Like the civic halls of England's towns and cities, the halls of London's livery companies have long provided more than a home base and administrative center for their eponymous institutions. They hosted, and symbolized the hosting of, the companies’ historic service in mediating between the freemanry and the city, in regulating the metropolitan economy, and in the very governance of London itself. From their very inception, often in medieval times, the physical presence of the livery halls emphatically punctuated the City of London's built environment, displaying the finest of its decorative arts and crafts as it did so. Their increasingly sumptuous furnishings mirrored, and continue to mirror, the power and affluence of company, city, and nation. The halls’ resilience over the centuries, especially in the years following the Fire of London in 1666 and again following the bombing raids of the 1940s, has been remarkable. Some halls are now in their fourth, fifth, or even sixth iteration on the same site. Though their function has evolved along with their respective companies, they have not been particularly well served by serious scholarship in the modern era. Part of that lack no doubt derives from the loss of physical premises and company archives following historic episodes of destruction. Yet the same may be said for sundry analogous institutions—the inns of court, the Guildhall of London, and the civic halls of sundry towns and cities elsewhere among them—which have nevertheless been far better served.

One therefore approaches this sumptuously produced and eloquently written work with great expectations. The volume was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of its full standing as a livery company. Its visual splendor and architectural emphasis nobly reflect that parentage. It partners Anya Lucas, whose recent Courtauld Institute of Art doctoral dissertation supports her art historical authority on the subject, with Henry Russell, whose architectural expertise supplies the rest. Sumptuous color photographs by Andreas von Einsiedel round out the production team.

The volume as a whole will be a delight to browse and display and offers a useful visual reference guide, replete with gazetteer and map, to the extant forty halls at issue. In that sense, the book serves as something of an updated and lavishly illustrated Pevsner, offering a valuable visual introduction to its subject. The readers of this journal will engage at greater length with Lucas's two chapters: the introduction and “The Lost Livery Halls,” which is really a summary history of the halls up to the end of the nineteenth century. One can see in both sections the tightrope on which Lucas has had to balance the original scholarship of primary research with the interests of a putatively lay audience. The trickiest part of the remit will have been the problem of contextualization: how far to enlist the discussion into current conversations about such matters as the role of the liveries in the developing capitalist economy of a long time span, and the relationship between architecture and authority without alienating the primarily lay readership for which the volume is intended. In this Lucas succeeds reasonably well: weaving together strands of primary as well as secondary source material, acknowledging at least something of recent historiographical conversations, while working all the while against the narrow, self-celebratory, and largely uncontextualized tenor of most traditional company histories.

Yet that is not to say that opportunities have not been missed. One still awaits a thoughtful consideration of, for example, what the halls meant in the life of the company, city, and the nation; how they facilitated the brotherly love and social stability to which their occupants were putatively devoted; how they accommodated the evolving function of the liveries themselves. It may also be useful to explore what they may have had in common in those respects with such other quasi civic building types as the inns of court, or the civic halls of cities and towns from London's Guildhall on down. Those inclined to indulge in such further investigations will find the labors of Lucas and Russell one of several useful points of departure.