City Of Cities: The Birth Of Modern London

A dazzling account of London at its height when it was the largest, richest and most rapidly changing city on earth. There is no period in London's history in which the city was more dynamic, fascinating, innovative and important than the thirty years before the First World War. Often obscured by the high Victorian era before it and the Great War after it, the story of London's triumphant rise to modernity during this period has never been told. The transition was profound and touched all aspects of the city and those who lived in it. This is the age of the London Underground (five 'tube' lines were constructed) and the motor car (more Londoners were killed in traffic accidents in 1910 than in 2000). It is the era of massive urban development, flats for the middle classes, the arrival of electric lighting, large scale social housing and imperial civic buildings. London saw the rise of massive immigration, fleet street and the suffragettes; it powered the arrival of mass marketing and mass consumption. Its inhabitants included the likes of Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Augustus John, and the Bloomsbury Group, who re-defined a new, bohemian role for the modern artist. It's often believed that the First World War had a revolutionary impact on the tranquil Edwardian era before it. Stephen Inwood shows that to the contrary, the war itself was a product of a period of massive revolutionary change.