#books #townplanning | The pragmatic construction of London

The pragmatic construction of London / Miguel Aguiló.
ACS, Madrid : 2007.
389 p. : il., fotos.
Colección: ACS Libros de Grandes Ciudades = ACS Books on Great Cities ; 15.
ISBN 9788469788707
Ciudades -- Gran Bretaña.
Londres (Inglaterra)
Urbanismo -- Gran Bretaña.
Sbc Aprendizaje A-711.4(410) PRA
http://millennium.ehu.es/record=b1881122~S1*spi

London has been chronicled countless times. As an ancient, sprawling and heavily populated city, every part of its geography and every one of its grandees has been observed, analysed and described from a host of perspectives in thousands of books.

London embodies the impotence of theory to explain the city or attempt to predict or channel its growth. And since the aim is to penetrate today's city, the first task is to decide where this narrative should begin. Although defining a point of departure is necessarily an arbitrary decision, this book 'had to' start in 1848. Many a study deems that the so-called Second Industrial Revolution began in 1850 and came to an end in 1914. Eric Hobsbawm contended that 'Only one economy was effectively industrialised by 1848, the British, and consequently dominated the world'.

The book distinguishes four major eras from that year to the present. A subject closely related to construction is discussed in each, focusing on a specific built element, although background and implications are also addressed and other pertinent subjects are mentioned. The text is arranged around revolution, empire, modernity and globalisation, the themes prevailing in the titles of four of Eric Hobsbawm's books, although the order of the sequence varies to analyse the effects of these developments on the construction of London. The introduction is followed by a chapter on the effects of the Industrial Revolution, focusing on the railroad as the backbone of mobility and illustrating the cardinal importance of the railway station for the city. The third chapter discusses the legacy of empire, taking the river as the city's origin and frontier, a boulevard where wharfs and bridges generate a built landscape as essential to the city's smooth operation as it is to its imagery. These constructions recovered the river as a passageway. Their multiple presence and operation afforded them a central role in drainage for London as a whole, which subsequently served as a model in all large western cities. The fourth chapter studies modernist inter-war proposals that materialised in the aesthetics and use of city streets. The fifth addresses London's present status as a global city seeking higher sprawl-free density, redirecting its energies to financial, leisure time and tourist services accessible to the entire wold via telecommunications and air travel. The sixth chapter describes recent ACS works in the city.

Although routinely regarded as polycentric, London has a clearly defined urban core delimited by a belt of railway stations interconnected by the city's underground Circle Line. Whilst the tracks are not visible and the stations are camouflaged behind the façades of large hotels, their interiors are conspicuous for their everyday use and their status as reference points on the famous tube map that governs the city's spatial image. London, too vast to be assimilated, is addictive: the more intensely it is explored, the more city is left to discover and the more attractive it becomes.