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Landscapes of London: the City, the Country and the Suburbs, 1660-1840

This book explores the rural-urban interface in the London area in the long eighteenth century. It proposes that a conception of a Greater London existed which constituted a significant trope in metropolitan culture. It demonstrates that this previously ignored peripheral zone formed a new suburban environment for both the gentry and the middling classes; the first such suburbs anywhere in the world. McKellar’s study explores this phenomenon beyond the limited enclaves of the elite court-related suburbs of the south-west instead focussing primarily on the non-conformist and merchant-dominated area to the north of the centre. This publication provides the first interdisciplinary cultural history of this area analysing it in relation to a number of key debates in the period concerning modernity and national, social and gender identities.

The book overturns the conventional chronology which places the first suburbs (in the modern sense) as beginning in the early nineteenth century. Instead it demonstrates that not only were the first suburbs a century and a half earlier but also that they had functions beyond the purely residential. It argues that the London region of the long eighteenth century was a mixed zone functionally, socially and economically; the forerunner of the modern conurbation. The research has been developed through invited conference papers and was funded by a Leverhulme grant. The publication was supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.

This work is based on extensive field work into the architecture and topography of the outer London region. A wide range of innovative source material, visual and textual was also consulted including: prints, maps, fiction, songs, newspapers, guidebooks and other popular literature, as well as buildings and landscapes. This interdisciplinary methodology enabled a multi-dimensional approach to the London suburbs to be developed addressing their physical, material, visual and textual identities and cultures.

This book is based on research carried out over a 15 year period, which involved identification of small houses and middle-class suburban environments previously little researched. It is based on extensive field work and includes study of many previously unpublished prints and drawings, and a wide knowledge and integration of historiography from a range of archives (including the BL and Guildhall libraries) and subject areas, including history, literature, art history and architectural history. The 188 illustrations also constitute a major catalogued research resource.