Britain's Lost Cities
de Gavin Stamp
"It is not only the Luftwaffe that was to blame for the destruction meted out on Britain's city centres during the twentieth century. The utopian dream of postwar planners beguiled by modernist visions of a car-borne, tower-block-dwelling society saw Mediaeval churches, Tudor alleyways, Georgian terraces and grand monuments to Victorian mercantilism vanish for ever, to be replaced by a landscape of concrete office-blocks, arterial roads and characterless shopping malls." "Now, Gavin Stamp shows us what we have lost. Reproduced in this book are hundreds of haunting photographs of cities from Plymouth to Glasgow, Canterbury to Leeds, all of streets and buildings that have gone for good - of historic cityscapes that now only exist at all in the form of a rare, sometimes grainy photograph. Lost, mourns Stamp, are Liverpool's magnificent Custom House, London's Foundling Hospital, Newcastle's Royal Arcade and Dundee's amazing and idiosyncratic Royal Arch, to pick just a handful of egregious losses." "He shows, further, how cities like Coventry and Hull that today we think of as both architecturally not particularly distinguished and above all recent, had, until the wrecking balls moved in, lovely mediaeval districts and leafy market squares - in Coventry's case, indeed, swept away by the city planners and enthusiast for the car even before German air-raids gutted the cathedral. Often, too, he reveals, the culprits in the most wanton destruction were those who might have been expected to be the most careful custodians of our heritage - like our universities, who oversaw the destruction of Georgian terraces in Edinburgh and in London's Bloomsbury." "This is a vocation of our architectural past - a virtual tour of a vanished Britain and a reminder of the importance of preserving our heritage."--Jacket.
