The birth of modern London

The period 1660–1720 saw the foundation of modern London. The city was transformed post-Fire from a tight warren of medieval timber-framed buildings into a vastly expanded, regularised landscape of brick houses laid out in squares and spacious streets. This book examines the building boom and the speculative developers who created that landscape. It offers a wealth of new information on their working practices, the role of craftsmen and the design thinking which led to the creation of a new prototype for English housing.

While concentrating on the mass-produced houses of 'the middling sort', which saw the adoption of classicism on a large scale in this country for the first time, the book reveals that the 'new city' maintained a surprising degree of continuity with existing patterns of urban use and traditional architecture. It presents the late-seventeenth and the early eighteenth century as a distinct phase in London's architectural development and offers a radical reinterpretations of the adoption of Renaissance styles and ideas at the level of the everyday, challenging conventional interpretations of their use and reception in this country.