QUESTING, IRREPRESSIBLE CITY

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30562, 3 October 1964, Page 4

QUESTING, IRREPRESSIBLE CITY

The Golden City. London between the Fires 1666 1941. By Bernard Ash. Phoenix House. 204 pp. Illustrated, .bibliography and index.

Many excellent books have been written about specialised aspects of the City of London—not to mention a legion of guide books. Bernard Ash’s “The Golden City" is something different. Semipopular in style, it traces with remarkable compactness the history of London from the gutting of the medieval City by the Great Fire in 1666 until present times. It tells not only the story of changing architecture but of the changing character of the people, the development of enterprises, the birth of government, the power of the Guilds (“those fellows in fur”), the savage mob that formed so big a part of its population and the manyother facets of the character of this “vigorous, questing, irrepressible city” during its perhaps greatest period. The book opens with an account of the Great Fire which destroyed the greater part of the medieval city—a city already of great antiquity but of great squalor, jerry-built, overcrowded and which stank. From the ashes of the fiveday fire arose the seemingly unanswerable questions of; how to set about rebuilding and how to pay for it?—in

a . time when architects and large scale contractors simply did not exist. Almost incredibly these questions were answered and the entire country contributed in some measure or other to the rebirth of the City of London — a city now on the threshold of a new era, for from here on we are made to feel the restless urge and the genius of the City in driving Britain on to the acquisition of the greatest empire the world has ever seen and through the rapid development of banking and large scale commercial enterprise, the creation of an even wider financial and commercial empire. Always radical, impatient of antiquity and tradition but jealous of its ancient rights, London lives in these pages

as “an organism with such an overwhelming urge to multiply that it made its seething energy felt around the spinning globe.” The story is one of adventure, frightening risk and great rewards. Wars, rebellions. the rise and fall of Governments and kings form the skeleton. Buccaneering, racketeering as well as enterprise, earnestness of purpose and honesty of endeavour form the flesh. There are in this all the things that made Britain great as well as many of the things that brought her undoing. In 1941, London burned again and once again history repeated itself, the burning marked the end of an era, this time the end of the City’s financial and commercial dominion over the world.