Books like London by Porter, Roy

An illuminating social history of nineteenth‑century London, tracing its rapid expansion, technological innovations, and the everyday lives of its inhabitants from markets to sewers, as seen through the eyes of Charles Dickens and meticulous research by Judith Flanders.

A three‑generation portrait of an East End family that traces the social life and customs of London’s inner city, set against the backdrop of the Thames.

The history of London may indeed comprise a history of printing, the theater, newspapers, museums, pleasure gardens, music hall, international finance, parliamentary government, and the novel, but for Stephen Inwood it is primarily a history of the people whose tastes, talents, trades, and pocketbooks have created this grand, monstrous metropolis - and sometimes threatened to destroy it. For Inwood, the city's history is forged no less by the common Londoners who tore down monasteries, saw their city burn to the ground, fled the plague, poisoned their own water supply, toiled in sweatshops, survived the Blitz, and moved into Council flats than it is by Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror, Henry Bolingbroke or Oliver Cromwell, Geoffrey Chaucer or Anthony Trollope, William Pitt or Margaret Thatcher. Drawing on a multitude of sources and with an abundance of unfamiliar anecdotes, Inwood vividly explores the history of a city defined as much by the mob as the monarch, the laborer as the lord, and on every colorful page shows why, as Samuel Johnson put it, "When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern collossus. Roy Porter writes a whole life of this world-renowned place - from the grid streets and fortresses of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror to the medieval, walled "most noble city" of churches, friars, and crown and town relationships. Within the crenellated battlements, manufactures and markets developed and street-life buzzed, enlivened with the cries of hawkers and peddlers. People worked, talked, haggled, and relaxed in London's medieval streets, while craftsmen lived where they worked, nestled trade-by-trade in neighborhoods. London's profile in 1500 was much as it was at the peak of Roman power. The city owed its courtly splendor and national pride of the Tudor Age to the phenomenal expansion of its capital. It was the envy of foreigners, the spur of civic patriotism, and a hub of culture, architecture, and great literature and new religion. Tudor Londoners had an insatiable appetite for new workshops, yards and stores, and comfortable homes; and makeshift quarters for laborers from rural areas began to dot the rising city.

"London: The Biography is the pinnacle of Peter Ackroyd's brilliant obsession with the eponymous city. In this work, Ackroyd brings the reader through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction.". "Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city's riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century.". "Anecdotal, insightful, and wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd's concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar "echoic" quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens."--BOOK JACKET.