Building Jerusalem: the rise and fall of the Victorian city

Abstract

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.

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