When a committee of MPs investigating the state of the country’s gaol’s visited the Marshalsea debtor’s prison in Borough in 1729 the conditions they reported were appalling. Wards were “excessively Crowded, Thirty, Forty, nay Fifty Persons having been locked up in some of them not Sixteen Foot Square”. […]
Soon after moving to London five years I took a boat trip down the Thames and, from the breezy open deck, the capital’s blockbuster sights flashed before my eyes. The Houses of Parliament, the South Bank Centre, Tower Bridge and Maritime Greenwich were the places that stood out. […]
The Industrial Revolution was “a storm that passed over London and broke elsewhere,” suggested J R Hammond, writing in 1925. And the author wasn’t alone in this view: “The capital cities would be present at the forthcoming industrial revolution, but in the role of spectators. Not London, but […]
Past In The Present 