Building Jerusalem: The Rise And Fall of the Victorian City - Hardcover

Made his name on BBC TV presenting a series about the English Civil War, which led to his first book, THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR AT FIRST HAND.

*Starred Review* London, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, crucibles for the Industrial Revolution, horrified Blake with their "dark Satanic mills" and outraged Dickens with their scenes of Coketown squalor. But as a cultural historian, Hunt finds much more than pollution and poverty in the cities that made Victorian England the world's first truly urban society. He uncovers in these cities a remarkable range of municipal ambitions, as determined reformers fight to alleviate the misery of the crowded masses and as cosmopolitan artists stretch their talents for growing new audiences. Readers thus retrace the events that transform filthy streets into delightful thoroughfares connecting spacious and beautiful libraries, art galleries, churches, and civic halls. Hunt details the spirited debates over competing architectural styles--Greek, Gothic, Venetian--proposed for the new urban centers, locating these debates in a much larger clash of civic visions, progressive and reactionary. Personalities as well as principles collided in this struggle to define municipal life, the moralists Carlyle and Ruskin looming especially large. But it is a healthy ferment that Hunt sees in the conflicts over how best to establish social order in the burgeoning cities, the best and brightest Victorian minds joining to meet the shared challenge of creating a humane urban world. Because much of what the Victorian titans achieved toward that end has since been lost in the twentieth-century flight to suburbia, Hunt concludes by posing hard questions about how policymakers might now renew neglected ideals of municipal citizenship. An enlightening historical context for urgent current issues. Bryce Christensen
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