London: Bread and Circuses Book

A beguiling combination of anecdote, analysis, and opinion, London: Bread and Circuses is Jonathan Glancey's personal and political take on a city he loves. Wherever and whenever state and church, state and autocracy, political and architectural ambition have met and loved one another hungrily, domes have raised their imperious, lofty heads. At once magnificent and messy, old-fashioned and ultra-modern, opulent and squalid, London is something of a mongrel city, cross-bred over the centuries from cut-throat commerce, high finance and unrestrained creativity. For all its inventiveness, however, it is now also a city unable to provide its citizens with decent public transport, housing or services, beset and betrayed by governments who take from it but refuse to give back. In the lead-up to the much-hyped Millennium, a fortune was spent on lavish building projects—giant wheels, great courts, titanic art galleries, ambitious museums, a Brobdingnagian dome—but little in the way of public services, intelligent urban planning and infrastructure except by default. Has the right kind of money been spent on the wrong sort of projects? Who, in this pluralistic age, will cut through the layers of bureaucracy to restore some of the city's unruly splendor? In this elegant and polemical book, the architecture critic Jonathan Glancey explores London's Millennial follies and asks how and where London might now channel its energies. Combining anecdote and analysis with a sustained critique of the way the city is governed and financed, he draws a detailed picture of the state London's in and speculates on how it might be transformed.Read More