The City predominated medieval and early modern London, at Westminster’s expense. Thereafter the British capital has passed through phases of growth and decline without settling on effective local governance or planning. She’s been profligate with land, unable to strike a balance between the market and the needs of poorer residents or transportation. Consequently London’s physical development, i.e., geography in contradistinction to architecture or socioeconomic character, has sacrificed neighborhood continuity and civic historicity.

The medieval decision to situate London’s power outside the district of St. Paul’s shaped the capital’s early history. Following the 1348’s plague of the Black Death, the City regularized government in 25 aldermen from 12 guilds, bolstered by 100 representatives from 25 wards. Most of the former were lifetime positions, though because of the guild’s basis in trade, especially maritimes, the oligarchy was regularly, naturally renewed by changing fortunes. Well-to-do medievals could escape the city’s walls for the countryside: commercial power was not co-resident with political heft.

In seizing the monasteries Henry III added to his hunting estates and consequently such parks as St. James, Hyde, Kensington Gardens, and Regent’s. Richard Gresham and his son Thomas, Henry’s bankers, saw to the City’s admitting Flemish refugees from Spanish Netherlands, contributing to London’s surpassing Antwerp as the commercial hub of northern Europe. By 1600, half of the wealthiest were ‘suburban’, contributing to a rising gentry, and as such Elizbeth’s government restricted building beyond three miles – creating a proto-greenbelt.

During the Civil War, the City favored the Puritans before taking a compromise position at decade’s end. It had financed Cromwell and overawed Westminster, reaching the apex of its power. London’s classes began intermixing during the Restoration, as the building of aristocratic squares (e.g., St James, Grosvenor) required servant quarters nearby. Later these became slums, then gentrified townhouses. Outside the City, late 17th-century London was inadequately governed by parish vestries (Middlesex, Essex), lacking the guilds’ organization and self-policing. Thus Sacheverell’s 1709 attacks on Irish Catholics and other Dissenters provoked discord, leading to the passing of the Riot Act in 1714.

By the Hanover era, Westminster was no longer a suburb but truly a second city, built around St James and Mayfair mansions. Johnson, of Fleet St, personified London, observing he who tires of it ‘is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford. You will find no man that is at all intellectual who is willing to leave’. Campaigns by Henry Fielding and William Gogarth against cheap gin led to heavy taxes, for alcoholism and infant mortality soared over 1720-50, hitherto the only time the population had stagnated; and thereafter the populace switched to beer.

(In 1709, Cheyne Row was built in then-distant Chelsea, which shortly became one of the few estates to change hands, sold to Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum. In 1753 it was divided between his daughters, one of whom married the Welsh Lord Cardogan, who developed in Knightsbridge and in the 1880s was responsible for heavily rebuilding the north section in the redbrick, neo-Dutch style. His estate remains active; fortunately, the white-stuccoed terraces toward the Army hospital survived.)

The regulation of construction, which began after the Great Fire of 1666, accelerated with 1774’s Building Act, banning exposed woodwork and prescribing uniform streets. The century’s latter half also saw renewed estate building. The Napoleonic wars stimulated development, but the broad trend over 1720-1800 had been imperial trade moving to Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow as London’s docks were outmoded. Hence construction commenced in the Isle of Dogs and Wapping: the East End became England’s greatest working-class city – almost unknown to the rest of the town.
Victorian reform (sanitation) and improvement – rapid, ‘brutal’ railway construction – came hand in hand, both being piecemeal. The Metropolitan Board of Works originated in 1855 after poor water was identified as the cause of ill health; it would be replaced by the more expansive London County Council (LCC) in 1888. Other British town councils were already in place in the 1830s. Yet Salisbury’s Tories opposed a unitary capital government as too big and powerful, favoring the unreformed City, Poor Law administrators, and vestries as bulwarks. Fabian capture of the bureaucracy would soon prove his point. Notwithstanding serious problems in 1832, ‘48, ‘67, and ’88, threats to public order were minimal because tradesmen were separated into ‘little islands’, making citywide agitation too difficult, There remained land for expansion, to accommodate the growing residency, Jenkins cites of historian Roy Porter.

Shipbuilding virtually disappeared in the 1860s. Services now predominated, accounting for 60 percent of jobs, notably in finance, law, and public administration. One-third of these were filled by women. By 1900 individual buildings had surpassed the street or square as the cityscape’s best-known features. Urban sprawl accelerated with the coming of cars, ownership rising to 1 million after World War I. Separately, London’s deep clay would prove ideal for the tube (whose iconic map was modeled on an electrical circuit board).

Planning came into vogue in interwar era. The Blitz damaged London much less than Allied bombs rent Germany, those killed numbering 30,000 versus 500,000, but postwar Labour efforts were more political than practical, density remaining fairly low. Clearance of traditional communities led to unwonted gentrification, and its evident failure to alleviate housing shortage led laissez-faire development in the 1950s and early ‘60s. (South Kensington remains one of the town’s densest districts.) Patrick Abercrombie, author of 1944’s Greater London Plan, builder of the Barbican, and all-round promoter of brutalism, is the villain. In the 1970s, arts and education bodies too destroyed heritage sites in the spirit of progress. Jenkins chides politicians for ‘taking orders’ from architects, planners, and quangos lacking in civic spirit. From 1950-70 the population fell by 9 percent, 17 in the inner city districts. However, the smog of 1952 (the successor of the Great Stink of 1858), was addressed in a private bill of ’56, resulting in the banning of coal heating by 1968.

London’s rebirth commenced in 1980 with Thatcherite policy and the City’s Big Bang, Nigel Lawson’s disbanding of monopoly practices, later extended by Blair. The working class moved rightward as enrichment spread. London would become an international city – by 2001 nearly 40 percent were foreign born, and 55 percent considered themselves ‘non-white British’. The populace, which had fallen to 6.6 million in 1985, rebounded to 9 million in 2019; however, the West End became the province of empty second homes (especially along Chelsea’s King’s Road or in Kensington’s Phillimore estate, the combined borough’s residency falling at the 2011 census.) Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson are responsible for permitting London’s unruly towers.

Surprisingly, Jenkins makes no comparisons with other great, imperial cities. He writes not in the interests of policy; his efforts in that direction, such as recalling his native Camden, are incomplete or unconvincing; yet he is a kindly and fond narrator. His view that cities belong to residents as much as developers is resonant.