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Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City
"Hunt tells this complex, epic story with dazzling clarity and organizational brilliance . . . I know nothing equaling its scope and ambition."--Phillip Lopate, Los Angeles Times Ever since Charles Dickens first described Coketown in Hard Times, the nineteenth-century city has connoted deprivation, pollution, and criminality. Yet, as historian Tristram Hunt argues in this powerful new history, the Coketowns born of the Industrial Revolution were canvasas for ambitious urban innovators who would influence the shape of cities for generations. Drawing on diaries, newspapers, and classic works of fiction, Hunt shows how the Victorians translated their energy and imagination into an astonishingly grand architecture, tranforming even the factories of Manchester and Birmingham into sites of freedom and art. Surveying the great civic creations, from town halls to city squares, sidewalks, and even sewers, Hunt reveals a story of middle-class power and the liberating mission of city life. The Victorians vowed to emulate the city-states of Renaissance Italy, and succeeded--until wealthy metropolises degenerated into dangerous inner cities in the twentieth century.
624 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
17 people are currently reading
190 people want to read
About the author
Tristram Hunt
32 books54 followersTristram Hunt is the author of Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels and Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. One of Britain’s leading young historians, he writes regularly for The Guardian, The Observer, and The Times, and has broadcast numerous series for the BBC. A lecturer in history at the University of London, Hunt represents Stoke-on-Trent in the British Parliament, where he serves as the education spokesman for the Labour Party.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 15, 2014
Reading this book I wonder why Labour have Tristram Hunt as Shadow education and not fronting down Pickles and his crew so intent on destroying local government.
A readable walk through of the ideas and people who shaped ideas of municipal government in our big cities in the 19thC, full of men in monocles building civic pride and tireless campaigners against laissez-faire management and the Shopocracy ( my new favourite history word), all of whom wanted the cities to reflect the best values of Victorian Britain.
Of course, they weren't perfect. Concern for the poor was bottom of their list and they carried out Hausmann style bulldozing of the poor areas, without any regard of where the poor would go when this was done, without much soul-searching (hmm sounds familiar).
Hunt makes a strong and passionate argument for defending local government and restoring to it powers gradually stripped from it in the last 40 years - unless he's changed his ideas since he wrote this, its a message that needs to be shouted much louder than it currently is.
A readable walk through of the ideas and people who shaped ideas of municipal government in our big cities in the 19thC, full of men in monocles building civic pride and tireless campaigners against laissez-faire management and the Shopocracy ( my new favourite history word), all of whom wanted the cities to reflect the best values of Victorian Britain.
Of course, they weren't perfect. Concern for the poor was bottom of their list and they carried out Hausmann style bulldozing of the poor areas, without any regard of where the poor would go when this was done, without much soul-searching (hmm sounds familiar).
Hunt makes a strong and passionate argument for defending local government and restoring to it powers gradually stripped from it in the last 40 years - unless he's changed his ideas since he wrote this, its a message that needs to be shouted much louder than it currently is.
October 20, 2019
This is less a history of Victorian cities than an intellectual history of Victorians' relationship to modernity and industrialization, of which, of course, cities were one important part. It's rambling, but rarely boring.
Hunt begins with the dolorous statistics on life in early Victorian cities. In places like St. Giles in London, or Blackfriars in Glasgow, population increased by 50 or 100% in just a few years in the early 19th century, while the amount of housing stayed the exact same. From 1800 to 1841 cities like Sheffield grew from 45,000 to 111,000, Bradford from 13,000 to 104,000, and Manchester from 95,000 to 310,000. James Philips Kay, the son of a nonconformist cotton mill-owner, left Edinburgh to be a doctor for the slums of Manchester, and he was shocked by what he saw, leading him to write "The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class," in 1832, which detailed the horrible living conditions of Mancunians. It later inspired Engels's splenetic work on the same city. The New General Register Office of 1837 estimated that life expectancy in Manchester was 27 years, while in the rural districts it was almost 35. Across England, the number of convicted criminals increased eightfold in the first 40 years of 19th century. Something had clearly gone wrong.
Perhaps it was not surprising that many began to romanticize a glorious past. Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish Presbyterian once destined for the church, used the German Romantics like Goethe to savage modern industrial society and its intellectual defenders, like Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarians. He formulated the idea that the "cash nexus" had become the only foundation of modern society, and that self-love supplanted community feeling. Carlyle and others, though, pointed out that diseases, crime, and vice showed that everyone was connected. He inspired Dickens, Disraeli, and countless others to inveigh against a false God of Mammon and utility. Along with Sir Walter Scott and many others, he also helped bring back a celebration of the Middle Ages. John Britton and Thomas Rickman, in their "Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England" (1817) revivified the Gothic architecture as most expressive of England's national, medieval genius, especially in its late, "Perpendicular" Gothic Style, and in turn inspired the lapsed French Catholic A.W.N. Pugin, whose "Contrasts," set off the rich community expressed in medieval architecture with modern gaols and "panopticons." John Ruskin in his "Stones of Venice," and his friend the Anglican architect William Butterfield, who pioneered "structural polychromy," made Venetian Gothic a new standard style as well, in an attempt to recover that same national and medieval community.
By contrast, people like historian Thomas Babington Macaulay attacked medievalism and celebrated the rise of the new cities, which they said were getting healthier and wealthier all the time. Assisted by a host of nonconformist reformers, such as journalists Edward Baines, Sr. and Jr. (of the Leeds Mercury), and continental allies such as French historian Francois Guizot, they found another past in which the Puritan Middle Classes (as once exemplified by Cromwell) created all the good in the world through industriousness and energy. Historians like Richard Vaughn ("The Age of Great Cities" 1843) celebrated the civic virtue of commercial ancient Greek towns against static estates and medieval cloisters. Others touted the medieval commercial Italian city-states, like the Liverpudlian William Roscoe in his "Life of Lorenzo de Medici" in 1796. Soon, works by Madame de Stael ("The Germans"), and William Stubbs ("Constitutional History of England") recovered "Angl0-Saxon" heritage, which they celebrated as invigorating localism against French centralization (while ignoring the old Saxon avoidance of cities). These groups celebrated the voluntary associations of cities, like the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Societies from 1781, Manchester Mechanics Institute of 1825, and the the Manchester Statistical Society of 1834, as opposed to the top-down autocracies of the middle ages. People like the self-made Richard Cobden urged Manchester to incorporate and expand their own municipal power, which they did in 1838.
The combination of this incipient noncomformist reform urbanism and historical localism brought about real changes. They inspired the 1835 Municipal Corporation Bill and another voluntary reform group, the Healthy Towns Association (HTA), created the Public Baths Bill of 1846, the Nuisances Removal Act of the same year, and the Public Health Act fo 1848 (all under PM Lord John Russell). Later Joseph Chamberlain, once a cordwainer in London, later a successful screw-manufacturer in Birmingham, along with allies like dissenter preacher George Dawson, conceived of a new "municipal gospel," where the city owned gas and water and other necessities and tried to inspire love of itself. The City of Glasgow Improvement Act of 1866 led to the first "urban renewal" programs, that bulldozed old streets and wynds (and later to the first municipally built homes and city-owned tramways) and led to Octavia Hill and Richard Cross championing the Artisans Home Bill in 1875 and the Housing Act of 1885. Soon cities were building and owning almost every type of industry imaginable, and Fabians like Sidney Webb were championing "municipal trading" as the pathway to socialism. By the turn of the century, municipalities constituted 50% of all government spending in England.
Yet the Victorian city dream soon fell apart. Developments like Hampstead Garden Suburb (championed by macassar oil heiress and settlement house pioneer Henrietta Barnett outside of Eton College, and designed by Ruskianian Garden City architect Raymond Unwin), the spread of suburban "Metroland," and the rise again of London as the center of modern life, meant the independent, local, nonconformist cities of the North lost their cachet. Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and others fell into desuetude as London boomed, and nationalism replaced localism as an ideology.
If there is a theme in this morass of names, books, and dates, it is that the Victorian City shocked contemporaries, and led them scurrying into a host of "usable pasts," either to reject it or revivify it, which had real effects. In any case, the book could have been saved with more organization and editing, but there is much to ponder on here.
Hunt begins with the dolorous statistics on life in early Victorian cities. In places like St. Giles in London, or Blackfriars in Glasgow, population increased by 50 or 100% in just a few years in the early 19th century, while the amount of housing stayed the exact same. From 1800 to 1841 cities like Sheffield grew from 45,000 to 111,000, Bradford from 13,000 to 104,000, and Manchester from 95,000 to 310,000. James Philips Kay, the son of a nonconformist cotton mill-owner, left Edinburgh to be a doctor for the slums of Manchester, and he was shocked by what he saw, leading him to write "The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class," in 1832, which detailed the horrible living conditions of Mancunians. It later inspired Engels's splenetic work on the same city. The New General Register Office of 1837 estimated that life expectancy in Manchester was 27 years, while in the rural districts it was almost 35. Across England, the number of convicted criminals increased eightfold in the first 40 years of 19th century. Something had clearly gone wrong.
Perhaps it was not surprising that many began to romanticize a glorious past. Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish Presbyterian once destined for the church, used the German Romantics like Goethe to savage modern industrial society and its intellectual defenders, like Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarians. He formulated the idea that the "cash nexus" had become the only foundation of modern society, and that self-love supplanted community feeling. Carlyle and others, though, pointed out that diseases, crime, and vice showed that everyone was connected. He inspired Dickens, Disraeli, and countless others to inveigh against a false God of Mammon and utility. Along with Sir Walter Scott and many others, he also helped bring back a celebration of the Middle Ages. John Britton and Thomas Rickman, in their "Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England" (1817) revivified the Gothic architecture as most expressive of England's national, medieval genius, especially in its late, "Perpendicular" Gothic Style, and in turn inspired the lapsed French Catholic A.W.N. Pugin, whose "Contrasts," set off the rich community expressed in medieval architecture with modern gaols and "panopticons." John Ruskin in his "Stones of Venice," and his friend the Anglican architect William Butterfield, who pioneered "structural polychromy," made Venetian Gothic a new standard style as well, in an attempt to recover that same national and medieval community.
By contrast, people like historian Thomas Babington Macaulay attacked medievalism and celebrated the rise of the new cities, which they said were getting healthier and wealthier all the time. Assisted by a host of nonconformist reformers, such as journalists Edward Baines, Sr. and Jr. (of the Leeds Mercury), and continental allies such as French historian Francois Guizot, they found another past in which the Puritan Middle Classes (as once exemplified by Cromwell) created all the good in the world through industriousness and energy. Historians like Richard Vaughn ("The Age of Great Cities" 1843) celebrated the civic virtue of commercial ancient Greek towns against static estates and medieval cloisters. Others touted the medieval commercial Italian city-states, like the Liverpudlian William Roscoe in his "Life of Lorenzo de Medici" in 1796. Soon, works by Madame de Stael ("The Germans"), and William Stubbs ("Constitutional History of England") recovered "Angl0-Saxon" heritage, which they celebrated as invigorating localism against French centralization (while ignoring the old Saxon avoidance of cities). These groups celebrated the voluntary associations of cities, like the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Societies from 1781, Manchester Mechanics Institute of 1825, and the the Manchester Statistical Society of 1834, as opposed to the top-down autocracies of the middle ages. People like the self-made Richard Cobden urged Manchester to incorporate and expand their own municipal power, which they did in 1838.
The combination of this incipient noncomformist reform urbanism and historical localism brought about real changes. They inspired the 1835 Municipal Corporation Bill and another voluntary reform group, the Healthy Towns Association (HTA), created the Public Baths Bill of 1846, the Nuisances Removal Act of the same year, and the Public Health Act fo 1848 (all under PM Lord John Russell). Later Joseph Chamberlain, once a cordwainer in London, later a successful screw-manufacturer in Birmingham, along with allies like dissenter preacher George Dawson, conceived of a new "municipal gospel," where the city owned gas and water and other necessities and tried to inspire love of itself. The City of Glasgow Improvement Act of 1866 led to the first "urban renewal" programs, that bulldozed old streets and wynds (and later to the first municipally built homes and city-owned tramways) and led to Octavia Hill and Richard Cross championing the Artisans Home Bill in 1875 and the Housing Act of 1885. Soon cities were building and owning almost every type of industry imaginable, and Fabians like Sidney Webb were championing "municipal trading" as the pathway to socialism. By the turn of the century, municipalities constituted 50% of all government spending in England.
Yet the Victorian city dream soon fell apart. Developments like Hampstead Garden Suburb (championed by macassar oil heiress and settlement house pioneer Henrietta Barnett outside of Eton College, and designed by Ruskianian Garden City architect Raymond Unwin), the spread of suburban "Metroland," and the rise again of London as the center of modern life, meant the independent, local, nonconformist cities of the North lost their cachet. Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and others fell into desuetude as London boomed, and nationalism replaced localism as an ideology.
If there is a theme in this morass of names, books, and dates, it is that the Victorian City shocked contemporaries, and led them scurrying into a host of "usable pasts," either to reject it or revivify it, which had real effects. In any case, the book could have been saved with more organization and editing, but there is much to ponder on here.
August 9, 2019
Pulling together an extensive array of primary sources, Building Jerusalem charts how the idea of the city developed throughout the Victorian era—a truly fascinating and pertinent topic. One of the very few criticisms is that, when discussing the opposition to Joseph Chamberlain, Hunt quite suddenly begins using the term ‘conservative’ to describe Joseph Allday and his “Economists” who opposed municipal intervention. Considering Hunt had defined conservatism and Toryism as essentially anti-capitalist (represented by Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin) for the first two-thirds of the book, it is frustrating that he fails to explore this specific shift. Nonetheless, the eruditeness inherent in Hunt’s writing enables him to move with fluidity from the past to contemporary issues, thereby further impressing the ongoing importance of Victorian discourses concerning the city.
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May 17, 2024You know you’re in for a challenge with a doorstop 500-page book that has another 70 pages of notes, references, bibliography etc. To be honest this isn’t a set work (for me) so I don’t need the full academic rigour and the thesis packaging … replace all this with more pictures, illustrations, maps & time-lines and I’d be a happier reader!
Anyway, it was a challenge but rewarding; with a rich set of overlapping themes and timelines; a span of the whole Victorian era, plus historical context and a foray into the 20th & 21st centuries, and; a landscape including the empire cities of London and Glasgow, Birmingham (the ‘workshop of the world’), and what is now called the Northern Powerhouse, some smaller urban planning projects (Port Sunlight, Bournville, Letchworth, Hampstead Garden City etc.) … even a few mentions of my home city of Chester.
And what a subject! No less the huge multi-layered story of how and why we live in modern post-industrial cities, the move from rural to urban and suburban environments, the architectures and aesthetic, borrowing and adapted from Europe and the home-grown ‘English Gothic’, the impact of ‘Merchant Princes’, non-conformists, socio-politics, the ‘Municipal Gospel’, and Garden City movements, to name a few. I particularly liked some of the older history, including the Civil War, the Saxon vs. Norman cultural norms (which connects even further forward in time to Brexit, discuss!) I would have loved this broken into smaller books or sections on each theme, with more ‘signposts’ for the reader, and maybe separate potted histories of each city in neater time-lines. Notwithstanding this I applaud Tristram Hunt’s vision and erudition to bring all this together into a, more-or-less, cohesive and coherent whole … the bibliography itself runs to over 20 pages, phew!
Anyway, it was a challenge but rewarding; with a rich set of overlapping themes and timelines; a span of the whole Victorian era, plus historical context and a foray into the 20th & 21st centuries, and; a landscape including the empire cities of London and Glasgow, Birmingham (the ‘workshop of the world’), and what is now called the Northern Powerhouse, some smaller urban planning projects (Port Sunlight, Bournville, Letchworth, Hampstead Garden City etc.) … even a few mentions of my home city of Chester.
And what a subject! No less the huge multi-layered story of how and why we live in modern post-industrial cities, the move from rural to urban and suburban environments, the architectures and aesthetic, borrowing and adapted from Europe and the home-grown ‘English Gothic’, the impact of ‘Merchant Princes’, non-conformists, socio-politics, the ‘Municipal Gospel’, and Garden City movements, to name a few. I particularly liked some of the older history, including the Civil War, the Saxon vs. Norman cultural norms (which connects even further forward in time to Brexit, discuss!) I would have loved this broken into smaller books or sections on each theme, with more ‘signposts’ for the reader, and maybe separate potted histories of each city in neater time-lines. Notwithstanding this I applaud Tristram Hunt’s vision and erudition to bring all this together into a, more-or-less, cohesive and coherent whole … the bibliography itself runs to over 20 pages, phew!
August 12, 2024
Building Jerusalem is a thoughtfully written book that takes you through all of the highs and lows of cities in Victorian Era Britain. I recommend this book to anyone who is remotely interested in sociology, city politics, and urban planning. In 500 pages, it does a very nice job of creating a compelling and complex argument and the epilogue brings that argument into the modern era.
Hunt is a mastermind of composing his thoughts and evidence in a way that calls back on itself as the book goes on. His repertoire of anecdotes, letters, quotes, and various pieces of evidence truly make it seem as if you’re in the time period. This book is so chock full of facts that you simply cannot fathom any counter point.
This book is pretty easy to read, however there were times through the less interesting (to me) chapters where it seemed like Hunt provided too much information on one topic or point. Every argument he makes is so well backed up with pages and pages of evidence and explanation that sometimes I could be losing my interest on the matter. However, he does a very nice job of exploring the numerous political, social, and economic facets of Victorian cities that I was never truly bored.
While it is by no means a page-turner, it’s a non-fiction/history book that had me looking forward to reading it every day. As a student soon to be studying urban planning and real estate in London, I enjoyed this book as a thoughtful piece on the underrepresented significance of Victorian cities and how they shaped the ones we live in today.
Hunt is a mastermind of composing his thoughts and evidence in a way that calls back on itself as the book goes on. His repertoire of anecdotes, letters, quotes, and various pieces of evidence truly make it seem as if you’re in the time period. This book is so chock full of facts that you simply cannot fathom any counter point.
This book is pretty easy to read, however there were times through the less interesting (to me) chapters where it seemed like Hunt provided too much information on one topic or point. Every argument he makes is so well backed up with pages and pages of evidence and explanation that sometimes I could be losing my interest on the matter. However, he does a very nice job of exploring the numerous political, social, and economic facets of Victorian cities that I was never truly bored.
While it is by no means a page-turner, it’s a non-fiction/history book that had me looking forward to reading it every day. As a student soon to be studying urban planning and real estate in London, I enjoyed this book as a thoughtful piece on the underrepresented significance of Victorian cities and how they shaped the ones we live in today.
July 10, 2024
This was much more enjoyable than I expected it to be. At a time when the planning system is much discussed in the uk this gives some past context to where we are and why. Some other themes like migration also crop up although of course in much smaller numbers than today. A good case for stronger local government is made here and as someone who is interested in getting involved this sounds like a plan (to an extent anyway).
September 8, 2025
Too much of a good thing, but a good thing nonetheless. Perhaps better for those who are already up to date with their Disraelis and Chamberlains; I really enjoyed the chapters about people I knew more about (the intellectuals, basically).
November 12, 2025
What an amazing book! I never thought I would describe a book about municipality and sewage treatment in Nineteenth century Britain as a riveting read but I could not put it down. That is down to the story telling and the wonderful prose.
May 6, 2021
Well researched, but not what I expected.
December 29, 2021
Mind-numbing accumulation of detail that merely depresses and confuses. Tristram Hunt is certainly not a popularising scholar in the mould of Neil MacGregor.
May 18, 2012
Tristram Hunt, better known as Labour MP and sometimes-Guardian columnist, offers a survey of conceptions of the city as it underwent rapid and seismic change in the Victorian era. This isn't a timeline history of industrialisation and urbanisation, but an exploration of how both the elite and popular society understood the new urban bohemoths springing up across Britain.
The space of a generation saw the greatest shift ever in the way the British lived. The new cities and their industries revolutionised how people worked and who they worked for, where and how they lived and who they lived with, how they got around, how and what they ate, what ideas they were exposed to, what opportunities they had for cultural enrichment and hedonistic pleasures, and changes in nearly every other facet of life.
These were massive disruptions to traditional notions of the family, the workplace, and the community, and they raised very serious introspection about just what the changes meant for Britain. Hunt takes us through what, in very simplistic terms, can be considered the nation's intellectual journey in its understanding of the new industrial cities: the deep scepticism of anything urban and in particular the reactionary 'Young England' movement which idealised rural Mideval England; the more modern scepticism of the 'slum' journalists and fiction writers who equated density and industry with disease and sin; the doctors, do-gooders, and campaigners - informed by either Christian beliefs or a utilitarian commitment to alleviate suffering - who tackled those problems; the 'civic fathers' who fought the sceptics by turning the city into an attractive and fulfilling place with community groups and intellectual societies as well as public monuments and grand buildings; and finally the institutionalisation of this civic pride with the emergence of genuinely local government which embraced an activism that improved housing, built transport and waste infrastructure, and most importantly laid down the foundations for councils which were a force for good in peoples' lives.
It is through this intellectual journey that the British revamped their cities from the dirty, unhealthy, and over-crowded anarchy of the early Victorian era into the clean, rational, and beautiful cities which bequeathed the built environment still enjoy today.
The chapter cataloguing Joseph Chamberlain's transformation of Birmingham through his leadership on the council is especially inspiring. This is not only a high point in the history, but a high point in the book itself. Hunt's discussion of Chamberlain is a well-focused narrative which uses one man's story to illustrate a larger trend. This engaging style is used throughout, though not always to as clear an effect.
Even at their greatest, Victorian cities were still dangerous and unequal places, and the short-sighted adoration of anything 'rural' continues to infest British ideas about the 'right' way to live. But those of us dedicated to urbanism can't help but feel a pang of envy at the Victorian social ethic. We only need compare the cheaply constructed shoeboxes we call public buildings with the sturdy, grand buildings the Victorians erected for their town halls and libraries. For all their faults, most Victorians loved their cities and were committed to making them better places. We could use a dose of that civic pride today.
The space of a generation saw the greatest shift ever in the way the British lived. The new cities and their industries revolutionised how people worked and who they worked for, where and how they lived and who they lived with, how they got around, how and what they ate, what ideas they were exposed to, what opportunities they had for cultural enrichment and hedonistic pleasures, and changes in nearly every other facet of life.
These were massive disruptions to traditional notions of the family, the workplace, and the community, and they raised very serious introspection about just what the changes meant for Britain. Hunt takes us through what, in very simplistic terms, can be considered the nation's intellectual journey in its understanding of the new industrial cities: the deep scepticism of anything urban and in particular the reactionary 'Young England' movement which idealised rural Mideval England; the more modern scepticism of the 'slum' journalists and fiction writers who equated density and industry with disease and sin; the doctors, do-gooders, and campaigners - informed by either Christian beliefs or a utilitarian commitment to alleviate suffering - who tackled those problems; the 'civic fathers' who fought the sceptics by turning the city into an attractive and fulfilling place with community groups and intellectual societies as well as public monuments and grand buildings; and finally the institutionalisation of this civic pride with the emergence of genuinely local government which embraced an activism that improved housing, built transport and waste infrastructure, and most importantly laid down the foundations for councils which were a force for good in peoples' lives.
It is through this intellectual journey that the British revamped their cities from the dirty, unhealthy, and over-crowded anarchy of the early Victorian era into the clean, rational, and beautiful cities which bequeathed the built environment still enjoy today.
The chapter cataloguing Joseph Chamberlain's transformation of Birmingham through his leadership on the council is especially inspiring. This is not only a high point in the history, but a high point in the book itself. Hunt's discussion of Chamberlain is a well-focused narrative which uses one man's story to illustrate a larger trend. This engaging style is used throughout, though not always to as clear an effect.
Even at their greatest, Victorian cities were still dangerous and unequal places, and the short-sighted adoration of anything 'rural' continues to infest British ideas about the 'right' way to live. But those of us dedicated to urbanism can't help but feel a pang of envy at the Victorian social ethic. We only need compare the cheaply constructed shoeboxes we call public buildings with the sturdy, grand buildings the Victorians erected for their town halls and libraries. For all their faults, most Victorians loved their cities and were committed to making them better places. We could use a dose of that civic pride today.
January 20, 2011
Considering its rave reviews, I found this book rather disappointing. Only those who enjoy reading history as a list of white businessmen-politicians and the buildings they erected will find something for them in Building Jerusalem. The tidbits of biography and historical detail nipped from primary sources are unfortunately too far between, and the meandering structure demands much of the reader to get from oasis to oasis. For the casual reader, it's a bit lengthy and its message of the necessity of civic spirit for modern progress, while optimistically driven, is frought with difficulties considering the very limited historical view Hunt has here - not to mention saturated in Hunt's own politics. And historians can look elsewhere for equally comprehensive, and more critically presented histories of the "Victorian city" in Hunt's Whiggish style, or on another shelf for a more well-rounded presentation of the Victorian city in all its facets rather than merely its politics and the top two per cent of its populace.
February 21, 2016
This marvelous history takes us through the low and high points of the development of the British cities of the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution greatly expanded the urban population, but also brought with it poverty and dismal living conditions among the new underclass. Hunt shows how individuals with a Catholic or Non-Conformist background initiated urban reform on a broad scale that included public buildings, city planning, culture and social services. It is a fascinating story told with great enthusiasm, erudition, and wit. The author is not afraid to make links to the present and provide lessons for to-day and showing that the urban disturbances of 2011 have clear historical antecedents.
February 18, 2011
This isn't about the lived reality of Victorian cities but about the ideas informing the shape of the city and how people, especially people of influence, envisioned the city and what it meant to live in one. Victorians really believed in the possibilities of urban life and the importance of maintaining, or creating, vibrant city spaces. They didn't always succeed (to put it mildly), but they thought of cities as exciting places where great things could happen, places that fostered civic involvement and the healthy interchange of ideas. That's a vision of the city we would do well to restore.
November 13, 2007
I think the title is a mistake--a grabber for fans of William Blake and Monty Python, but maybe a turn-off for other prospective readers. Which is too bad, because the book is unusually lively for a 500-page history of English cities and how they grew. Lots more foreign influences than I suspected--on the architecture, most intriguingly to me. The political ups and downs of Gothic, for instance. You have to be ready to skip chunks about things you already know about or don't care about, and linger over what is news to you and helps you see new connections.
June 4, 2008
Stimulating and enjoyable; a great help in understanding the development of our major cities. Issues: concentrates too much on a few cities - Manchester, Birmingham - to the exclusion of other provincial towns and cities, and does not spend enough time on London; far too hard on suburbs and new towns, which is where most people live, and more significantly, where they want to live.
July 15, 2009
A lot of interesting info... never really went anywhere
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews