Building Jerusalem : The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

History writing at its compulsive best - A. N. Wilson

This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance.

Tristram Hunt explores:

• The horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle

• The influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin

• The pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans

• The identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance - commerce, trade and patronage

• The change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing

• Finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard