Search results for ""Author Lucy McMurdo""

Despite a history stretching back almost 2,000 years, the City of London is one of the world’s most modern, booming and yet unspoiled places to visit. Today it is teeming with those who work in London’s international financial, legal and insurance industries. Catering to their every need, the tiny ‘Square Mile’ is full of fine-dining establishments, cafés, cocktail bars, clubs, cultural venues and historic pubs. With street names including Poultry, Cornhill and Cheapside, it is impossible to ignore the City’s long and colourful history as a major commercial hub. Stretches of Roman wall, fort, amphitheatre and bathhouse also provide constant reminders of its past. In this book, author Lucy McMurdo guides us on a fascinating tour highlighting fifty of the City’s architectural treasures and landmarks from across the centuries. The City has a reputation for pageantry and tradition. It has its own government and Lord Mayor and is home to many livery companies and guilds. Great institutions are also based here, such as the Bank of England and Stock Exchange, as are some exceptional historic churches. With buildings of every style, age and height the City is an exciting destination, for its skyline changes constantly with new office towers. Today, many of them offer free viewing on their upper floors, revealing the fabulous London panorama. From here you see the City’s complex layout: narrow streets, ancient and ultra-modern buildings as well as Tower Bridge and UNESCO World Heritage Site the Tower of London. Illustrated throughout, City of London in 50 Buildings offers a superb and engaging portrait of the rich architectural heritage of the Square Mile.

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Chiswick is considered to be one of West London’s most appealing suburbs, renowned for its leafy appearance, riverside pubs and fine houses. Its four original villages – Strand on the Green, Turnham Green, Little Sutton and Old Chiswick – have remained a cohesive body despite the construction of a major road in the 1950s. The area has always been known for its good air, fishing and riverside trades. In the late nineteenth century Thornycroft & Co. shipbuilders launched their vessels and built the first torpedo boat for the Royal Navy. The yard was close to another of the area’s main industries – brewing – and Fuller’s Griffin Brewery is still a major business here operating from its 350-year-old site beside the Thames. In Chiswick in 50 Buildings author Lucy McMurdo presents an engaging and accessible perspective of the area’s rich architectural heritage. Walk around Chiswick’s streets and you will see buildings from the 1500s onwards in every architectural style. Until the mid-nineteenth century it was renowned for its market gardens and parkland as well as its grand Palladian villa, Chiswick House, designed in the early eighteenth century by the 3rd Earl of Burlington. This remains one of Chiswick’s treasures. With the arrival of the railway in the 1860s the area became rapidly urbanised, the population increased and fields made way for housing. Unsurprisingly, many famous people have made Chiswick their home including artists Hogarth and Whistler and poet W. B. Yeats. Illustrated throughout, this book guides you on a fascinating architectural tour of this leafy and attractive London suburb.

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The London districts of Islington and Clerkenwell are charming to explore. Within their streets are the greatest variety of architectural styles, ranging from Tudor, Georgian and Victorian to modernist and contemporary twenty-first-century design. In Islington & Clerkenwell in 50 Buildings, author Lucy McMurdo presents a well-illustrated and engaging perspective of the rich architectural heritage of both areas. Islington has a wonderful vibrancy. Its main thoroughfare of Upper Street overflows with bars, restaurants, cafés, pubs and clubs, giving rise to the nickname ‘Supper Street’. Hostelries have lined this street for centuries. It was here, on the main route into the capital, that herdsmen bringing cattle and sheep to Smithfield broke their journey from the north. Until the growth of industry in the 1800s, Islington was renowned for its river, springs and meadows, and a recreational destination for hunters and archers. Industrialisation resulted in an increasing population, transforming Islington’s character and replacing fields with terraced houses, Georgian squares, gin distilleries, warehouses, depots and factories. Neighbouring Clerkenwell has always been more densely populated. Until the 1530s it was famous for its monastery, priory and nunnery and, in the late 1600s, it was a haven for French Huguenot immigrants, and later refugees and workers from Ireland, Prussia and Italy. For hundreds of years the River Fleet acted as Clerkenwell’s main artery and, together with the district’s many springs, was a prime reason for the area’s development. The French Huguenots who settled here brought skills in watchmaking, precision engineering, printing, bookbinding and weaving – many of which are still found in the area today.

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Secret Islington and Clerkenwell delves into this historic area's often unknown but colourful past. It takes the reader on a fascinating journey from the time when these villages were rural communities up to the thriving, vibrant neighbourhoods they are today. You will discover what made the area initially so attractive to farmers and dairy maids, why so many monastic communities settled here in the Middle Ages, and how a seventeenth-century waterway supplying water to Londoners was not only built in the district but is still providing water to the capital today.This book highlights the role that great revolutionary figures such as Wat Tyler, Lenin, Mazzini and Garibaldi have played in Clerkenwell, as well as the contribution made by its very many immigrants, especially the Huguenots, Italian and Irish. You will discover how in the late 1800s extreme poverty and squalid living in unsanitary rookeries led to great criminal activity and how benevolent philanthropists stepped in to provid

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