In recent years, a number of authors have sought to address the visual character of London. Perhaps the most famous example is Lynda Nead's Victorian Babylon (New Haven, 2000). Focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century, Nead's account is typical of a common privileging of the darker, Dickensian image of the city. Dana Arnold's The Metropolis and its Image (Oxford, 1999), Re-Presenting the Metropolis (Aldershot, 2000) and Rural Urbanism (Manchester, 2006) went some way to direct attention towards earlier decades. However, the late nineteenth century remained the focus for many. Landscapes of London challenges the disproportionate emphasis placed on the Victorian period and, by covering 180 years of London history, provides one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind. As with many publications from Yale, McKellar's text is illustrated throughout in colour. In addition to increasing the overall visual appeal, the images offer a valuable introduction to urban imagery, particularly watercolours, engravings and ephemera. The reproduction of works such as Thomas Milne's intricate Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (1800) prompts acknowledgment of the sophistication and delicacy with which the sprawling townscape was approached by artists and cartographers. For every boorish caricature, there were considered sketches and schematics designed to aid the interpretation as well as appreciation of the capital. McKellar's sources range from Rasmussen to Stow and Dyos to Defoe. The image makers themselves are equally diverse and include the famous, such as Cruickshank, Scharf, Knyff, Daniell, Rowlandson and Sandby, as well as obscure artists and anonymous engravers. As a repository of visual and literary source material, it constitutes an ambitious and meticulous project. Nevertheless, McKellar's greatest achievement is perhaps her detailed and consistent explanation of the fragmentary and ‘scattered’ nature of London, a model that many have struggled to accommodate within the preferred simplistic imagining of London as a singular ‘Great Wen’. The plurality of vision acknowledged by the title is applied throughout as the author unpicks stereotypes, presenting both a literal and figurative picture of a city in which terms such as ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ were never stable nor absolute. In this sense, the book tackles the most challenging of tasks – the definition of the geographical, economic and social parameters of a city. This is achieved in a series of chapters, each of which tackles a distinct theme, period and/or neighbourhood.
The book is divided into two parts titled ‘Paper landscapes’ and ‘Inhabited landscapes’ respectively. The first part addresses mapping, writing and pictorial imagery in turn. The second part is organized chronologically and uses similar source materials to attend to landscapes of pleasure, mobility, selectivity and transition. Each chapter incorporates case-studies of the environs of the City of London and Westminster, such as Whitechapel, Shadwell, Enfield, Highgate, Chiswick and Chelsea. Throughout these detailed discussions, there lies a convincing narrative of a process of conglomeration, fused in the minds of those who witnessed it through the myriad visions presented to them.
Chapter 1 examines the role of mapping as a ‘form of popular knowledge, pleasure, and material culture’. Incorporating analysis of examples by Hollar, Lea and Rocque, McKellar asserts convincingly that by the late seventeenth century, mapping the city was as much about defining its limits as it was about plotting its interior. Around the same time, McKellar argues, maps indicate the increasing identification of a wider London area, beyond the City and Westminster, a phenomenon evidenced by the emergence of the term ‘environs’ as early as the 1660s. It is such connections between the conceptualization of the metropolis and its delineation on paper and canvas that help to move McKellar's account beyond the confines of conventional urban history. The rapid growth of London in the eighteenth century demanded the evolution of new formats for its representation, such as Cary's The Country Fifteen Miles Round London (1786). The author traces this development in detail while maintaining the overarching of a landscape created by, and for, a consumer society.
The second chapter is titled ‘Writing the landscapes of London’ and addresses the emergence of guidebook literature about the metropolis. One of the most intriguing elements of this section is the emphasis placed on the pan-European market for such material. Publications such as Colsoni's Le guide de Londres (1693) are likely to be unfamiliar to many scholars. In addition to revealing much about the readership of this genre, McKellar's account suggests that as early as 1700, there was little consensus about what most appealed to visitors and readers; some authors attempted to make the city knowable, while others sought to sensationalize London's ‘dangerous, labyrinthine impenetrability’ (p. 61). In recounting these conflicting perspectives, the author succeeds in presenting variations in attitude to the expanding metropolis as a distinctive feature of the long eighteenth century, rather than as a precursor of the more intensively studied ‘Dickensian’ city that was to follow.
In the final chapter of Part 1, McKellar assumes an inclusive approach to the term ‘picturing’ and intertwines visual imagery with poetic and dramatic literature to explore depictions of the ‘London countryside’. The account given of the London print market complements rather than expands on existing narratives, but nonetheless provides a useful introduction to the subject. More radical and compelling is the discussion of the aerial vantage point, particularly in light of the topography of the capital and the numerous opportunities to view and depict the metropolis from elevated positions on the peripheral neighbourhoods. McKellar's identification of ‘scopic corridors’ from the suburbs into the centre is just one example of how her approach to the imagery discussed has the potential to inform more broadly our interpretation of the spatial politics of London during one of the most significant periods in its development (p. 83).
The theme of the chapter titled ‘Landscapes of pleasure’ will be familiar to most historians of the long eighteenth century. However, whereas many scholars have confined their focus to the urban centre, venturing perhaps as far as Vauxhall, McKellar stays true to her commitment to a wider geographical scope and includes a colourful discussion of Sadler's Wells, Hampstead and even Enfield. ‘Landscapes of mobility’ challenges the prevailing historical wisdom that relocation to the suburbs or rural hinterland constituted yet another example of social emulation. The author's observation that ‘the mobility the majority of them sought was not upwards into the ranks of the landed elite but outwards into creating a more diversified economic base than their trading and financing activities alone could provide’ gives some indication of the potential wider impact of McKellar's study (p. 148). Concerned with a period during which the suburban landscape was increasingly regulated spatially, ‘Landscapes of selectivity’ addresses the impact of the ideas of the architect John Gwynn and the landscape architect J.C. Loudon upon both individual buildings and wider streetscapes. An array of plans, sketches and modern photographs demonstrate how the age of lodges, villas and ‘cottages’ saw the gentrification of the environs and, arguably, a high point in the synthesis between the real landscape of London and the idealized aesthetics of the artist's imagination. The final chapter, titled ‘Landscapes of transition’ presents a persuasive analysis of Regent's Park as a modern landscape of transition. The discussion of speed and transit through the park is particularly arresting and invites further study of the impact of transportation on the conceptualization and representation of early urban parks and gardens.
The general appeal of Landscapes of London owes much to the fact that it engages the reader's own Romantic imagination by presenting images and accounts of sights so obliterated from the current city as to appear almost irrelevant to its present form, and yet so deeply embedded in the narrative of its evolution as to demand recognition. At a scholarly level, it presents seemingly familiar subjects, such as pleasure gardens, and delivers evidence that enriches and complicates those now-established narratives of urban society and the landscapes it inhabited. In a field of study bound by stereotypes and clichés, this recognition of plurality and contradiction is a significant challenge to historical wisdom. The book provides an alternative model for considering urbanization in general, as well as London in particular. As McKeller herself states, ‘This book is about cities, where they begin and where they end’ (p. xi).
