Successive Applications of Sticking-Plaster

Andrew Saint

• The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Vol. III, 1840-1950 edited by Martin Daunton
  Cambridge, 944 pp, £90.00, January 2001, ISBN 0 521 41707 4

Do the authors of this volume of the Cambridge Urban History know how gloomy a book they have written? Pessimism suffuses these pages from start almost to finish. ‘Why have so many of Britain’s great cities fared so badly in the 20th century?’ Peter Clark, the general editor of the series, asks in his preface. Turn the page, and Martin Daunton’s introduction descends with unconcealed relish into the ‘decay, corruption, stench and stickiness’ of the early Victorian city – a hell from which the best escape reformers can imagine is the extirpation of stagnancy, and the setting of traffic, sewage and people alike moving on a joyless treadmill of ‘continuous circulation’.