his first book, THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR AT FIRST HAND.

Reviews

This fun, if meandering, intellectual history of city-building in Victorian Britain traces the evolution of grim industrialized towns, with their "rat-haunted slums" and "vomiting chimneys," through their heyday as wealthy cultural centers, and beyond. Hunt relates how a newly prosperous middle class, eager to legitimatize its economic power and distance itself from accusations of philistinism, began "manufacturing a new cultural identity," in which architecture and government reflected social and moral values. Using various models—from the buccaneering "municipal gospel" of Joseph Chamberlain to the example of Renaissance Florence, with its traditions of self-government and public design—the Victorians created the Age of Great Cities. No model was wholly successful in combatting the miserable living conditions of the poor, and an "anti-civic" solution—the suburbs—signalled the end of "urbs triumphant." Yet, Hunt argues, aspects of the Victorian framework hold valuable lessons for revivifying contemporary cities.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0297607677
• ISBN 13: 9780297607670
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432