Britain's Lost Cities

Britain's Lost Cities PDF Author: Gavin Stamp
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
ISBN: 9781845135232
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Two hundred high-quality images of beautiful streets and buildings, destroyed by bombing or planned demolition, bring to life the stories behind Britain's lost urban heritage The destruction meted out on Britain's city center during the 20th century, by the combined efforts of the Luftwaffe and brutalist city planners, is legendary. Medieval churches, Tudor alleyways, Georgian terraces, and Victorian theaters vanished forever, to be replaced by a gruesome landscape of concrete office blocks and characterless shopping malls. Now architectural historian Gavin Stamp shows exactly what has been lost. Reproduced in this haunting volume are hundreds of city photographs, showing streets and buildings that are gone forever. The accompanying text traces their creation and destruction, remembering the massive campaign to save the Euston Arch, wantonly demolished in 1962, and mourning the loss of lovely medieval Coventry, which was already doomed by the city planners even before German air raids intervened. Alternately fascinating, enraging, and heartbreaking, this is an extraordinary evocation of Britain's architectural past, and a much-needed reminder of the importance of preserving heritage.

Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages

Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages PDF Author: Matthew Green
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039363535X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2022 A “brilliant London historian” (BBC Radio) tells the story of Britain as never before—through its abandoned villages and towns. Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff. This is the extraordinary tale of Britain’s eerie and remarkable ghost towns and villages; shadowlands that once hummed with life. Peering through the cracks of history, we find Dunwich, a medieval city plunged off a cliff by sea storms; the abandoned village of Wharram Percy, wiped out by the Black Death; the lost city of Trellech unearthed by moles in 2002; and a Norfolk village zombified by the military and turned into a Nazi, Soviet, and Afghan village for training. Matthew Green, a British historian and broadcaster, tells the astonishing tales of the rise and demise of these places, animating the people who lived, worked, dreamed, and died there. Traveling across Britain to explore their haunting and often-beautiful remains, Green transports the reader to these lost towns and cities as they teeter on the brink of oblivion, vividly capturing the sounds of the sea clawing away row upon row of houses, the taste of medieval wine, or the sights of puffin hunting on the tallest cliffs in the country. We experience them in their prime, look on at their destruction, and revisit their lingering remains as they are mourned by evictees and reimagined by artists, writers, and mavericks. A stunning and original excavation of Britain’s untold history, Shadowlands gives us a truer sense of the progress and ravages of time, in a moment when many of our own settlements are threatened as never before.

Britain's Lost Cities

Britain's Lost Cities PDF Author: Gavin Stamp
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
ISBN: 9781845135232
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Two hundred high-quality images of beautiful streets and buildings, destroyed by bombing or planned demolition, bring to life the stories behind Britain's lost urban heritage The destruction meted out on Britain's city center during the 20th century, by the combined efforts of the Luftwaffe and brutalist city planners, is legendary. Medieval churches, Tudor alleyways, Georgian terraces, and Victorian theaters vanished forever, to be replaced by a gruesome landscape of concrete office blocks and characterless shopping malls. Now architectural historian Gavin Stamp shows exactly what has been lost. Reproduced in this haunting volume are hundreds of city photographs, showing streets and buildings that are gone forever. The accompanying text traces their creation and destruction, remembering the massive campaign to save the Euston Arch, wantonly demolished in 1962, and mourning the loss of lovely medieval Coventry, which was already doomed by the city planners even before German air raids intervened. Alternately fascinating, enraging, and heartbreaking, this is an extraordinary evocation of Britain's architectural past, and a much-needed reminder of the importance of preserving heritage.

Shadowlands

Shadowlands PDF Author: Matthew Green
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9781324064497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2022 A "brilliant London historian" (BBC Radio) tells the story of Britain as never before--through its abandoned villages and towns.

Treaty for a Lost City

Treaty for a Lost City PDF Author: C. L. Lim
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108838758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Uses declassified archival records to analyse the legal and contemporary circumstances surrounding the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration.

Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities

Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities PDF Author: Catherine Flinn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350067644
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Many British cities were devastated by bombing during the Second World War and faced stark economic dilemmas concerning reconstruction planning and implementation after 1945. How did politicians, civil servants and local authorities manage to produce the cities we live in today? Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities examines the underlying processes and pressures, especially financial and bureaucratic, which shaped postwar urbanism in Britain. Catherine Flinn integrates architectural planning with in-depth economic and political analyses of Britain's blitzed cities for the first time. She examines early reconstruction arrangements, the postwar economic apparatus and the challenges of postwar physical planning across the country, while providing insightful case studies from the cities of Hull, Exeter and Liverpool. By addressing the ideology versus the reality of reconstruction in postwar Britain, Rebuilding Britain's Blitzed Cities highlights the importance of economic and political factors for understanding the British postwar built environment.

Lost Victorian Britain

Lost Victorian Britain PDF Author: Gavin Stamp
Publisher: Aurum Press
ISBN: 9781781310182
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
These days it seems obvious that stupendous constructions like St Pancras Station should be preserved and restored. But as recently as the 1970s Glasgow’s superb St Enoch’s Hotel made way for a shopping centre, and in the 1960s St Pancras itself was also earmarked for demolition. “Victorian” was a term of abuse. Add in wartime bombing by the Luftwaffe, and town planners eager for ring roads and multi-storeys, and the destruction is shocking. This poignant, angry book, full of stunning images, chronicles the catastrophic swathe cut through Britain’s architectural heritage by the twentieth century’s sustained antipathy to the nineteenth, entirely through buildings that have disappeared. Of the 200 notable examples of Victorian architecture illustrated in this book, from the magnificent Imperial Institute in Kensington to the vast country house of Eaton Hall, not one still exists. A photograph is all we have left. As well as architectural causes célèbres like the Euston Arch and London’s Coal Exchange, Gavin Stamp turns up many lesser-known Victorian buildings, like the extraordinary Gothic battlements of Columbia Market in East London, or Chatsworth’s soaring glasshouse streamlined like a spaceship. Surprising, chastening, but also uplifting, Lost Victorian Britain is a memorable journey back into a world that should never have been lost.

Boom Cities

Boom Cities PDF Author: Otto Saumarez Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192573470
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Boom Cities is the first published history of the profound transformations of British city centres in the 1960s. It has often been said that urban planners did more damage to Britain's cities than even the Luftwaffe had managed, and this study details the rise and fall of modernist urban planning, revealing its origins and the dissolution of the cross-party consensus, before the ideological smearing that has ever since characterized the high-rise towers, dizzying ring roads, and concrete precincts that were left behind. The rebuilding of British city centres during the 1960s drastically affected the built form of urban Britain, including places ranging from traditional cathedral cities through to the decaying towns of the industrial revolution. Boom Cities uncovers both the planning philosophy, and the political, cultural, and legislative background that created the conditions for these processes to occur across the country. Boom Cities reveals the role of architect-planners in these transformations. The volume also provides an unconventional account of the end of modernist approaches to the built environment, showing it from the perspective of planning and policy elites, rather than through the emergence of public opposition to planning.

Architecture and Armed Conflict

Architecture and Armed Conflict PDF Author: JoAnne Mancini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317659775
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Architecture and Armed Conflict is the first multi-authored scholarly book to address this theme from a comparative, interdisciplinary perspective. By bringing together specialists from a range of relevant fields, and with knowledge of case studies across time and space, it provides the first synthetic body of research on the complex, multifaceted subject of architectural destruction in the context of conflict. The book addresses several specific research questions: How has the destruction of buildings and landscapes figured in recent historical conflicts, and how have people and states responded to it? How has the destruction of architecture been represented in different historical periods, and to what ends? What are the relationships between the destruction of architecture and the destruction of art, particularly iconoclasm? If architectural destruction is a salient feature of many armed conflicts, how does it feature in post-conflict environments? What are the relationships between architectural destruction and processes of restoration, recreation or replacement? Considering multiple conflicts, multiple time periods, and multiple locations allows this international cohort of authors to provide an essential primer for this crucial topic.

The Lost Continent

The Lost Continent PDF Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385674562
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.

Coventry

Coventry PDF Author: Frederick Taylor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408860279
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
At a few minutes past seven on the evening of Thursday, 14 November 1940, the historic industrial city of Coventry was subjected to the longest, most devastating air raid Britain had yet experienced. Only after eleven hours of continual bombardment by the German Luftwaffe could its people emerge from their half-sunk Anderson shelters and their cellars, from under their stairs or kitchen tables, to venture up into their wounded city. That long night of destruction marked a critical moment in the Second World War. It heralded a new kind of air warfare, one which abandoned the pursuit of immediate military goals and instead focused on obliterating all aspects of city life. It also provided the push America needed to join Britain in the war. But while the Coventry raid was furiously condemned publically, such effective enemy tactics provided Britain's politicians and military establishment with a 'blueprint for obliteration', to be adapted and turned against Germany. A merciless four-year war of attrition had begun. In this important work of history Frederick Taylor draws upon numerous sources, including eye witness interviews from the archives of the BBC which are published here for the first time, to reveal the true repercussions of the bombing of Coventry in 1940. He teases out the truth behind the persistent rumours and conspiracy theories that Churchill knew the raid was coming, assesses this significant turning point in modern warfare, looks at how it affected Britain's status in the war, and considers finally whether this attack really could provide justification for the horror of Dresden, 1945.