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'History writing at its compulsive best' A. N. Wilson

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 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; 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. A key text which should be read by all politicians and by anyone interested in the way we live now. It is deeply researched, but written in an highly accessible way, and the reader never loses sight of the vitally relevant and interesting story Tristram Hunt has to tell. It is history writing at its compulsive best. -- A. N. Wilson What matters is his book's prodigious range and passionate enthusiasm, and his skill in showing how ideas, however foolish, can take over minds, change landscapes and mould the future. It is a rich, nutritious read. -- John Carey * Sunday Times *

Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City