Life in the Georgian City

by Dan Cruickshank, Neil Burton

During the 18th century, the narrow cluttered streets of towns were replaced by regular terraces of town houses built to classical designs. The author has previously written " the Art of Georgian Building" and "A Guide to the Georgian Buildings of England and Ireland".

Genres: History, Architecture, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

Published September 4, 1990

About the author

Cruickshank holds a BA in Art, Design and Architecture and was formerly a Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Sheffield and a member of the London faculty of the University of Delaware. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a member of the Executive Committee of the Georgian Group and on the Architectural Panel of the National Trust.

Reviews

[Nelson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title is more than a little misleading. This is less a book about 'life' in the Georgian city than an incredibly precise and elaborate architectural survey regarding the construction and layout of the typical Georgian home. The print is spectacularly tiny (something that I tend to notice these days) and often veers into incredible specificity about daily pay rates for bricklayers versus master joiners and the expectation for how many rods of brickwork a particular wall will require and so forth. If you are an architect or an architectural historian, this volume will be right up your alley. It is informative: I know far more about dados and cornices than I ever expect I will need to know, not to mention the preferred and / or typical placement of the shitter in a Georgian home. Indeed, for a certain reader, there's probably enough information here for you to build your own Georgian house with period materials and tools. (Sounds like a BBC4 show.) What redeems the book from not exactly fulfilling what the title seems to promise are loads of quotations from foreign travelers, period pamphlets and other eighteenth-century material that places the architectural detail into context. And of course the pictures. That might be the best thing here: the volume is sumptuously illustrated with modern photographs, period paintings, drawings and more. It's a wonder to look at, less so to read.

[Nightwitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for people interested in Georgian city architecture... not to mention Georgian city gardens, Georgian city domestic life, Georgian city street life, and Georgian city interior design. Highly readable given the density of the information contained, although I probably know more about bricks than I need to.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Architectural drawings and extensive diagrams throughout. British history.

[Andrew Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a student I regularly got lost in the university library. I'd pick up a book that was entirely unrelated to what I was studying and, more often than not, I'd be hooked. I'm a knowledge sponge - I love learning about new subjects and idea - although I'm not sure how much of that information can be wrung out of me afterwards.
This is great example of the sort of book that would get me hooked. It's packed with detail about the Georgian city, from what time people ate breakfast to how busy the streets were at night. Drains, watchmen, building design and much more are all covering in minute detail.
The first half of the book is particularly interesting, as it explains how the city developed to accommodate those living in it. The descriptions are not at the grand scale, but right down at street level: lighting, coal holes, how the inhabitants used the spaces inside their homes. There are plenty of illustrations and contemporary sources.
The second half becomes much more architectural and I admit to skipping over this. But if you're looking to write novel featuring Georgian property speculators and builders, this book is packed with material. The detail of architectural moulding around door frames is less useful, but it's here if you need it.
All in all, this book is a worthy addition to our library of Georgian history resources. I think it will get more appreciation here than in its previous home of a university library, from which it was formally withdrawn a year or so back.

[Bhan13 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book with almost enough illustrations (I always want more). I had not realized how much is unknown about this fairly recent time in history, e.g. what time people ate dinner, when luncheon first started appearing. It was interesting to find out how many people lived in what is now considered a single family home (a family + equal number of servants, or a combination of one or more families and possibly single people). I was surprised at how often people ate out (referred to as 'fast food'), and although I was familiar with the habit of using a bourdoloue in the presence of other people I was not familiar with the habit of using a small bowl of water to swish and rinse out the mouth and pick at the teeth at the table. I would have liked more coverage of transportation, urban planning, what was planted in the gardens (although apparently much of that is not well known) and personal things like what people ate and wore, and where they got these things, but it covered things I hadn't thought much about like houses being built on spec, construction, sewers, and how they got their household water. I also learned so much about house design! I hadn't realized that dadoes, panelling, cornices, etc. were all based on the idea of Roman temples, and there was incredible detail on the endless variations of architectural details on architraves, baseboards, etc.