author : Robert Bucholz

This is the course guidebook that accompanies the 24 lecture “Great Course” of the same name. It is essentially an abbreviated transcript of each lecture, a few pictures, and some related reading. (I watched the lectures, which is what I am reviewing here, and am using the online book simply as an aide-memoire.)

This provides a potted history of London, its buildings, its businesses, its people, and its politics, from Roman times to (nearly) the present day. We get fires, plagues, guilds, riots (so many riots), plays, palaces, executions, parades, sewers, slums, smog, wars, and more, showing how, from a somewhat shaky start, London rose to become “The Greatest City in the World”.

A few points I found interesting: The Great Fire of London, 1666, destroyed over 10,000 houses, but the official death toll was less than 10 people; although he does say that hundred of poor people may have died in the following winter, that is still a remarkably small casualty rate for such a massive disaster. Nevertheless, there was a lot of death in those days (plague, bad sanitation, and the like), but London still grew: in Tudor and Stuart times, London’s birth rate wasn’t high enough to match its death rate; its growth was due to high immigration rates. And then all those traditional royal ceremonies, like the size and style of coronations, weddings and funerals, were in fact late Victorian public relations inventions to improve the standing of the crown.

The lecturer clearly loves London, and Londoners, and creates a lively, mostly rosy-tinted, although at times grim, picture of the city.