An illustrated history one of England’s finest cities - London and its famous East End.

This guidance, together with the Streets for All regional documents, provides updated practical advice for anyone involved in planning and implementing highways and other public realm works in sensitive historic locations, including highways engineers, planners and urban and landscape designers. It looks at making improvements to public spaces without harm to their valued character, including specific recommendations for works to surfaces, street furniture, new equipment, traffic management infrastructure and environmental improvements. It draws on experience of Historic England's planning teams in highways and public realm schemes, including case studies showing where highways works and other public realm schemes have successfully integrated with and enhanced areas of historic or architectural sensitivity. This guidance has been prepared by Rowan Whimster and builds on the text published in 2004 with the subsequent Streets for All series. It has been prepared with assistance from the Department for Transport and is supported by the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation.

In c.1713, Sir Richard Child, heir to a mercantile fortune, commissioned Colen Campbell, to build Wanstead House, ‘one of the noblest houses, not only in England, but in Europe’. Campbell’s innovative classical façade was widely influential and sowed the seeds for English Palladianism. Its opulent interior by William Kent was equal to Kensington Palace and its extensive gardens were attributed to leading landscape designers George London and Humphry Repton. Wanstead’s glory days came to an end in 1822, when a major sale of its contents was arranged to pay off financial debts. Two years later the house was demolished, its building fabric dispersed far and wide. A large crater on an east London golf course is all that remains of this once ‘princely mansion’. Based on scholarly research, Wanstead House: East London’s Lost Palace provides the first illustrated history of the lost Georgian estate, charting the meteoric rise and fall of the Child dynasty. By restoring Wanstead’s reputation amongst the leading houses of the era, this book demonstrates that those lost in actuality, should by no means be lost to history.

This illustrated history portrays the very heart of our great capital city - Central London. Using photographs taken from the unique Historic England Archive.

Among the many important political and social reforms of the mid 19th century concerning working conditions, public health and education was the Public Libraries Act of 1850. However, while this allowed municipal boroughs in England and Wales to establish public libraries, few were built until Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887 precipitated the setting up of several dozen. During the 1880s and 90s private philanthropy saw the construction of a vast number of small and medium sized libraries, and by 1914, 62 per cent of the England's population lived within a library authority area. This selection guide looks at the external architecture of the libraries built under these and later initiatives, and how they were fitted out and used as access to their book-stock was opened up to readers.

East End I888 documents in minute detail the social, political, and economic life in the notorious slums of East London during the reign of Queen Victoria. The setting for Jack the Ripper's atrocities, East End was synonymous with crime, filth, disease, and the dregs of humanity. W. J. Fishman focuses on a single year, one century ago and one century after the storming of the Bastille. Poignant accounts of homeless families choosing starvation rather than submitting to the inhumanity and separation of the workhouse are contrasted with lively reports of entertainment in music halls and "penny gaffs" or freak shows, where Joseph Merrick, The Elephant Man, was discovered. Providing numerous excerpts from contemporary newspapers, police records, workhouse journals, novels, medical reports, church sermons, and political debates, Fishman illuminates a slice of life in Victorian England. Author note: William J. Fishman is Professor of Political Studies at Queen Mary College, University of London.

The modern history of London's East End has been well-documented – but what of its ancient roots? From embryonic beginnings in the Stone Age, through Roman rule and civil wars, all the way to its jam-packed twentieth-century timeline, the East End has always been a place of innovation, diversity and change. Written by an East Ender with a love of her roots, The Little History of the East End is an engaging look at the area's history through the people that made it, one that will enthral and surprise both residents and visitors alike.