City Of Cities: The Birth Of Modern London - Softcover

By 1880, London, capital of the largest empire ever known, was the richest, most populous city on earth. And yet it remained poluted and undergoverned with huge, unexplored slums grippped by poverty and disease. This is the tale of how, over the next three decades, London transformed itself through technologcial advance, inventive dynamism and sheer wealth and size, into the first trully modern city. Steven Inwood takes us - by hansom cab, bicycle, electric tram or motor bus - on an evocative tour of the burgeoning metropolis, from the glittering new department stores of Oxford Street to the synagogues and sweat shops of the East End, and from bohemian bars and gaudy music halls to the well-kept gardens of Edwardian surburbia. En route we learn how the city took on it's modern shape and how the advent of such novelties as electricity, the motor car, the telephone, socialism and female emancipation transformed the lives of its inhabitants. A work of profound scholarship, City of Cities provides a rich, multi-layered record of the making of modern London.

'formidably well researched . . .the best kind of social history' Guardian

'Stephen Inwood is a master of the genre . . . His sources are compendious and his range impressive.' Spectator

'Stephen Inwood's talent for ferreting out the choicest of statistics . . . is matched by his alertness for piquant social detail' TLS

'He is equally at home with the grand sweep and the human detail, always supported by immaculate research' Financial Times