You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. Over the four-week summer break between

issues of the paper, the podcast is taking a virtual tour of a few places in Europe through

readings of pieces that have appeared in the LRB in recent months. This week, to begin, Rosemary

Hill reads her piece on London's West End, published in March. And if you enjoy listening to the LRB podcast

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Populist Palatial by Rosemary Hill, read by Rosemary Hill. A review of two books, London's

West End creating the Pleasure District 1800 to 1914 by Rowan McWilliam,

and The Survey of London, Volume 53, Oxford Street, edited by Andrew St.

For the Witt, Wig and Clergerman Sidney 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 Coombe Flory, 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. Rowan McWilliam's West End is bigger than Smith's. It

begins further east, at what is now King's Way, and carries on south to the Strand, but it is

conceptually the same, a sort of flying island of sophistication, sociability and pleasurable

consumption. In its late Georgian incarnation,

as Smith knew it, the West End probably was an unprecedented phenomenon. London was the biggest

city anyone had ever seen, and in the Napoleonic era, where McWilliam begins, it was the richest

and most stable in Europe. Money, antiquities and dispossessed

...