This book is the first major study of the rural-urban interface in the London area in the long eighteenth century. It proposes that a conception of a ‘Greater London’ existed in the long eighteenth century which constituted a significant trope in metropolitan life and culture. It is the first major study to emphatically shift scholarly attention from the polite culture of the fashionable West End, where most recent studies have been concentrated, to the city’s hinterland where urban and rural met forming a new suburban environment.

This collection, by an international list of contributors, takes an interdisciplinary approach to the task of reconstructing eighteenth-century architectural studies based on substantial new archival and bibliographic research. Drawing on current thinking about the eighteenth century it is one of the first books to utilise a range of methodologies in relation to British classicism. The book explores topics such as social and gender identities, colonization and commercialization as well as notions of the rural, urban and suburban.

The period 1660-1720 saw the foundation of modern London. This work examines in detail the building boom and the speculative developers who created the new regularised landscape of brick houses laid out in spacious squares and streets. It offers a wealth of new information on their working practices, the role of craftsmen and the design thinking which led to the creation of a new prototype for English housing. The book concentrates on the mass-produced house of ‘the middling sort' which saw the adoption of classicism on a large scale in this country for the first time.