Metropolis At War London

This book covers the years of terror and death faced by the metropolis of London during World War II. This is about the city and its people, not about war strategies, generals and politicians, although historical currents flowed through the city during the war. The city expected to be invaded. It was subject to starvation. It was bombed during a two-year period. Later, it was the first great city subjected to on-going rocket and missile attacks, including the V-2 Rocket, forerunner of the intercontinental ballistic missile. While terror rained down, the people of the city carried on with their lives, fought back, organized resistance and worked on ways to defeat the enemy. Film studios cranked out movies, theaters continued with shows. People lived and loved, even as others died in the bomb and rocket attacks. Spies and counterspies worked in the city. New nations were in the throes of birth, including Israel, India, and Pakistan. Exiles from dozens of nations flocked to the city. In the end, the city--and nation--survived and went on to thrive. Compared to those days, the "terror" threat of today seems far less menacing.

This book covers the years of terror and death faced by the metropolis of London during World War II. This is about the city and its people, not about war strategies, generals and politicians, although historical currents flowed through the city during the war. The city expected to be invaded. It was subject to starvation. It was bombed during a two-year period. Later, it was the first great city subjected to on-going rocket and missile attacks, including the V-2 Rocket, forerunner of the intercontinental ballistic missile. While terror rained down, the people of the city carried on with their lives, fought back, organized resistance and worked on ways to defeat the enemy. Film studios cranked out movies, theaters continued with shows. People lived and loved, even as others died in the bomb and rocket attacks. Spies and counterspies worked in the city. New nations were in the throes of birth, including Israel, India, and Pakistan. Exiles from dozens of nations flocked to the city. In the end, the city--and nation--survived and went on to thrive. Compared to those days, the "terror" threat of today seems far less menacing.

This vibrant history of London in the twentieth century reveals the city as a key site in the development of black internationalism and anticolonialism. Marc Matera shows the significant contributions of people of African descent to London’s rich social and cultural history, masterfully weaving together the stories of many famous historical figures and presenting their quests for personal, professional, and political recognition against the backdrop of a declining British Empire. A groundbreaking work of intellectual history, Black London will appeal to scholars and students in a variety of areas, including postcolonial history, the history of the African diaspora, urban studies, cultural studies, British studies, world history, black studies, and feminist studies.

The London cityscape has been intensely chronicled in photographs from daguerreotype to digital and is a visual laboratory for understanding the evolution of the modern city. This wonderful collection of images spans the city’s entire history, from ancient byways to beloved icons like St. Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, and the neon lights of Piccadilly Circus. Much of modern London was built as recently as the nineteenth century and captured by the immediacy of photography. Included are such paradigm-shifting moments as the rebuilding of Westminster Palace after the devastating fire of 1834 into the Houses of Parliament we know today, the construction of the world’s first underground transportation system, and even the latest architectural wave that has been radically transforming contemporary London, such as Norman Foster’s Swiss Re Tower (aka the Gherkin). Witness how this dynamic city was built (and rebuilt), becoming the popular destination known today for its royal palaces, lively outdoor markets, lavish department stores, peaceful garden squares, naturalistic parks, and many magnificent museums. This is the perfect book for Anglophiles and for anyone who has fallen for London’s many charms.

London continues to fascinate a vast audience across the world, and an extensive, diverse literature now exists describing and analyzing this metropolis. The central question - what is London? - has produced many answers but none of them, the author argues, uncovers the complex ways in which knowledge is constructed in the diverse attempts to represent places and people. On the contrary: a gulf has opened up between analysis of contemporary London as a global, postcolonial city, on the one hand, and historical accounts of the imperial capital on the other. The author shows how the gap can be bridged by combining an analysis of the representation over time by various experts of London and certain localities with an investigation of the ways in which residents have represented their communities through struggles over symbolic and material resources.

A comparative, historical analysis of three of the world's most challenging capital cities.

A vivid account of the forgotten citizens of maritime London who sustained Britain during the Revolutionary Wars In the half-century before the Battle of Trafalgar the port of London became the commercial nexus of a global empire and launch pad of Britain’s military campaigns in North America and Napoleonic Europe. The unruly riverside parishes east of the Tower seethed with life, a crowded, cosmopolitan, and incendiary mix of sailors, soldiers, traders, and the network of ordinary citizens that served them. Harnessing little-known archival and archaeological sources, Lincoln recovers a forgotten maritime world. Her gripping narrative highlights the pervasive impact of war, which brought violence, smuggling, pilfering from ships on the river, and a susceptibility to subversive political ideas. It also commemorates the working maritime community: shipwrights and those who built London’s first docks, wives who coped while husbands were at sea, and early trade unions. This meticulously researched work reveals the lives of ordinary Londoners behind the unstoppable rise of Britain’s sea power and its eventual defeat of Napoleon.

This book takes a fresh approach to the London Blitz by viewing this time through individual local boroughs of the metropolis. The term ‘London Blitz’ means that culturally we have become accustomed to understanding that the actual blitz experience was the same wherever in the capital one happened to be, despite some areas being hit more than others. This book illustrates how there were many London blitzes, not one, influenced by a myriad of metropolitan localities, and giving rise to an agency of locality that helped to shape the lived blitz experience. By walking through the streets of London, this book conducts a local area analysis, witnessing the blitz through six London localities, representative of the assorted administrative, economic, and socio-political variables prevalent in wartime London. Covering air raids alongside topics like the provision of shelters, homelessness, and communal feeding, it shows how any history of the London Blitz must acknowledge that it was an experience reflective of a varied metropolis.