An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical Age into an important medieval city and significant Renaissance urban center to a modern colossus--full of a free people ever evolving. Roy Porter touches the pulse of his hometown and makes it our own, capturing London's fortunes, people, and imperial glory with vigor and wit. 58 photos.

"Our contemplation of London must begin, as London began, at the river. The River Thames is a slow moving and rather murky body of water, flowing west to east, about a quarter to an eighth of a mile wide as it passes through the city. To this day, the sinewy thread of the Thames is London's most notable topographical feature, the curving line around which the metropolis orientates itself. As we have seen, this was not by chance. The Romans founded London in imitation of their own great capital city so that London, like Rome, sits on its river at exactly the spot where it narrows enough to bridge (see Map 1). That confluence of west-east river and south-north bridge made London both a military choke-point and an economic funnel long before our arrival sometime in 1550"--

This book surveys the lives and experiences of hundreds of thousands of eighteenth-century non-elite Londoners in the evolution of the modern world.

Events such as the Fire of London and the Plague, and historic locations like the Globe Theatre, are part of London's heritage. Yet until recently, the history of the city between 1500 and 1750 has been little studied. During this period, London's population soared from around 50,000 to nearly half a million--the demographic explosion transformed the city to a metropolis. London became a center of new social and sexual identities and a solvent of older, more hierarchical forms of social organization. The essays in this volume cover the themes of polis and the police, gender and sexuality, space and place, and material culture and consumption. Within these themes are thieves, prostitutes, litigious wives, the poor, disease, “great quantities of gooseberry pye,” and the taxing question of fresh water.

An imaginative retelling of London’s history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.

A collection of guided tours throughout London Black History Walks invites the reader to see their surroundings with new eyes.