This is a somewhat perplexing and frustrating book to review. On the one hand, this well-presented and serious study of early modern London, co-written by two of its leading historians, serves as a useful, lucid and reliable introduction to the history of London between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how the authors managed to be persuaded to allow their work to be marred by one of the most annoying conceits of modern historical writing, the first person imaginary time-traveller, delivered in a demotic North American chattiness, that neither brings London to life nor convinces the reader of the veracity of the work.

This is a real shame as the bulk of the book consists of a reasonably convincing if somewhat familiar case for London as an engine of growth, ‘a catalyst for modernity’, in which metropolitan institutions, manners and mores played a transformative role. This is familiar ground. Long ago, economic historians such as Frank Fisher, E.A. Wrigley and others demonstrated how London's population growth, demand for luxuries, fuel and foodstuffs did much to help promote regional specialization and a national market. Likewise, more recently Peter Borsay and others have shown how London manners and London ways in the arts and architecture, club life and sociability, reading habits percolated from the centre to the provinces and contributed to the making of the English urban renaissance. Historians of the public sphere such as Peter Clark and Miles Ogborn, have built on the work of Jurgen Habermas to delineate, through the development of clubs, coffee houses and newspapers, specific set of attitudes and social practices that helped to forge the culture of modern liberal market-oriented societies. Bucholz and Ward see the ‘hallmarks of modernity’ in London's local government finance, participatory democracy, novels, newspapers, insurance schemes and street lighting. The transformation of London is framed around a systematic breakdown of old established social and cultural hierarchies, the ‘Great Chain of Being’ and the emergence of a modern dynamic urban society.

It is possible to take issue with this argument while admiring the way it is put. The concept of modernity is notoriously slippery and it is wise to be wary of reading all developments in the period as leading towards one modernizing goal. Yet, this is a strong thread running through this work that is consistent and could have done with more focus. In regard to local government, it is possible to take issue with the idea of early modern London as agent of modernity. Reformers of nineteenth-century local government looked back on the proliferation of local commissioners of sewers, the administration of justice and much else by the Middlesex JPs as archaic hangovers from the past rather than harbingers of the present. Likewise, political radicals of the nineteenth century castigated the proliferation of office holders, lowly paid bumbles of the City of London Corporation and livery companies, as part of the ‘old corruption’ that they were fighting to overthrow. London may have been well governed in the early modern period but it was not modern nor was it proto-democratic, as generations of radicals, from the Levellers onwards, had learned. Though attempts to fit the rest of the book into a conceptual framework of modernity do not entirely convince, this is not to say that there are not compelling and comprehensive discussions here, of the fine arts, charitable institutions, literature, popular culture, urban riots, the Great Fire and rebuilding. All these are here and more besides, and, as is to be expected from historians such as Bucholz and Ward, coverage is scrupulous and detailed.

Why the reservations? The book is obviously geared to a US undergraduate market, right down to spellings and colloquialisms. We are treated in the first few pages to discussions of property development as ‘real estate’ and the proliferation of ‘gin joints’ in the eighteenth century. Women servants in alehouses are ‘bar maids’. Late medieval London is compared to Hendersonville, North Carolina. The first virtual 60 pages of the book are rendered in a somewhat breathless prose with necessary (given the target audience) digressions into London's history prior to 1550, the history of Britain in the early modern period and a very short section on historiography. The bibliography though not comprehensive would serve to direct undergraduates to further reading. There are a few mistakes but they are minor. It is the use of the historical present tense and the first person imaginary travelogue that is particularly grating. An entire early chapter is taken up with an imaginary visit to London in 1550. This could be forgiven but an entirely lucid and interesting account of the organization of the Court is disrupted by the reappearance of our imaginary traveller, who disappears and pops again later in the text on a return visit in 1750. It is this approach that ultimately renders the modernization thesis, if not unconvincing, then difficult to follow.