Building the Vanished City: Conservation in Turn-of-the-Century London

Abstract

Claims interpretations of demolitions in late-nineteenth-century London by topographers and antiquarians found expression in the works of the municipal government. Notes how the demolition and rebuilding of the city over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincided with a growing interest in London’s vanishing material heritage, an interest that by the end of the century gave rise to groups devoted to recording traces of the disappearing city. Believes texts of this recording project enabled London’s government to modernize London as an historic city.