London: The Biography of a City was published by Longmans, Green in 1969 (revised and expanded in 1977 and again in 2001). Hibbert traces London’s history from the Roman settlement of Londinium, through the Saxon and Norman periods, the medieval city of Chaucer, the Tudor and Stuart metropolis of Shakespeare, the Great Fire and Great Plague, the Georgian and Victorian expansion, and the twentieth-century transformations wrought by two world wars and the social revolutions that followed.
Hibbert’s method is to organize the narrative around themes as well as chronology: the chapter on the Great Fire is simultaneously a disaster narrative and an account of how London rebuilt itself (Wren’s churches, the prohibition of timber construction, the birth of modern urban planning). The Victorian chapters combine the splendors of the Crystal Palace exhibition with the squalors of the East End slums. The Blitz chapters describe both the bombing and the social leveling that the shared experience of bombardment produced.
The book’s enduring appeal lies in Hibbert’s ability to make the reader see, hear, and smell historical London — the medieval streets ankle-deep in refuse, the Georgian coffeehouses buzzing with speculation, the Victorian fog yellow with coal smoke, the wartime blackout pressing down on a city that refused to surrender. It remains, alongside Peter Ackroyd’s later London: The Biography, one of the essential single-volume histories of the world’s most documented city.
Collecting London: The Biography of a City
First edition (Longmans, Green, London, 1969): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30