The Battle of London 1939-1945
The immense drama of London in the Second World War gets a significant re-telling in this new book by award-winning historian Jerry White. It puts at the centre of the narrative the citizens of London’s local civil defence forces, largely written out of subsequent histories of the ‘myth of the Blitz’. These men and women were London’s backbone during the greatest sustained bombardment experienced by any city in history. But this is no simple history of popular heroics. It offers a refreshingly ‘warts-and-all’ chronicle that reveals the underside of civic solidarity in the spiteful hostilities of class and race, and in the rejection of dominant values by black-market traders and petty thieves. And it gives for the first time a long view of the effect of the war on the history of London, especially in government policy to push people and industry out of the city once hostilities ceased.
This is a riveting social history of these tempestuous six years, drawn afresh from diaries written by Londoners at the time, from official records and local newspapers, all vividly recording London at war. At the end of it all, the Battle of London was won not on the playing fields of Eton but in the playgrounds of a thousand council elementary schools across the capital.
“Jerry White is one of London’s best historians…and in this enveloping book he tries to scrape away the myths that have obscured our view of the Second World War and reintroduce us to what life in the city between 1939 and 1945 was actually like” - Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times
“As a history of the capital in wartime, it is probably unsurpassable…From the Myra Hess lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery, to the extraordinary resilience and bravery of Londoners…all can be found in this book” - Anne de Courcy, Sunday Telegraph
“The Battle of London 1939-45…benefits hugely from a vast and well-chosen range of quotes and anecdotes, conjuring the atmosphere of a city under siege with vivid force. What’s most striking in this raw and comprehensive portrait of a city on fire is just how enchanting and appealing it is: you actually start wishing you had been alive to witness it” - Sebastian Milbank, Tablet
“[An] impressive history of the capital at war…White, an accomplished chronicler of London’s history, tells it with brio and a confident mastery of the sources. He has a good nose for a piquant anecdote and clear-eyed awareness of the failings as well as the fearlessness of Londoners” - Alan Allport, Literary Review
“Jerry White has a unique relation to London and Londoners. More than a historian, he is the city’s witness, champion and town-crier…White does not rehearse the cliché of the Blitz spirit. Instead, by giving narrative commentary to the bit players in the drama…he presents a more complex, bleak and confused tale” - Frances Wilson, Oldie
“Endlessly fascinating…White is such a brilliant historian: he casts his net way beyond the usual territories. His books are consequently peppered with colourful vignettes drawn from all sort of unconventional sources, high and low” - Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
“The definitive and most readable account of the city during the conflict. The Battle of London 1939-45 is the most meticulously researched social history of wartime London that one could ever hope to find…the detail is woven together in such a way, and so colourfully, that it frequently pulls the reader up short with the realisation that the author did not actually experience himself all that he writes about…Almost every page contains a riveting and truly astonishing revelation about that fascinating period in the city’s history” -History of War
“White’s account is a vivid and highly accessible insight into how ordinary life both turned upside-down and continued in a ‘new normal’ during a once-in-a-generation emergency that we can now all relate to” - Harry Verity, Who Do You Think You Are?
“Both the terror and the calmness in Jerry White’s exemplary social history of London during the war years…[an] illuminating…tour de force” - Colin Shindler, Jewish Chronicle
Click here to buy your hard cover, paperback or Kindle version of the book
Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison
For Londoners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, debt was a part of everyday life. But when your creditors lost their patience, you might be thrown into one of the capital’s most notorious jails: the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison.
The Marshalsea became a byword for misery; in the words of one of its inmates, it was ‘hell in epitome’. But the prison was also a microcosm of London life and it housed a colourful range of characters, including Charles Dickens’s father. The experience haunted the writer, who went on to immortalise the Marshalsea in his work, most memorably in Little Dorrit.
In Mansions of Misery, acclaimed chronicler of the capital Jerry White introduces us to the Marshalsea’s unfortunate prisoners - rich and poor; men and women; spongers, fraudsters and innocents. We get to know the trumpeter John Grano who wined and dined with the prison governor and continued to compose music whilst other prisoners were tortured and starved to death. We meet the bare-knuckle fighter known as the Bold Smuggler, who fell on hard times after being beaten by the Chelsea Snob. And then there’s Joshua Reeve Lowe, who saved Queen Victoria from assassination in Hyde Park in 1820, but whose heroism couldn’t save him from the Marshalsea.
Told through these extraordinary lives, Mansions of Misery gives us a fascinating and unforgettable cross-section of London life from the early 1700s to the 1840s.
“This colourful, exuberant, brilliantly detailed account by Jerry White is the latest in a long list of irreplaceable books about London, all written as if the author were personally remembering what he describes rather than excavating it.” - Simon Callow, Guardian, Book of the Week
“White’s book, like his previous explorations of London’s past, is searching and brimful of intriguing characters.” - John Carey, Sunday Times
“…learned and entertaining…Jerry White’s absorbing book is a salutary reminder of the realities of debt.” - Catherine Peters, Literary Review
“…marvellous history…In vivid prose White conjures a murky underworld of jailbird chancers and scuffers of one stripe or another." -Ian Thomson, Evening Standard
“A factual portrait of desperate and roughish Londoners that is as startling as anything in Dickens. Its wealth of anecdote and sympathetic style, spiced with witty observations makes this the very opposite of a miserable read.’ - George Goodwin, BBC History Magazine, Book of the Year
“riveting, richly researched account…It is a scrupulous piece of scholarship, which makes imaginative and brilliantly illuminating use of its archival sources, not only in order to reconstruct the everyday lives of ordinary and not so ordinary debtors incarcerated in the Marshalsea, but in order to provide a vivid sense of ‘what it meant to be a Londoner between 1700 and 1842’” - Matthew Beaumont, Times Literary Supplement
“It is primarily through the stories of the prisoners that White skilfully and meticulously recounts the prison’s history" - Dave Hill, Guardian online
“White, a great historian of London…has done a fantastic job of restitution, so that we too, like Dickens returning there, may feel ourselves ‘among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years’” - Hermione Eyre, Spectator
“The most notorious prison of all, immortalised by Charles Dickens, was the Marshalsea on the south side of the Thames in London, now the subject of Jerry White’s fascinating institutional biography.” - Paula Byrne, The Times
“The story of the Marshalsea is also the story of ordinary Londoners and the telling of it results in a fascinating and beautifully written social history of the metropolis.” - Mike Paterson, London Historians Blog
“…a splendid book providing a vivid image of the Hanoverian and early Victorian worlds, of their societies and, particularly, of a cross-section of people living on the edge” - Clive Emsley, BBC History Magazine
“a vibrant look at a community of colourful characters…a multi-faceted, compassionate look at an extraordinary microcosm of human life.” - History Revealed, Book of the Month
Click here to buy your hard cover, paperback or Kindle version of the book
Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War
Spear’s Social History of the Year 2014
Guardian Best Book of the Year 2014
11pm, Tuesday 4 August 1914: with the declaration of war London becomes one of the greatest killing machines in human history. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers pass through the capital on their way to the front; wounded men are brought back to be treated in London’s hospitals; and millions of shells are produced in its factories.
The war changes London life for ever. Women escape the drudgery of domestic service to work as munitionettes. Full employment puts money into the pockets of the London poor for the first time. Self-appointed moral guardians seize the chance to clamp down on drink, frivolous entertainment and licentious behaviour. As the war drags on, gloom often descends on the capital. And at night London is plunged into darkness for fear of German bombers and Zeppelins that continue to raid the city.
Yet despite daily casualty lists, food shortages and enemy bombing, Londoners are determined to get on with their lives and flock to cinemas and theatres, dance halls and shebeens, firmly resolved not to let Germans or puritans spoil their enjoyment.
Peopled with patriots and pacifists, clergymen and thieves, bluestockings and prostitutes, Jerry White’s magnificent panorama reveals a struggling yet flourishing city.
“Zeppelin Nights is social history at its best…White creates a vivid picture of a city changed for ever by war” - The Times
“Jerry White’s name on a title page is a guarantee of a lively, compassionate book full of striking incidents and memorable images…This is a fast-paced social history that never stumbles…A well-orchestrated polyphony of voices that brings history alive" - Guardian
“White delivers in brilliant time-eclipsing detail an evolving and often deeply moving portrait of a city that became gradually squeezed to its limits” - Sunday Telegraph
“Jerry White is masterful at mixing hard facts and statistics with telling anecdotes” - Mail on Sunday
“It is an extraordinary tale - peopled by characters from all walks of the capital’s life - and White, a prize-winning author of London’s late-modern history, tells it with gusto, nuance and panache” - Evening Standard
“…a fascinating study…White gives us many vivid moments, and builds up a convincing picture of what Londoners experienced and even felt during those momentous and sometimes even exhilarating four years that one contemporary described as simply ‘wonderful’” -Sunday Times
“A superbly detailed account…Professor White has written a fine social history that portrays London as a teeming nerve centre of the Allied war effort” - Financial Times
“White provides an exceptionally well-researched account of wartime life in London, and makes significant contributions to a number of scholarly debates” - Journal of Family & Community History
Click here to buy your hard cover, paperback or Kindle version of the book
London in the Eighteenth Century
By 1700, after half a century of relentless expansion, London had overtaken Paris to become the largest - if disputably the finest - city in Europe. A striking feature of this monster city in 1700 was its newness. In September 1666 some three-fifths of the City of London had been destroyed in the Great Fire. The losses were immense - 13,200 houses were burnt to the ground and so were most of the great public buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral.
London in the Eighteenth Century details the growth of the city and urban change; the make-up of the Londoner from home and abroad; ways of earning a living from banking to begging; the public pleasures of London and the crime and prostitution that accompanied them; the tightening sinews of power and discipline; and the hesitant beginnings of London democracy.
“White is one of our great chroniclers of London and this beautifully written, impeccably researched and incredibly generous book is a necessity for those of us who are not yet tired of life.” - Sunday Telegraph
“A dazzling and dramatic narrative…a must for anyone seriously interested in London’s history” - Evening Standard
“White brings a diligence and contagious zest that may serve to discourage anyone from ever tackling the subject again” - Sunday Times
“A brilliant account of the bursting, overflowing city, with its glittering wealth and harrowing poverty…A work of undoubted academic authority…yet it is also a poetic evocation” - Financial Times
London: The Story of a Great City
No city can lay claim to a more dramatic history than London. Engulfed in calamities that seemed to mark its end - fire, plague, riot, civil war, mass bombing - from each crisis it has emerged stronger than ever. Its cultural life, and the long heritage that underpins it, has made London one of the most visited and best-loved places on Earth. It is this extraordinary story that London: The Story of a Great City encapsulates: the rise of the city from a remote outpost of Rome’s northern empire; the growth of trade that sent money and ships to every corner of the earth; the roll-call of great Londoners from Shakespeare to Dickens, from Cromwell to Churchill; the strength of its institutions, Parliament prominent among them; the endurance of its people in the face of disaster and war; its innovations in enterprise and pleasure; its dark side in crime and mayhem; and, the positive example it gives the world as a tolerant city in the face of global movements of people.
For its lavish illustrations and memorabilia, this book draws on the fabulous resources of the Museum of London, one of the world’s great city museums. The Museum’s uniquely rich collections illuminates the whole of London’s history through artefacts, documents, maps, paintings and photographs.
“White’s narrative is lively and engaging, and the facsimiles are well produced…it’s also great fun” - Sunday Telegraph
“The new history of the capital” - Time Out
“..relentlessly cheerful…The facsimiles are very finely reproduced” - Times Literary Supplement
London in the Twentieth Century
Winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2001
In 1901, London was the greatest city the world had seen in size, wealth and grandeur. Yet it was also a city where poverty and disease were rife. London in 2001 was no longer among the world’s very largest cities, but was still one where vast wealth was displayed - alongside beggars sleeping rough. Such paradoxes are among the defining experiences of living in London in this extraordinary century, and in this colourful book Jerry White tells the story not just of London, but of Londoners too. He examines the changes on the worlds of work, transport, popular culture, politics and government and shows how London affects its inhabitants, shaping their lives and being shaped in turn by them.
Beautifully illustrated and with a wealth of detail, this is a definitive and highly readable history of London in the twentieth century
“A brilliant, acclaimed book which examines one of the world’s greatest cities during one of the most tumultuous centuries”
Click to buy either the hardback, paperback or Kindle editions of the book
London in the Nineteenth Century
London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. As William Blake put it, London was ‘a Human awful wonder of God’. It was a century of genius - of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday, Disraeli and Dickens.
Jerry White’s dazzling book is the first in a hundred years to explore London’s history over the nineteenth century as a whole. We see the destruction of old London and the city’s unparalleled suburban expansion. We see how London absorbed people from all over Britain, from Europe and the Empire. We see how Londoners worked and played. Most of all, we see how they tried to make sense of their city and make it a better place in which to live. Emerging clearly from this eloquent and richly-detailed overview is the London we see about us today.
“Quite extraordinary…The writing is extremely lucid, colourful and, though he does not shrink from the occasional technical word, the author presents his subject in a very readable story” - BBC Who Do You Think You Are Magazine
“Meticulously researched and full of often engaging detail” - Guardian
“Both exhaustive and detailed: both scholarly…and human…irresistible” - BBC History Magazine
“From a prize winning historian, a fresh and energetic look at a century of frenzied growth” - Sunday Times
“A dazzling and dramatic narrative” - London Evening Standard
“Magisterial” - Observer
Click to buy either the hardback, paperback or Kindle editions of the book
Campbell Bunk: The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars
From the 1880s to World War II, Campbell Road, Finsbury Park (known as Campbell Bunk), had a notorious reputation for violence, for breeding thieves and prostitutes, and for an enthusiastic disregard for law and order. It was the object of reform by church, magistrates, local authorities and scientists, who left many traces of their attempts to improve what became known as ‘the worse street in North London’. In all that record, the voice of Campbell Bunk itself was silent. Campbell Road was eventually cleared as a slum in the 1950s.
This title provides insight into the realities of life in a ‘slum’ community, showing how it changed over a 90-year period. The author uses extensive oral history to describe in detail the years between the wars, revealing complex lessons between the new world opening up (especially for young women) in Campbell Bunk and the street’s traditional culture of economic individualism, crime, street theatre and domestic violence.
“A more lucid and penetrating analysis of an urban slum would be hard to imagine…a most subtle and powerful evocation of life and labour.” - Guardian
“A brilliant and searching study…I do not believe that even Henry Mayhew could have done greater or more sympathetic justice to the memory ‘Campbell Bunk’ and its inhabitants.” - Victor Neuberg, British Book News
“This is an enthralling book which comes as near as possible to understanding an urban community in its environment. It deserves to become a classic” - Emrys Jones, Planning Perspectives
Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East-End Tenement Block, 1887-1920
Rothschild Buildings were typical of the ‘model dwellings for the working classes’ which were such an important part of the response to late-Victorian London’s housing problem. They were built for poor but respectable Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the community which put down roots there was to be characteristic of the East End Jewish working class in its formative years. By talking to people who grew up in the Buildings in the 1890s and after, and using untapped documentary evidence from a wide range of public and private sources, the author re-creates the richly detailed life of that community and its relations with the economy and culture around it. The book shows how cramped and austere housing was made into homes; how the mechanism of class domination, of which the Buildings were part, was both accepted and fought against; how a close community was riven with constantly shifting tensions; and how that community co-existed in surprising ways with the East End casual poor of ‘outcast London’. It provides unique and fascinating insights into immigrant and working-class life at the turn of the last century.
“Jerry White has written a moving and richly detailed history of those times and those people. They are recalled like a lost tribe, revealing the extraordinary courage of ordinary people in their day-to-day battle for existence.” - Bernard Kops, Guardian
Click to buy either the Kindle or paperback edition of the book
