In Visualising a Sacred City, Ben Quash, Aaron Rosen and Chloë Reddaway have brought together 19 essays examining the relationship between religion, the arts and London. The collection is impressively ecumenical – not only in its attention to various religious traditions (with chapters examining Protestants and Catholics, Roman mystery cults, Judaism, Islam, Neo-Paganism and Sikhism), but also chronologically, spanning the entirety of London's history from the Ancient Romans to the present day; in its definition of ‘art’, including architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry, prose, photography and cartoons; and disciplinarily, with contributors hailing from the fields of religious studies, history, art history, architecture, philosophy and film studies, as well as practising members of the clergy. The volume's contents, therefore, collectively exemplify not only London's past and present religious diversity and the multiform ways this diversity shaped – and continues to shape – the life and landscape of the capital city, but also the range of perspectives that might be deployed in endeavouring to make sense of those moments where (in the words of Samuel Wells, vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields) ‘art, London, and religion converge’ (p. xxi).

Given the enormous variety of topics and approaches assembled in the collection, one might expect the overall effect on the reader to be cacophonous. Yet this is remarkably not the case. The editors have imposed one kind of coherence on this diverse array of eras, forms and methodologies by grouping the individual chapters into five thematic subsections: ‘Part 1: Foundations, ancient and medieval’, ‘Part 2: Visions of a holy city’, ‘Part 3: Material culture’, ‘Part 4: Modern worship spaces’ and ‘Part 5: Contemporary art exhibitions’. In addition to the editors’ organizing framework, however, a number of common themes are observable throughout the volume, yielding a sense of collective argument across the collection as an entirety.

First, most of the authors ground their arguments in a specific physical space, work of art or artifact still present in the London landscape. In some cases, the relationships between these physical entities and the analyses they inspire are more explicit than in others. The connections made by the essays in ‘Visions of a holy city’, for example, are the most tenuous (and thus the least convincing), but perhaps this is to be expected, given this subsection's focus on imaginative depictions of London and religion. For the most part, however, the linkages made between artifacts and arguments in these essays are more tightly connected. This allows the authors to demonstrate how immersion in the geo-spatial reality of present-day London enhances our comprehension of its religious history, while simultaneously emphasizing how understanding this history likewise enriches the lived experience of the city today, regardless of one's own individual spiritual proclivities (or lack thereof).

Catherine Hundley, for example, retraces the footsteps of twelfth-century pilgrims between four London churches inspired by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, but does so via the streets of the twenty-first-century metropolis. In doing so, she deftly employs the present-day pedestrian context as a means for facilitating an understanding of the ‘complex significance of these churches to twelfth-century Londoners’ (p. 60). Michael Ledger-Lomas likewise grounds his analysis of the cultural implications of the late Victorian and twentieth-century efforts to preserve the early modern burial ground of Bunhill Fields as a sacred space, historic relic and ‘open space’, with the Field's metal railings, familiar to any contemporary visitor to the graveyard. These railings, he argues, are indicative of this tripartite but conflicted preservationist mission, whose end result was a compartmentalized space where the ‘sacred’ was cordoned off in discrete corners to allow the ‘holy dead’ to co-exist with ‘modern ideas of beauty and amenity’ (p. 159). This compartmentalization, while physically preserving Bunhill Fields within the heavily built London landscape, nevertheless eradicated its sacred function as imagined by early modern Protestants, who believed that wandering freely among the graves represented a valuable means of religious instruction. Thus, the visitors who picnic or stroll in Bunhill Fields today are barred (culturally and literally) from engaging in this earlier, sacred activity.

A focus on religious traces observable in the contemporary London environment, in turn, supports another recurring theme running throughout the collection: the ways different religions transformed London, and the corresponding ways in which the London context, in turn, contributed to altering existing religious practices. As new religions left their imprints on London's physical and cultural environment, so did London leave its imprint on these traditions. Ben Quash argues that the practice of different religions in the capital city produced both ‘competitive’ and ‘additive’ dynamics, resulting in ‘lively cross-fertilisations’ that have shaped the city's ‘distinctive energy and character’ (p. 5). In fact, he contends that this seemingly paradoxical relationship demonstrates that religious life in London has continually produced spiritual and urban imaginaries that ‘often coexist in highly mutually contradictory ways’ (p. 8).

This contradictory dynamic of conflict and construction emerges in a particularly striking fashion in the volume's two chapters addressing the history of Sikhs in London. In his examination of the architectural evolution of the Gurdwara in London between 1906 and the present day, for example, Peter Bance notes that many of the earliest Sikh worship spaces in the city were converted Christian churches. In fact, well into the middle of the twentieth century, he contends that even ‘purpose-built’ Gurdwara in London frequently ‘drew on Western, Christian forms’, resulting in spaces of religious practice characterized by Asian-European hybridity (p. 236). Tania Ahmed's analysis of visual depictions of Sikh men with their distinctive turbans, in contrast, demonstrates how the presence of Sikhs in public London spaces – above all, as drivers of the iconic London bus – introduced controversial religious practices into spaces that were previously secular (or at least were perceived to be secular). In this way, the legal demands for tolerance often associated with British secularism paradoxically became the means of introducing religion into compartments of London life previously viewed as non-religious, like public transportation. Thus, these authors’ conclusions, like those of the many other contributors to the collection, confirm Quash's claim that, while no religious tradition ‘enters London without becoming an inheritor’, so also no contemporary Londoner can inhabit the city without being enmeshed in the city's multilayered religious inheritance (p. 14).

Ultimately, this collection's authors’ common emphasis on seeing the history of religion in London through the lens of its present-day physical geography yields the impression that even when they are writing about the religious life of London hundreds (or even thousands) of years in the past, they are also always writing about the spiritual life of London in the present day, and this past/present slippage may at times prove frustrating to readers from the historical discipline. Nevertheless, one cannot come away from the work as a whole without receiving a sense of the vital importance different religious traditions continue to play in shaping the London of the twenty-first century.