Prou bé tot i ser breu i dispers. ( )

Definitely presents an idiosyncratic point of view. Some of the specifics seem questionable (can it possibly be true that it was "in the reign of Elizabeth that torture was first used in England"?). Moreover, that he singles out the Soane Museum -- an exemplar of excessive dilettantism if ever there is one -- the "one thing in the capital" he would show a tourist certainly reflects a nontraditional view of the riches of London's varied museums. ( )

A somewhat grumpy ride through London's history via the prism of its (remaining) architecture. I really liked A N Wilson's main device: the linking of the buildings and the events. I only wish I knew both better so I could weigh up his opinions. For an outsider who has visited London a few times and plans to do so again, Wilson's book added some colour, but as the twentieth century finished and the new millennium began, things became ever greyer. I guess that for Wilson, London is precious and imperiled and his book defends her against living foes and dead vandals; for me, a foreigner, London attracts, and the book, though negative at many points, has still enhanced by my anticipation.

Since her foundation in A.D. 43 as a Roman military encampment, London has seen more than her share of plagues, riots, poverty, madness, and crime. Newgate Prison, Bedlam Hospital, and the gallows on Tyburn Hill, though all gone now, are nearly as well known as Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s Cathedral. London has been burned to the ground and blown to bits. Like her ancient sister city Troy, London rises over many layers of her own rubble.

Such is the romanticized, gothic conception of that great city that children and artists have cherished for centuries (London Dungeon and Madame Toussaud’s Chamber of Horrors are to England what Disneyland is to California). A. N. Wilson’s London: A History (previously published in the UK as London: A Short History, which at less than 200 pages it most decidedly is), less a continuous chronology than a series of historical snapshots, takes a skeptical approach to the notion of psychic continuity common to popular historians who like to expound upon the “soul” of a country or city. To Wilson, a city is not a person; it cannot harbor neuroses or repressed memories, and its character can change with each wave of immigrants, or be obliterated by the wrecking balls of vandals with development contracts. The experience of the past at such tourist attractions as The Globe Theatre and Tower of London are now “as ersatz as Disney World” (a comparison Wilson makes twice in the space of twenty pages, lest we not get the point).

It might seem odd, then, that Wilson has dedicated his book to Peter Ackroyd, whose London: The Biography is the very epitome of the poeticized, organic view of history, or that he begins his book with a description of the lost rivers of London, such as the Fleet and the Walbrook, which continue to “live” many feet underground, centuries after being paved over, occasionally making themselves known by flooding a basement or a subway tunnel. Wilson’s point, I believe, is not that the past is irretrievable, or that we all should stop dreaming and live in the present, but rather that maintaining a sense of history requires proper stewardship of cultural artifacts, humble appreciation of the achievements of one’s forbearers, and an active and forward-looking imagination. The past will not look after itself, nor can it survive simply by being encased in amber and put on display. Only where the past and present are blended together, influencing and nourishing each other, is it possible to experience “a personal encounter with Londoners of the past.”

Wilson describes the Elizabethan historian John Stow, author of Survey of London (1598), as “an intensely conservative and pessimistic observer of the London scene.” This could easily apply to Wilson himself. He is passionate about architecture, and censures the Victorians and Modernists largely on aesthetic grounds, for their “hatred of the past.” Other periods he skips over entirely. Although London became a great center of commerce and the center of Christianity in Britain during the 7th and 8th centuries, Wilson follows his Roman chapter with one on Norman London, presumably because under the Saxons, who built their dwellings out of wattle and daub instead of bricks and mortar, London was no longer a real city. Later on, Wilson writes of Charles I’s aesthetic intelligence and of his patronage of the architect Inigo Jones, designer of the Banquet House at Whitehall. Then, without a word of warning, the next paragraph begins, “After a trial in Westminster Hall, the King was condemned to death, and the execution took place on January 30, 1649.” The causes of this drastic measure are never explained, and the Civil War and Cromwell’s republic are hardly mentioned, except for an obligatory reference to the closing of the theatres; after “Tudor and Stuart,” the next chapter is “Restoration.”

Wilson follows in many footsteps when he notes the architectural anarchy of London, a city that has never been considered beautiful in the way Paris and Naples are. Central planners with grand designs have never been able to get their way there. When the city was expanding, this lack of central oversight would lead to a delightful variety of styles evident among the squares that sprung up during the 18th century, “the age of the greatest London buildings.” But in less enlightened times this same unregulated state of affairs could also lead to speculative developers knocking down entire blocks of historic buildings and replacing them with cheap row houses and concrete tower blocks. The Invisible Hand giveth and the Invisible Hand taketh away.

At times, especially in the later chapters, London threatens to become mainly a history of architecture, and architects end up forming a disproportionate number of Wilson’s heroes (Christopher Wren, Thomas Nash, Charles Holden) and villains (Richard Seifert, Denys Lasdun). This is not necessarily because he prefers buildings to people, although in certain cases that may be true. On the contrary, it is specifically the inhuman dimensions of Brutalist architecture that he deplores. Wilson is partial to Art Deco, singling out Broadcasting House and the Hoover Factory for special praise, buildings designed to be pleasing, not overwhelming. As befitting his curmudgeonly nature, Wilson does not mention, and appears to take little solace in, the fact that the battle against architectural modernism was essentially won in the 1970s, and that recent trends have encouraged high density, low-rise construction that conforms to the existing character of the neighborhoods.

The same resistance to grand designs and central authority that Wilson sees in London’s architecture, he also praises in its people. While the danger of mob violence has always been present, as it is in any large, crowded city where an impoverished underclass forms a significant portion of the population, such uprisings as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 or the Chartists and Gordon riots of the 18th century never seemed to last very long or spread very far. “Would-be revolutionaries have often been shocked…by the English capacity to switch off politically.” Londoners seemed to have an infinite capacity to weather injustice, whether to themselves or to others. Samuel Pepys, in his famous diary, could describe a public execution (“he was presently cut down and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy”), and a pleasant dinner of oysters, and an afternoon spent “setting up shelves in my study,” all in the same paragraph. This casual cruelty of the Londoners, the dark side of the stiff upper lip, also rendered them largely immune to the massacres and pogroms that periodically shook the capital cities of the European continent (the execution in question, for regicide and treason, was the last of the unexpectedly mild reprisals that followed the restoration of the Stuarts). The confidence that cooler heads will always prevail leads Wilson to flirt with complacency when he downplays the significance of the race riots in Notting Hill and Brixton. The only time he truly crosses the line is when he tries to excuse the Fascism of Oswald Mosley: “Mosley showed no sign of being personally anti-Semitic, but he was willing to subscribe to conspiracy theories about international Jewry to bring about the result he wanted, a war.” That sentence makes no sense whatsoever.

When he turns to analyze the contemporary situation in London, Wilson shows himself prey to that particular blindness that leads an author to attribute characteristics solely to his subject that are actually universal. Near the end of his chapter on the Blitz, Wilson pronounces his judgment of the last fifty years of London’s history: “The victors who rose from the ruins of wartime London were vandals, property speculators, modernist fanatics, and shysters.” Elsewhere he decries a London where industry has fled, the docks have closed, the great financial institutions are in foreign hands, and the largest industries are tourism and real-estate speculation; in short, a place where nobody does any real work anymore (when Wilson blames tourists, rather than modern military technology, for the fact that the Tower “no longer functions as a fortress,” one suspects him of having gone beyond curmudgeonly and into cranky). What he doesn’t seem to notice, or at least fails to mention, is that this is more or less true of almost all western cities, from Rome to San Francisco. The unlucky ones, like Detroit, are dying, the lucky ones are being turned into museums of themselves. In my city, New York, we have twice elected a mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, who seems bound and determined to turn Manhattan into an exclusive, wealthy, residential community, and banish industry and poor people to the outer boroughs, essentially turning America’s greatest metropolis into its own suburb. Perhaps the nature of cities is changing, and nothing can bring back the economic forces that created and fed them in the Industrial age. Today we are all perpetual tourists, even in our own backyards.

--Jim McCaffery ( )

Has its moments but it's way too ambitious for 200-odd pages. And the last chapter, where Wilson spends a couple of pages slagging off Ken Livingstone's choice of words in a pamphlet, are wasted. Not a bad introduction to London but if you want something meaty get Ackroyd's or Porter's works. ( )