This book - the first major study of the Holland Park Circle of artists, architects, and their patrons - is both an engrossing narrative of their lives, works and influence and a perceptive analysis of the subtle relationships between high Victorian taste and mercantile values."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume introduces, through a series of freshly researched studies, new perspectives on the history of European urban culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The approach is an international one, with essays on Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy, and the authors drawn not only from Europe, but also the USA and Japan. The essays examine a range of specialist aspects of culture, such as gardening, spa towns, painting, and music. At the same time the contributors also explore jointly several broader interconnected themes - health, nature, the arts and cultural institutions, leisure, and tourism - of central importance to the cultural identity and development of the modern European town.

This volume of 13 original interdisciplinary essays surveys the relationship of Victorian works and the urban experience that shaped them. Each essay addresses how the selection or rejection of an urban setting provide the context for a representative product of Victorian art or culture.

"'Queen Anne' was more than a style of architecture: its influence can be traced in furniture, pictures and decorations of the period, in children's books such as Kate Greenaway's, and in the revival of the 'old-fashioned' garden. In this book, Mark Girouard describes the 'Queen Anne' movement in all its manifestations, tracing its origin in the 1860s the spread of its subsequent vogue from London to the provinces, and from England to America, and its fall from grace in the 1890s, when it was taken up the architects of pubs and waterside villas. In doing so he does more than chart the style for the first time: he also throws light on an important segment of English life in the last decades of the nineteenth century."--Back cover.