London - A Short History

This superb short history of London, which manages to find room for political and social history of every sort, is written with A.N. Wilson's characteristic verve, wit and colour, but also with affection and passion for a city that he loves.

The great figures from London's past all make their appearance, from Chaucer to Churchill, from Pepys to Dickens; as do the dramatic events - from the Great Fire to the Blitz, from the Peasants Revolt to Mosley's Fascist rallies, But he also pays particular attention to the physical transformations of the city: Elizabethan London (even then menaced by over-population, overbuilding and the greed of speculators); the rebuilding after the Fire; the elegant squares and pleasure gardens of the 18th century; the prodigious expansion of the 19th century and the Railway Age, which made and unmade London. Overcrowding and cholera, but also the engineering triumphs of the sewers and the Underground Railway.

If the First World War was, for London, a nightmare happening elsewhere, the amazing six years of 1939-45 were indeed the city's finest hour. But after 1945 property developers, con-men and modernist fanatics took over, with disastrous results. And with increasing prosperity in the 1950s came rising crime.

In the 1980s, with 'Big Bang', the City fell to foreign ownership. Property values soared, and the gap between the rich and the poor widened. If one can rightly celebrate the cosmopolitan nature of modern London that mobility and mass immigration have created, it is impossible not to deplore the moronic features of contemporary London such as the Millennium Dome and Ken Livingstone's 2002 London Plan.