London, a Social History

Front Cover
Harvard University Press, 1998 - History - 431 pages
This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern collossus. Roy Porter writes a whole life of this world-renowned place - from the grid streets and fortresses of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror to the medieval, walled "most noble city" of churches, friars, and crown and town relationships. Within the crenellated battlements, manufactures and markets developed and street-life buzzed, enlivened with the cries of hawkers and peddlers. People worked, talked, haggled, and relaxed in London's medieval streets, while craftsmen lived where they worked, nestled trade-by-trade in neighborhoods. London's profile in 1500 was much as it was at the peak of Roman power. The city owed its courtly splendor and national pride of the Tudor Age to the phenomenal expansion of its capital. It was the envy of foreigners, the spur of civic patriotism, and a hub of culture, architecture, and great literature and new religion. Tudor Londoners had an insatiable appetite for new workshops, yards and stores, and comfortable homes; and makeshift quarters for laborers from rural areas began to dot the rising city. London experienced a cruel civil war, fires, enlightenment in thought, government, and living, and the struggle and benefits of empire from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. From the lament that "London was but is no more" to "you, who are to stand a wonder to all Years and ages ... a phoenix," London became an elegant, eye-catching, metropolitan hub. It was a mosaic that represented the shared values of a people - both high and low born - at work and play. London was and is a wonder city, a marvel. Not since ancient times has there been such a city - not eternal, but vibrant, living, full of a free people ever evolving. As no one before him, Roy Porter captures the deep pulse of his hometown and makes it our own. London's fortunes, people, and imperial glory are recaptured with brio and wit. This is a transcendent book for all lovers of London, cities, and the habits and fortunes of peoples.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction I
1
Formation to Reformation II
11
Tudor London
34
War Plague and Fire
66
From Restoration to Regency
93
16501800
131
Life under the Georges
160
The Victorian Age
185
18201890
257
Victorian Life
279
Expansion 18901945
306
18901945
326
19451975
344
Thatchers London
364
The London Marathon
385
Further Reading
390

The Building of the Victorian Capital 18201890
205
Bumbledom? Londons Politics 18001890
239

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About the author (1998)

Roy Sydney Porter was born December 31, 1946. He grew up in a south London working class home. He attended Wilson's Grammar School, Camberwell, and won an unheard of scholarship to Cambridge. His starred double first in history at Cambridge University (1968) led to a junior research fellowship at his college, Christ's, followed by a teaching post at Churchill College, Cambridge. His Ph.D. thesis, published as The Making Of Geology (1977), became the first of more than 100 books that he wrote or edited. Porter was a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge from 1972 to 1979; Dean from 1977 to 1979; Assistant Lecturer in European History at Cambridge University from 1974 to 1977, Lecturer from 1977 to 1979. He joined the Wellcome Institute fot the History of Medicine in 1979 where he was a Senior Lecturer from 1979 to 1991, a Reader from 1991 to 1993, and finally a Professor in the Social History of Medicine from 1993 to 2001. Porter was Elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994, and he was also made an honorary fellow by both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Roy Porter died March 4, 2002, at the age of 55.

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