The Making of Our Urban Landscape

Britain was the first country in the world to become an essentially urban county. And England is still one of the most urbanized countries in the world. The town and the city is the world that most of us inhabit and know best. But what do we actually know about our urban world - and how it was created?

The Making of the English Urban Landscape tells the story of our towns and cities and how they came into being over the last two millennia, from Roman and Anglo-Saxon times, through the Norman Conquest and the later Middle Ages to the ’great rebuilding’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ’polite townscapes’ of the eighteenth, and the commercial and industrial towns and cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The final chapter then takes the story from the end of the Second World War to the present, from the New Towns of the immediate post-war era to the trendy converted warehouses of Shoreditch.

This is a book that will make the world you live in come alive. If you are a town or a city-dweller, you are unlikely ever to look at the everyday world around you in quite the same way again.

Geoffrey Tyack is the former Director of the Stanford University Programme in Oxford and a Fellow of Kellogg College. He is President of the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society and a Trustee of the Oxford Preservation Trust, a council member of the London Topographical Society, and Editor of the Georgian Group Journal. He is the author of numerous articles and books on architectural history, including Oxford: An Architectural Guide (OUP, 1998), and is co-editor of the revised volume on Berkshire in the Pevsner Buildings of England series (Yale, 2010).