Landscapes of London, a beautifully produced volume in the Studies in British Art series by the Paul Mellon Centre at Yale, is a valuable addition to the growing literature on the cultural and social history of London in the premodern period. Elizabeth McKellar focuses on the boundaries between the city and the countryside, her test area is London, and she uses poetic, pictorial, and architectural evidence to develop her themes. Her historiographical and cultural context ranges from F. M. L. Thompson to Rayner Bonham, Mark Girouard, and Raymond Williams, while placing the impetus for change on middle-class practices and culture rather than landowning ideologies, as advanced recently by Dana Arnold in Rural Urbanism: London Landscapes in the Early Nineteenth Century (2005). McKellar begins by looking at the pictorial and architectural heritage of the London fringes in the long eighteenth century, drawing on Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto), George Cruikshank, Paul Sandby, and Thomas Rowlandson, among others, to show a variety of landscapes immediately beyond the fully built-up area, including brick kilns and rubbish dumps near King's Cross, the latter next to the smallpox hospital, the drug mill at Lambeth, and lime kilns in Charlton.

In the following chapter McKellar examines how the immediate environs of London were mapped over the period. Earlier maps showed mainly the parishes immediately adjacent to the built-up area, while by the early nineteenth century they extended ten—and then fifteen to twenty miles—from the center, beyond Middlesex to the southern fringes of Hertfordshire. From large multiple sheet maps like John Roque's, which could be joined then unrolled for display, to the pocket map books for travelers, the types of map in production reflected cultural fashions. In the next chapter, McKellar considers writing on London from John Stow to Daniel Lysons, charting the changing emphasis on history and on economic and social activity (in Defoe). She notes the many pocket guidebooks of the eighteenth century often in indexed gazetteer form and increasingly concentrated on leisure activities. Writings about London in the early nineteenth century were dominated by Lysons's work with its detailed local histories running outwards as far as Hertfordshire, reflecting parish histories such as William Robinson's Edmonton (1819), but it also included books of walks and books aimed at children. In another chapter, McKellar examines depictions of London in descriptive writing as well as pictorial representations. McKellar concentrates on the printmakers who gave views of London wide circulation, particularly the works of Samuel Grimm and J. T. Smith. In these views, London's hinterland became a managed landscape to be admired, often from well-documented viewpoints towards the center, but also including both gentlemen's seats and parks, and Smith's picturesque heathland cottage dwellings.

In the four chapters that form the second part of the book, McKellar examines “inhabited landscapes.” In the first two, “Landscapes of Leisure” and “Landscapes of Mobility,” McKellar considers the period up to ca. 1790. “Leisure” is examined through a discussion of the various pleasure gardens and springs to the immediate north of London, starting with Sadlers Wells in Islington, St. Pancras wells near Old St. Pancras church, and then Hampstead and Marylebone Gardens for their cultural and social significance. There is much excellent material here, and the chapter ends with a delightful example of the social norms and cultural nuances of suburban living, which McKellar describes through a discussion of a commemorative fan produced for an equivocal housewarming party held by a Holborn publisher moving to Hampstead. McKellar characterizes “mobility,” rather less successfully, by following the changing character of Highgate, where aristocratic seats of the sixteenth century were increasingly abandoned to nonconformists, the new Jewish community of London, and middle-class professional and tradespeople after the Restoration. The very mixed nature of Highgate's built environment is well illustrated, but a telling print of the pre-macadam road of enormous breadth to Highgate through Holloway does not sufficiently convey the full impact of this major thoroughfare, nor how it narrowed into a bottleneck in the center of Highgate. Equally, one of Highgate's features then and now, was its position at the junction of three administrative parishes, doubtless one of its attractions to early nonconformists.

In the two last chapters of this section, titled “Landscapes of Selectivity” and “Landscapes of Transition,” respectively, McKellar looks at the design of new buildings in London's near suburbs that were aimed at a middle-class market, while giving the air of a bespoke creation. The first is chapter is centered on a discussion of the theory and practice of villa building, drawing on architects John Gwynn and J. B. Papworth, and characterized by cuboid detached or semidetached buildings in a classical mode. The villa is contrasted with the “box” and the cottage, both of which appealed to middle-class aspirants to a suburban second home at the end of the eighteenth century. The final chapter provides an interesting case study: the development of Regent's Park in the early nineteenth century as potentially the first planned suburb and with the later St. Johns Wood a major influence on city design across the Anglophone world. This was a time when London's rapidly rising population was putting great pressure on the infrastructure of the environs, and welfare provision multiplied the numbers of poor- and almshouses while the coming of canals, gas supplies, and turnpikes was changing the suburban countryside.

It would be carping to question McKellar's choice of well-trodden northern suburbs as case studies when their modern residents will undoubtedly love the book, but historians might have preferred Edmonton, Walthamstow, and perhaps Harrow as more ambitious choices with good available sources. She handles the multiplicity of cultural discourses well and draws on a wide range of sources, but her feeling for the economic and social context is less sure, and the concluding chapter could do more to draw the themes of the book together and set future agendas. Frustratingly, Yale has not allowed for any listing or index of the illustrations, but overall the content of the book has amply complemented its fine production standards.