London's West End, Rosemary Hill (LRB 4 March 201)
Vol. 43 No. 5 · 4 March 2021 Populist Palatial Rosemary Hill Share on Twitter London’s West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800-1914 by Rohan McWilliam . Oxford, 400 pp., £30, September 2020, 978 0 19 882341 4 Survey of London: Volume 53, Oxford Street edited by Andrew Saint . Paul Mellon Centre, 421 pp., £75, April 2020, 978 1 913107 08 6 F or the wit, Whig and clergyman Sydney Smith it was ‘the golden parallelogram’. The area bounded by Hyde Park to the west and Regent Street to the east, extending north to Oxford Street and south to Piccadilly, enclosed ‘more intelligence and ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world had ever collected in such a space before’. In the long summer months when he was confined to his Somerset parish at Combe Florey, Smith tried and failed to love the countryside. He looked forward instead to the return of ‘bad weather, coal fires and good society in a crowded city’. Rohan McWilliam’s West End is bigger than Smith’s.