Geoffrey Tyack - The Making of Our Urban Landscape

Over half the worlds population currently live in towns or cities, and by 2050 the number is expected to rise to two thirds. The vast majority of the British people are town-dwellers, and urban agglomerations account for some ten per cent of our land use. Towns and cities are the background against which we live our lives, and if we try to understand their history we can go some way towards understanding ourselves. Most of our towns can trace their origin back to the Middle Ages, some even to the Roman Empire, and more or less substantial traces of the past can still be seen in their streets, their buildings and their public spaces. Few visitors can be unaware of the influence of the past on the appearance of Edinburgh or Bath, but the past has also shaped the public faces of Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Cardiff and other towns and cities across our island. Place-making has become something of a vogue word among urban planners in recent years, and this book has been written with the aim of explaining the processes by which the places that we often take for granted have been created over the past millennium or more.

I have been interested in the history of the urban landscape ever since my childhood in South London. My father worked as a civil servant in a former warehouse complex next to Tower Bridge, and my mother grew up in the East End; my grandmother never left it. I started exploring central London as a teenager, and on footstill the only way to properly understand towns and cities. My first paid employment involved writing the histories of North London suburbs, and since then my interests have taken me to towns throughout the British Isles, Europe and the wider world, especially the United States. A large part of the fascination of urban history lies in its variety; each town, each suburb even, has its own unique history. If the reader can share some of my enjoyment in getting to understand these places better, I will have achieved a large part of my aim.

All historians stand on the shoulders of their predecessors, and for a historian of the urban landscape those shoulders are both broad and numerous. I am indebted to early chroniclers and topographers such as John Leland in the sixteenth century and Celia Fiennes in the seventeenth, and to more recent writers such as W. G. Hoskins, the doyen of English local and landscape history (though not a lover of large cities), to the compilers of the invaluable Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), and to the authors of the many excellent town and city histories that have come out in recent years. I have made extensive use of multi-volume works such as the Victoria County History for those parts of England that have been covered; the Historic Towns atlas, still flourishing and expanding; and Nikolaus Pevsners Buildings of England series (especially in its second, revised incarnation), and the companion volumes on Scotland and Wales. Our understanding of urban history has been profoundly enhanced in recent years by the research of archaeologists and urban geographers, and I have also done my best to incorporate their insights into my narrative. I am grateful to Malcolm Airs, John Blair, David Clark, Perry Gauci, Trevor Rowley, Otto Saumarez-Smith, Robert Thorne and Steven Ward, who have read and commented on drafts of the chapters, but above all to my wife Penny for her companionship and her astute comments on the manuscript as it evolved. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Matthew Cotton at the Oxford University Press for encouraging me to write the book, and to Kizzy Taylor-Richelieu, Cathryn Steele and Gayathri Venkatesan for seeing it through the publication process.

This book inevitably reflects my own interests. I share William Blakes belief that art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars, and I find the histories of individual places more enlightening than theories of urban development, useful though they can sometimes be. I have a special interest in buildings, both for themselves and for what they tell us about the past. I make no apology in giving more emphasis than some other writers to developments over the last two centuries. These were, after all, the years that did most to shape the urban landscapes that we experience in our daily livesthe urban population of Britain only surpassed that of rural areas in the middle of the nineteenth century. Change is, and always has been, an essential feature of urban life. I vividly remember visiting Milton Keynes, now a thriving city of some 250,000 people, when it was little more than a gleam in the eyes of planners and architects, and I finished writing this book just before the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-21, which temporarily emptied town and city centres with long-term results that still remain to be seen. To fully understand todays urban landscapes, we need to try and understand change, unearthing the layers that lie beneath the surface of what we now see and experience, and attempting to make sense of the often piecemeal, un-coordinated processes that have created the world that we now inhabit. I hope that this book will help readers do this for themselves, and to take pleasure in the process.

Geoffrey Tyack

Oxford

November 2021