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London: A History of 300 Years in 25 Buildings
A lively new history of London told through twenty-five buildings, from iconic Georgian townhouses to the Shard A walk along any London street takes you past a wealth of seemingly ordinary an Edwardian church, modernist postwar council housing, stuccoed Italianate terraces, a Bauhaus-inspired library. But these buildings are not just functional. They are evidence of London's rich and diverse history and have shaped people's experiences, identities, and relationships. In this engaging study, Paul L. Knox traces the history of London from the Georgian era to the present day through twenty-five surviving buildings. Knox explores where people lived and worked, from grand Regency squares to Victorian workshops, and highlights the impact of migration, gentrification, and inequality. We see famous buildings, like Harrods and Abbey Road Studios, and everyday places like Rochelle Street School and Thamesmead. Each historical period has introduced new buildings, and old ones have been repurposed. As Knox shows, it is the living history of these buildings that makes up the vibrant, but exceptionally unequal, city of today.
448 pages, Paperback
Published September 9, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 26, 2024
All in all, I enjoyed reading this book: great insight about different mid-term architectural trends and development schemes of the city. The buildings chosen are interesting, and tough the story is specified on a single city, I think one could (but may not!) enjoy it without ever visiting London.
Recommended to anyone interested in Architecture OR interested in London. :)
jerry builder diye bi ifade var la. karadenizli muteahit demekmis!
Notes:
For the aristocratic landlords of the Great Estates, the leasehold system was especially important in their calculations. Their estates were ‘settled’ in law, which meant that they were not entitled to sell any of the land outright, thus preserving the family inheritance. The land could, however, be leased for a fixed term. So, instead of selling their freehold interest to developers, aristocratic landowners leased it to speculative builders. Under the terms of the lease, the builders would erect buildings to a specified standard and keep them in repair for a certain length of time – typically ninety-nine years, the ‘London lease’. On the expiry of the lease, the land and the buildings on it would revert to the freeholder.
‘Battle of the Railings’: ostensibly a campaign to supply scrap metal for the war effort, but in many ways a proxy battle over the elite symbolism of private gardens. By late 1941, the railings around all of the Bloomsbury squares had been requisitioned for scrap, excepting those at Bedford Square. The reprieve was one of the first conservation victories of the Georgian Group, which had only been founded in 1937.
The required land was to be purchased by the City of London Corporation and then sold on to the West India Dock Company through trustees. The act also required all rum, coffee and sugar imported to London to be unloaded in the West India Dock for twenty-one years following its construction. This clause removed much of the speculative risk, and there was little difficulty in raising the initial capital of £500,000.
Matches were big business throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. They were needed by everyone: for lighting fires, candles, cigars, cigarettes, oil lamps, gas lamps and gas cookers. Millions were consumed every day.
The school building on Nichol Street was for infants. It was a frontier outpost of a reform movement that sought, on the one hand, to ameliorate social conditions, instil wholesome values and enforce obedience to authority; and, on the other, to meet the need for basic numeracy and literacy in the industrial workforce.
There was also an important symbolism in the architecture of board schools. It was widely recognised that the Gothic styles favoured by denominational schools were inappropriate to the spirit of the new school system, their religious connotations at odds with a cornerstone of the 1870 act, which required school curricula to be entirely secular. The progressive middle-class supporters of board schools favoured Domestic Revival styles, especially Queen Anne, which was held to suggest both art and enlightenment: the ‘sweetness and light’ of Matthew Arnold’s famous essay on culture
By 1914, a quarter of the earth’s surface and over a fifth of its population were governed from Westminster and Whitehall.
The first to be completed were the Foreign Office and the India Office, in 1868 (Chapter 9). Great importance, and much debate, surrounded their design: Britain was the leading world power, and offices dealing with foreigners had to remind them of that.
The façade itself was relatively restrained, but since it was, after all, Parliament Street, it was given an allegorical group of figures on the parapet. Victoria herself is the centrepiece of the composition, posing as a Roman empress seated upon her throne, the British lion and unicorn at her side. Representations of Knowledge and Power (the Book and the Sword) symbolise the means by which Britain would maintain control across the globe.
For the growing lower-middle and middle classes of Victorian London, museums provided a novel mixture of education and diversion. Victorian museums were entirely new kinds of spaces that allowed – even fostered – the self-conscious performance of identity, including class identity: allowing people’s dress and public comportment to be made visible to one another in a controlled setting (and incidentally providing perfectly innocent locales for rendezvous).
Following the recommendation of a Royal Commission in 1846, railway termini north of the Thames were to be allowed no closer to the centre of the city than New Road (the present-day Euston Road and Marylebone Road). Not surprisingly, the termini of railway companies with routes entering London from the north – Euston (for the London and Birmingham Railway), St Pancras (for the Midland Railway), King’s Cross (for the Great Northern Railway) and Marylebone (for the Great Central Railway) – ended up being aligned along this boundary, as close as possible to the city centre.
as the size of the Royal Navy shrank from 128,000 enlisted personnel in 1955 to fewer than 30,000 in 2020, with only twenty-one deepwater warships and ten submarines. The monumental building had become functionally unnecessary, as well as an unwelcome reminder of how weak British naval power had become in comparison with the past
The building was refurbished in 2000 and occupied by Cabinet Office staff; but in 2010 it was put up for sale as part of the government’s austerity drive to reduce Britain’s debt after the 2008 international financial crisis. But in many ways the sale of the building was the end game of a broader sweep of privatisation of major national assets that had been initiated by the Thatcher administration in the 1980s and that included Jaguar, Rolls Royce, British Steel, British Petroleum, British Telecom, British Rail, British Airways, British Aerospace, British Gas, British Coal and Thames Water. By 2010, saleable government assets had been reduced to heritage real estate, such as Admiralty Arch.
Unlike most other great cities of the world, London had not grown from a single commercial, ecclesiastical or administrative centre, nor had it been laid out to an overarching plan. Rather, London’s growth had gradually converted a scattering of villages and parishes into mini-towns, which in turn grew into specialised districts – each with distinctive physical, economic and social characteristics – within a single functional metropolitan fabric. London became, famously, a ‘city of villages’.1 The political and administrative legacy was a multitude of independent districts.
But mansion blocks were an attractive proposition for developers planning to build in more expensive parts of town, where land was at a premium and building at high densities offered the prospect of reaping higher profits per acre. Queen Anne’s Mansions had also caught the attention of London’s upper-middle classes, and soon mansion blocks began to appear here and there in West London
Recommended to anyone interested in Architecture OR interested in London. :)
jerry builder diye bi ifade var la. karadenizli muteahit demekmis!
Notes:
For the aristocratic landlords of the Great Estates, the leasehold system was especially important in their calculations. Their estates were ‘settled’ in law, which meant that they were not entitled to sell any of the land outright, thus preserving the family inheritance. The land could, however, be leased for a fixed term. So, instead of selling their freehold interest to developers, aristocratic landowners leased it to speculative builders. Under the terms of the lease, the builders would erect buildings to a specified standard and keep them in repair for a certain length of time – typically ninety-nine years, the ‘London lease’. On the expiry of the lease, the land and the buildings on it would revert to the freeholder.
‘Battle of the Railings’: ostensibly a campaign to supply scrap metal for the war effort, but in many ways a proxy battle over the elite symbolism of private gardens. By late 1941, the railings around all of the Bloomsbury squares had been requisitioned for scrap, excepting those at Bedford Square. The reprieve was one of the first conservation victories of the Georgian Group, which had only been founded in 1937.
The required land was to be purchased by the City of London Corporation and then sold on to the West India Dock Company through trustees. The act also required all rum, coffee and sugar imported to London to be unloaded in the West India Dock for twenty-one years following its construction. This clause removed much of the speculative risk, and there was little difficulty in raising the initial capital of £500,000.
Matches were big business throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. They were needed by everyone: for lighting fires, candles, cigars, cigarettes, oil lamps, gas lamps and gas cookers. Millions were consumed every day.
The school building on Nichol Street was for infants. It was a frontier outpost of a reform movement that sought, on the one hand, to ameliorate social conditions, instil wholesome values and enforce obedience to authority; and, on the other, to meet the need for basic numeracy and literacy in the industrial workforce.
There was also an important symbolism in the architecture of board schools. It was widely recognised that the Gothic styles favoured by denominational schools were inappropriate to the spirit of the new school system, their religious connotations at odds with a cornerstone of the 1870 act, which required school curricula to be entirely secular. The progressive middle-class supporters of board schools favoured Domestic Revival styles, especially Queen Anne, which was held to suggest both art and enlightenment: the ‘sweetness and light’ of Matthew Arnold’s famous essay on culture
By 1914, a quarter of the earth’s surface and over a fifth of its population were governed from Westminster and Whitehall.
The first to be completed were the Foreign Office and the India Office, in 1868 (Chapter 9). Great importance, and much debate, surrounded their design: Britain was the leading world power, and offices dealing with foreigners had to remind them of that.
The façade itself was relatively restrained, but since it was, after all, Parliament Street, it was given an allegorical group of figures on the parapet. Victoria herself is the centrepiece of the composition, posing as a Roman empress seated upon her throne, the British lion and unicorn at her side. Representations of Knowledge and Power (the Book and the Sword) symbolise the means by which Britain would maintain control across the globe.
For the growing lower-middle and middle classes of Victorian London, museums provided a novel mixture of education and diversion. Victorian museums were entirely new kinds of spaces that allowed – even fostered – the self-conscious performance of identity, including class identity: allowing people’s dress and public comportment to be made visible to one another in a controlled setting (and incidentally providing perfectly innocent locales for rendezvous).
Following the recommendation of a Royal Commission in 1846, railway termini north of the Thames were to be allowed no closer to the centre of the city than New Road (the present-day Euston Road and Marylebone Road). Not surprisingly, the termini of railway companies with routes entering London from the north – Euston (for the London and Birmingham Railway), St Pancras (for the Midland Railway), King’s Cross (for the Great Northern Railway) and Marylebone (for the Great Central Railway) – ended up being aligned along this boundary, as close as possible to the city centre.
as the size of the Royal Navy shrank from 128,000 enlisted personnel in 1955 to fewer than 30,000 in 2020, with only twenty-one deepwater warships and ten submarines. The monumental building had become functionally unnecessary, as well as an unwelcome reminder of how weak British naval power had become in comparison with the past
The building was refurbished in 2000 and occupied by Cabinet Office staff; but in 2010 it was put up for sale as part of the government’s austerity drive to reduce Britain’s debt after the 2008 international financial crisis. But in many ways the sale of the building was the end game of a broader sweep of privatisation of major national assets that had been initiated by the Thatcher administration in the 1980s and that included Jaguar, Rolls Royce, British Steel, British Petroleum, British Telecom, British Rail, British Airways, British Aerospace, British Gas, British Coal and Thames Water. By 2010, saleable government assets had been reduced to heritage real estate, such as Admiralty Arch.
Unlike most other great cities of the world, London had not grown from a single commercial, ecclesiastical or administrative centre, nor had it been laid out to an overarching plan. Rather, London’s growth had gradually converted a scattering of villages and parishes into mini-towns, which in turn grew into specialised districts – each with distinctive physical, economic and social characteristics – within a single functional metropolitan fabric. London became, famously, a ‘city of villages’.1 The political and administrative legacy was a multitude of independent districts.
But mansion blocks were an attractive proposition for developers planning to build in more expensive parts of town, where land was at a premium and building at high densities offered the prospect of reaping higher profits per acre. Queen Anne’s Mansions had also caught the attention of London’s upper-middle classes, and soon mansion blocks began to appear here and there in West London
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 16, 2024
Part architectural history, part sociological tract, this marvelous study of the infrastructure of the ancient city of London begins with Spencer House in St. James Place and runs to the still-under-construction (at the 2024 publishing of the book) Platform G of King’s Cross … Of particular note is the chapter on Christ Church, Turnham Green, its architect being the famous Victorian, George Gilbert Scott (with William B. Moffat) … punctuated by lovely color illustrations … absolutely stellar …
January 15, 2025
Fascinating! But I wish this was wayy more intersectional
September 20, 2024
A bit like a series of Grand Designs, in which the buildings created from and designed to show off vast wealth make incredibly boring reading/watching and those built with care and attention to surroundings and the needs of (normal) people make fascinating reading/watching. And like Kevin McCloud, Paul Knox (perhaps also with the longevity of his career in mind) pulls his punches just when you want him to let rip.
There's a pretty fascinating narrative of the history of planning slightly buried by the structure of the book that is likely to encourage further reading; for example, I was sad to learn that a Betterment Tax (taxing developers on the price of land increased through public funding) had actually existed and perceived to fail and wanted to know more.
The optimistic concluding paragraphs are at odds with the closing chapters featuring skyline changing-buildings lying empty as investment vehicles and a Disney-fication of central London as a playground for the super-tax-efficient
There's a pretty fascinating narrative of the history of planning slightly buried by the structure of the book that is likely to encourage further reading; for example, I was sad to learn that a Betterment Tax (taxing developers on the price of land increased through public funding) had actually existed and perceived to fail and wanted to know more.
The optimistic concluding paragraphs are at odds with the closing chapters featuring skyline changing-buildings lying empty as investment vehicles and a Disney-fication of central London as a playground for the super-tax-efficient
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews