How did London's West End function as a specific urban unit in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? And how does this change our understanding of ‘pleasure districts’ as a wider category of historical analysis? These are the central questions addressed in Rohan McWilliam's London's West End, and he answers them while providing the reader with a chronological overview of the development of the district in question. The central argument of the book is that various ‘pleasure’ institutions – from theatres to optical lantern shows to hotel lobbies, museums, restaurants and cafes – not only mutually influenced one another, but that these influences and connections made up a specific cultural glue, unique to the West End in this period.

One of the ways McWilliam achieves his argument is through the novel concept of a ‘populist palatial’ cultural style – found in music halls, cinemas, restaurants, cafes, museums, hotels and theatres – that combined grandiose, ‘exotic’, cosmopolitan styles with an emphasis on ‘taste and refinement’. The Savoy's numerous hotel rooms, for instance, did not form a cohesive set of design principles but employed contrasting styles – a mix of Louis XV and XVI, Empire and Georgian – with the sole purpose of provoking awe and a sense of luxury among its patrons. This style was ‘about atmosphere, fashion, and indulgence on a grand scale’ (p. 200), and penetrated a range of West End institutions: music halls’ sense of prestige and luxury followed the style of grandeur found at Drury Lane and Covent Garden; restaurants intersected with theatre through creating desserts and teacakes designed to evoke performances patrons saw on stage; and the West End's arcades’ function as ‘offer[ing] the magnetic appeal of being small towns in miniature’, which was reflected in advertisements for the Hotel Cecil, which claimed to be ‘a little world in itself located in the very centre of the hub of the richest capital of the world’ (p. 265). The West End thus gained its allure, argues McWilliam, by being self-referential – a defining characteristic of pleasure districts more broadly.

Throughout the book, there is an attempt to trace how these interactions between representations of the West End functioned, which is largely achieved by resorting to juxtaposition and paradox. The theatres of St James’ offered London's elite their own stage on which to perform their aesthetic superiority while visiting a play, yet they are placed by McWilliam against the backdrop of Covent Garden's drab square where the lower classes engaged in bawdiness, alcohol and prostitution. Old Masters’ paintings in the National Gallery were located in close proximity to street performers in Tableaux vivants scenes re-enacting the well-known paintings, which juxtaposed ‘official and unofficial art’ (p. 91). The Burlington Arcade, nominally a controlled space – where police enforced bans on smoking, whistling and singing – paradoxically hosted shops that sold French pornographic novels. Numerous paradoxes and juxtapositions are only useful, however, insofar as they aid historians in addressing more fundamental questions. What do these contrasts and contradictions say about wider themes in Victorian society and culture? And how might these challenge established ways of seeing nineteenth-century urban spaces? One possible inroad in answering these questions would be to invoke theory that can illuminate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban life – and there are numerous references to Pierre Bourdieu, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin – but McWilliam cites these without meaningfully integrating their ideas into his argument, and it consequently feels, at times, like an exercise in name dropping.

The book would also have benefited from a deeper examination of how the development of the West End as a pleasure district was received in the minds of the public. If the reader is to believe ‘lighting was in every sense dramatic and could be used in new ways to affect the senses’ (p. 124), the ‘visual impact of the West End was crucial to its impression on the senses’ (p. 122), or theatres constituted a ‘buffer zone which translated an aristocratic idiom to a wider public’ (p. 192), then reference to how individuals actually experienced these developments at the time would have helped make the arguments more persuasive. One occasion where personal commentary is invoked – with reference to the German traveller Sophie von la Roche's diary entries on the phantasmagoric quality of Oxford Street in the late eighteenth century (p. 24) – works very well and provides strong evidence on how shop window displays were received by contemporaneous witnesses.

The strength of the book, then, lies in its broad overview of the development of the West End – from aristocratic luxury in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the mass market imitation of this luxury by the middle classes in the latter part of the century – while examining both concrete historical institutions – hotels, shops, theatres, restaurants, opera – and more abstract notions such as the role of lighting, architecture, performance and cosmopolitanism in the creation of the pleasure district. McWilliam's book should, therefore, serve as a good place of departure for both undergraduates and researchers interested in not only the West End, but how entertainment districts function as a whole.