Andrew Saint is the general editor of the Survey of London; his most recent book is Architect and Engineer.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
18 March 1982
Victorian Piles
2 July 1981
Perpetual Sunshine
22 May 2008
Das englische Haus
17 October 2002
George Gilbert Scott Jr
6 April 1995
Not Mackintosh
18 March 1982
Super-Real
18 March 1982
Christina and the Sid
RELATED CATEGORIES
Art and architecture, Architecture, 1800-1899, 1840-1859, 1800-1899, 1860-1879, 1800-1899, 1880-1899, Europe, Western Europe, UK
Vol. 27 No. 7 · 31 March 2005
pages 30-32 | 3786 words
Swiping at Suburbs
Andrew Saint
- Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City by Tristram Hunt
Weidenfeld, 432 pp, £25.00, June 2004, ISBN 0 297 60767 7
How Blake would blench at the ends to which the English left has turned his poem. The vagueness of his vision of Jerusalem helps to make it the handiest of slogans. Officially appropriated as the New Labour anthem to replace the robust ‘Red Flag’, here we have it dusted down again by Tristram Hunt to front a passionate, kaleidoscopic but wilful defence of the Victorian city. Building Jerusalem is a book with a plain political line; yet where it leaves us is little clearer than in Blake’s poem.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 27 No. 8 · 21 April 2005
From Gerrard Roots
Andrew Saint rightly describes the centre of Hampstead Garden Suburb as ‘limp’, but his suggestion that this ‘stemmed from failures of investment, possibly also of community size, not design’ is too kind (LRB, 31 March). The fault is that of Edwin Lutyens, who persuaded Henrietta Barnett to drop Raymond Unwin’s plan for a central square with shops and a market, presumably because these would detract from Lutyens’s own monolithic Free Church and St Jude’s, two of the most enervating buildings in North-West London.
Gerrard Roots
London NW4
