Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City - Hardcover

Hunt, Tristram

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297607677 ISBN 13: 9780297607670

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Tristram Hunt was born in 1974 and took a First in History at Cambridge in 1995. In 1996-7 he worked for Peter Mandelson on the Labour Party election campaign, and later became a political adviser to Lord Sainsbury and a consultant to Gould Greenberg Carville NOP strategy and polling company. In 2002 he made his first TV series about the English Civil War (for BBC),

Edition details

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0297607677
• ISBN 13: 9780297607670
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 472