Most of the pedestrians in London seem to walk with their eyes fixed firmly on the pavement – perhaps searching for the gold that they hope to find there. But the real treasure of London lies at or above eye-level in the architecture that lines every street, and it is a genuine pleasure to get lost on its historic streets and places.
Unlike Paris or Munich, London is not a planned city. For a long time, London and its historic architectural development from Roman times, right up to its take on today’s expression of a bustling commercial and cultural capitol city, has been a slow building city. For most of the 20th century Britain’s tallest commercial building was in Liverpool.
Guide To The Architecture Of London, updated every 10 years or so, is still the best guide available after more than 30 years since its publication.
Guide To The Architecture Of London
Guide To The Architecture Of London
London has an unrivalled richness of architecture, from its squares and houses to its palaces and churches. This is the only guide to cover all of London’s building history, from its Roman foundation to the massive expansion of the 19th century which made London the largest city on earth.
London architecture is one of the best regarded examples of creativity, functionality and mixture of classic and modern, stone and glass.
Julius Caesar visited England in 54BC, but nearly a century passed before the Romans invaded in AD43, during the reign of Claudius. As a settlement London barely existed before the Roman invasion, and afterwards St Albans, Colchester, Lincoln, York and Gloucester were almost certainly more important administrative centres. But it was essential to the Romans to build roads to deploy their military strength in the new colony, and London’s convenient position – at a point when the Thames could be bridged and at a navigable distance from the open sea – placed it a the center of a monumental road system. Oxford, Watling and Ermine Streets all date from this time and established London’s essential armature.
– Book excerpt
London has an unrivalled richness of architecture, from its squares and houses to its palaces and churches. This is the only guide to cover all of London’s building history, from its Roman foundation to the massive expansion of the 19th century which made London the largest city on earth.
The book is a marvelous base to start studying the interesting buildings in London.Each entry gives a concise summary with clear conclusions on every building, if the authors don’t like certain features then these are pointed out.These summaries are intelligent and thought provoking and I would highly reccomend this book to both amateurs and practising Architects.
The commentary manages to be both informative and conversational, making it just as good a meander in an armchair as on the streets. (THE GOOD BOOK GUIDE)
This is the best book of this kind I have ever read, about any city, anywhere in the world. (Amazon review)
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