London Revisited

London Review of Books

Topics: History · Education

From its beginnings as a backwater of the Roman Empire to its heyday at the heart of the British Empire and up to the eve of the Great War, Rosemary Hill charts London’s history through waves of expansion and contraction with the help of historians, antiquaries and archaeologists. London's past is everywhere beneath its streets, in the geology and archeology of its deep and ancient history, and in its mythic lives, in William Blake's Albion and Cobbett's 'Great Wen', the home of Dick Whittington and King Lud. This will be the London described by Tacitus, Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, a city shaped by Boudicca, Christopher Wren and Joseph Bazalgette, and a story of countless disasters,...