Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire

The Battle of London 1939-45

'Endlessly fascinating. . . White is such a brilliant historian' Mail on Sunday 
 
Lasting for six long years, the Blitz transformed life in the capital beyond recognition, marking a time of almost constant anxiety, disruption, deprivation and sacrifice for Londoners. With the capital the nation's frontline during the Second World War, by its end, 30,000 inhabitants had lost their lives. 
 
While much has been written about 'the Myth of the Blitz', its riveting social history has often been overlooked. Unearthing what it was actually like for those living through those tempestuous years, Jerry White paints a fascinating portrait of the daily lives of ordinary Londoners, telling the story through their own voices. 
 
'As a history of the capital in wartime, it is probably unsurpassable' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'An impressive history of the capital at war. . . White, an accomplished chronicler of London's history, tells it with brio and a confident mastery of the sources' Literary Review

Jerry White is one of London's best historians...and in this enveloping book he tries to scrape away the myths that have obscured our view of the Second World War and reintroduce us to what life in the city between 1939 and 1945 was actually like

The Battle of London 1939-45... benefits hugely from a vast and well-chosen range of quotes and anecdotes, conjuring the atmosphere of a city under siege with vivid force. What's most striking in this raw and comprehensive portrait of a city on fire is just how enchanting and appealing it is: you actually start wishing you had been alive to witness it

[An] impressive history of the capital at war... White, an accomplished chronicler of London's history, tells it with brio and a confident mastery of the sources. He has a good nose for a piquant anecdote and clear-eyed awareness of the failings as well as the fearlessness of Londoners

Jerry White has a unique relation to London and Londoners. More than a historian, he is the city's witness, champion and town-crier... White does not rehearse the cliché of the Blitz spirit. Instead, by giving narrative commentary to the bit players in the drama...he presents a more complex, bleak and confused tale

As a history of the capital in wartime, it is probably unsurpassable... From the Myra Hess lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery, to the extraordinary resilience and bravery of Londoners... all can be found in this book

Endlessly fascinating... White is such a brilliant historian: he casts his net way beyond the usual territories. His books are consequently peppered with colourful vignettes drawn from all sort of unconventional sources, high and low

This fascinating social history is pieced together as a mosaic of dozens of experiences... White does not shy away from dismantling some of the dearly held myths about the Blitz spirit, but equally his compassion and fondness for London shines through on every page... a rich tapestry of life under fire in the capital.

The definitive and most readable account of the city during the conflict. The Battle of London 1939-45 is the most meticulously researched social history of wartime London that one could ever hope to find... the detail is woven together in such a way, and so colourfully, that it frequently pulls the reader up short with the realisation that the author did not actually experience himself all that he writes about... Almost every page contains a riveting and truly astonishing revelation about that fascinating period in the city's history

White's account is a vivid and highly accessible insight into how ordinary life both turned upside-down and continued in a 'new normal' during a once-in-a-generation emergency that we can now all relate to

Both the terror and the calmness in Jerry White's exemplary social history of London during the war years... [an] illuminating...tour de force

Professor Jerry White teaches London history at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of London from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His more recent books include Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison and Zeppelin Nights, a social history of London during the First World War. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by the University of London in 2005 and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Lasting for six long years, the Blitz transformed life in the capital beyond recognition, marking a time of almost constant anxiety, disruption, deprivation and sacrifice for Londoners. With the capital the nation's frontline during the Second World War, by its end, 30,000 inhabitants had lost their lives. 
 
While much has been written about 'the Myth of the Blitz', its riveting social history has often been overlooked. Unearthing what it was actually like for those living through those tempestuous years, Jerry White paints a fascinating portrait of the daily lives of ordinary Londoners, telling the story through their own voices.

A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison

Mansions of Misery

A micro-history of 18th &amp; 19th century London and the story of the capital’s notorious debtors’ prison, immortalised by Charles Dickens

This colourful, exuberant, brilliantly detailed account by Jerry White is the latest in a long list of irreplaceable books about London.

[It] is searching and brimful of intriguing characters.

[A] marvellous history of the Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison… In vivid prose White conjures a murky underworld of jailbird chancers and scufflers of one stripe or another.

Evening Standard - London Books of the Year

A factual portrait of desperate and roughish Londoners that is as startling as anything in Dickens. Its wealth of anecdote and sympathetic style, spiced with witty observations makes this the very opposite of a miserable read.

The way White has written this book, it is as if the Marshalsea is a microcosm of life outside the walls in the London area. He shows that there was a complete mixture of inmates, rich and poor, fraudsters and hucksters, and many other colourful characters filled the prison. I found this to be a fascinating and engaging read about a place that people often forget was a dark shadow over many lives. Jerry White has written an engaging and very readable account of life in the Marshalsea and of London during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am sure it will be a must read for all those interested in the social history of London for many years to come

[A] colorful, exuberant, brilliantly detailed account… The latest in a long list of irreplaceable books about London

White’s absorbing book is a salutary reminder of the realities of debt.

This is a splendid book providing a vivid image of the Hanoverian and early Victorian worlds, of their societies and, particularly, of a cross-section of people living on the edge.

For Londoners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, debt was a part of everyday life. But when your creditors lost their patience, you might be thrown into one of the capital’s most notorious jails: the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. 
 
In Mansions of Misery, acclaimed chronicler of the capital Jerry White introduces us to the Marshalsea’s unfortunate prisoners – rich and poor; men and women; spongers, fraudsters and innocents. We get to know the trumpeter John Grano who wined and dined with the prison governor and continued to compose music whilst other prisoners were tortured and starved to death. We meet the bare-knuckle fighter known as the Bold Smuggler, who fell on hard times after being beaten by the Chelsea Snob. And then there’s Joshua Reeve Lowe, who saved Queen Victoria from assassination in Hyde Park in 1820, but whose heroism couldn’t save him from the Marshalsea. Told through these extraordinary lives, Mansions of Misery gives us a fascinating and unforgettable cross-section of London life from the early 1700s to the 1840s.

A Great and Monstrous Thing

London In The Eighteenth Century

The unrivalled, panoramic account of London's turbulent 18th century by the master of London history

White is one of our great chroniclers of London and this beautifully written, impeccably researched and incredibly generous book is a necessity for those of us who are not yet tired of life

[A] page-turner biography of the capital, full of amazing facts and anecdotes, a book that anyone wanting food for thought about social history or human nature will treasure

An invigorating yet thoughtful tour through the metropolis’s most extraordinary and bracing of centuries

A tremendous work - well researched, well written, solid and reliable, mastering a complex subject in an authoritative account that is a pleasure to read

Spiralling stories enliven every page of Jerry White’s magnificent, fully annotated, accessible and scholarly book

It’s hard to see how a more detailed and readable account of Defoe’s ‘great and monstrous thing’ could be written

A vast and impressive synthesis ... [a] wonderful panorama

Jerry White's London in the Eighteenth Century is an unrivalled, panoramic account of the city's dramatic century of rebirth by its leading expert. 
 
London in the eighteenth century had risen from the ashes. The city and its people had been brought to the brink by the Great Fire of 1666. But the century that followed was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty. 
 
In Jerry White’s acclaimed history of London’s magnificent and boisterous rebirth we witness the astonishing drama of daily life in the midst of this burgeoning city.

A City and Its People

London in the Twentieth Century

The Wolfson Prize-winning account of the city’s most tumultuous century by the master of London history

A wonderful book.  I passionately urge people to read it from cover to cover

A fascinating story and an outstanding contribution to the study of London history

Succeeds brilliantly … lucid and engaging

Engaging, optimistic and enthusiastic, and very funny

White is plainly fascinated by London, and for anyone who shares that fascination his book offers many rewards

Jerry White's London in the Twentieth Century, Winner of the Wolfson Prize, is a masterful account of the city’s most tumultuous century by its leading expert. 
 
In 1901 no other city matched London in size, wealth and grandeur. Yet it was also a city where poverty and disease were rife. For its inhabitants, such contradictions and diversity were the defining experience of the next century of dazzling change. 
 
In the worlds of work and popular culture, politics and crime, through war, immigration and sexual revolution, Jerry White’s richly detailed and captivating history shows how the city shaped their lives and how it in turn was shaped by them.

London In The Nineteenth Century

The richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by the master of London history

A dazzling and dramatic narrative of a century of high-speed change ... A must-have for anyone seriously interested in London’s history

Magnificent ... Charged with infectious enthusiasm for its subject, this is an unmissable treat which ought to be top of every Londoner’s reading list

A brilliant account of the bursting, overflowing city, with its glittering wealth and harrowing poverty

Jerry White is to London as Boswell is to Johnson... London in the Nineteenth Century should sit on your shelf alongside Debrett’s, the Oxford dictionary, and your complete set of Dickens

White brings to his book a diligence and contagious zest that may serve to discourage anyone from ever tackling the subject again

Professor Jerry White teaches London history at Birkbeck, University of London, and has been writing about the city for over thirty years. His London in the Twentieth Century won the Wolfson Prize in 2001 and his London in the Eighteenth Century completed the acclaimed trilogy in 2012. His mroe recent books include Zeppelin Nights, a social history of London during the First World War, and Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by the University of London in 2005 and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. 
 
London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'. 
 
In Jerry White's dazzling history we witness the city's unparalleled metamorphosis over the course of the century through the daily lives of its inhabitants. We see how Londoners worked, played, and adapted to the demands of the metropolis during this century of dizzying change. The result is a panorama teeming with life.

London in the First World War

Zeppelin Nights

A unique look at London during the First World War, seen through the eyes of the people who lived there by an acclaimed writer who ‘is to London as Boswell is to Johnson’

Zeppelin Nights is social history at its best… White creates a vivid picture of a city changed for ever by war

Jerry White's name on a title page is a guarantee of a lively, compassionate book full of striking incidents and memorable images… This is a fast-paced social history that never stumbles… A well-orchestrated polyphony of voices that brings history alive

White delivers in brilliant time-eclipsing detail an evolving and often deeply moving portrait of a city that became gradually squeezed to its limits

Jerry White is masterful at mixing hard facts and statistics with telling anecdotes

A superbly detailed account… Professor White has written a fine social history that portrays London as a teeming nerve centre of the Allied war effort

If you only read one [book about the First World War], choose Zeppelin Nights, which is packed with new information and avoids the clichés that are wearying us all

An extraordinary tale… [White] tells it with gusto, nuance and panache

In a hectic history, teeming with life at all levels, from West End to East End, from music hall to munitions factories, from society balls to sweatshops, the voices of wounded soldiers, dazed refugees, liberated women and sharp-witted Londoners sing and weep throughout this constantly surprising story

A convincing and exhaustive account of what Londoners experienced from 1914 to 1918

A rich social history… White is as adept with individual characters as he is with the statistics of munitions production

Few people have a better grasp of the history of London than Professor Jerry White

Fresh, interesting… Vivid and often moving

White writes with the fluency of a novelist, and this book can be hugely recommended

As ever with Jerry White, the broader themes are peppered with wonderful, throwaway trivia, while the main thrust is both meticulously researched and highly readable

‘Zeppelin Nights is social history at its best… White creates a vivid picture of a city changed forever by war’ The Times 
 
2018 marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. In those four decisive years, London was irrevocably changed. Soldiers passed through the capital on their way to the front and wounded men were brought back to be treated in London’s hospitals. At night, London plunged into darkness for fear of Zeppelins that raided the city. Meanwhile, women escaped the drudgery of domestic service to work as munitionettes. Full employment put money into the pockets of the poor for the first time. Self-appointed moral guardians seize the chance to clamp down on drink, frivolous entertainment and licentious behaviour. 
 
Even against a war-torn landscape, Londoners were determined to get on with their lives, firmly resolved not to let Germans or puritans spoil their enjoyment. Peopled with patriots and pacifists, clergymen and thieves, bluestockings and prostitutes, Jerry White’s magnificent panorama reveals a battle-scarred yet dynamic, flourishing city. 
 
‘Jerry White's name on a title page is a guarantee of a lively, compassionate book full of striking incidents and memorable images… This is a fast-paced social history that never stumbles… A well-orchestrated polyphony of voices that brings history alive’ Guardian

The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars

Campbell Bunk

Most studies of the British working-class experience deal with labour aristocrats and the 'respectable poor'. Campbell Bunk gives the first full account of a 'rough', sub-proletarian community and the forces which moulded, changed, and eventually destroyed it.

A more lucid and penetrating analysis of an urban slum would be hard to imagine... A most subtle and powerful evocation of life and labour

A brilliant and searching study... I do not believe that even Henry Mayhew could have done greater or more sympathetic justice to the memory of 'Campbell Bunk' and its inhabitants

This is an enthralling book which comes as near as possible to understanding an urban community it its environment. It deserves to become a classic

From the 1880s to the Second World War, Campbell Road, Finsbury Park (known as Campbell Bunk), had a notorious reputation for violence, for breeding thieves and prostitutes, and for an enthusiastic disregard for law and order. It was the object of reform by church, magistrates, local authorities, and social scientists, who left many traces of their attempts to improve what became known as 'the worst street in North London'. 
 
Jerry White offers insight into the realities of life in a 'slum' community, showing how it changed over a 90-year period. Using extensive oral history to describe in detail the years between the wars, White reveals the complex tensions between the new world opening up and the street's traditional culture of economic individualism, crime, street theatre, and domestic violence.

Life in an East-End Tenement Block 1887 - 1920

Rothschild Buildings

'Jerry White has written a moving and richly detailed history of those times and those people. They are recalled like a lost tribe, revealing the extraordinary courage of ordinary people in their day-to-day battle for existence' - Guardian

Prize[d] for its rich, detailed insights into immigrant life in turn-of-the-century Spitalfields... Though White's commentary steers the reader and supplies valuable context, it's the interpolated quotations from tenants which bring the Buildings to colourful, tumultuous life

With an economy of language, without sentimentality, yet with a sensitive perception, rare for an outsider looking in on an alien world, Jerry White marvellously evokes the lost world of the immigrant 'greener'

A work of first-class history and a major contribution to the social history of Anglo-Jewry, lively, well-researched and eminently quotable

We are never likely to have another account which sets these personal recollections so firmly in the physical environment in which people grew up, struggled and sometimes flourished. A whole historical episode is illuminated by the decision to focus on just a couple of streets and the people who lived there

Jerry White has given us a book which deserves to be on every historian's shelf

As rich and informative a community study as one could hope to get

Winner of the Jewish Chronicle Harold H. Wingate Literary Award. 
 
Rothschild Buildings were typical of the 'model dwellings for the working classes' which were such an important part of the response to late-Victorian London's housing problem. They were built for poor but respectable Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the community which put down roots there was to be characteristic of the East End Jewish working class in its formative years. 
 
By talking to people who grew up in the Buildings in the 1890s and after, and using untapped documentary evidence from a wide range of public and private sources, the author re-creates the richly detailed life of that community and its relations with the economy and culture around it. The book shows how cramped and austere housing was made into homes; how the mechanism of class domination, of which the Buildings were part, was both accepted and fought against; how a close community was riven with constantly shifting tensions; and how that community co-existed in surprising ways with the East End casual poor of 'outcast London'. 
 
It provides unique and fascinating insights into immigrant and working-class life at the turn of the last century.

Jerry White

Jerry White is truly the historian of London, and this may be his crowning achievement: a stunningly ambitious and brilliantly executed study of the great, indispensable city – in all its human drama and beguiling variousness – at this pivotal moment of world as well as British history

David Kynaston, author of A Northern Wind

This beautiful book is Jerry White at his best. An elegantly written and thought-provoking account of London during the Industrial Revolution, drawing fascinating interconnections across trade, money, empire, slavery, war and revolution to shed new light on the making of modernity and the creation of the great city we know today

Emma Griffin, Professor of British History, QMUL

London in a Revolutionary World, 1789-1815

How the turmoil of revolution and war created the London we know today – the world’s first truly global city. 
 
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars changed London beyond recognition, turning it into the capital of the world – the centre of international finance and trade. Victory over France in 1815 ushered in the ‘British Century’: the next hundred years would be defined by Britain’s capitalist innovation and financial might, naval supremacy and imperial ambition. 
 
In this brilliant portrait of these pivotal years, Jerry White looks at how revolution and war on the Continent transformed the capital. While the manufacture of war materials brought wealth for some, high food prices led to bread riots. The war divided public opinion, with ultra-patriots clamouring for the defeat of ‘Boney’, while others sought to emulate the democratic reforms pioneered across the Channel. Crucially, the chaos and uncertainty on the continent led to a mass flight of aristocratic wealth, foreign bankers and European merchants to London, which would help turn the capital into the world’s leading financial centre. 
 
Jerry White shows how huge docks transformed the Port of London into the world’s trading centre; how the City of London financed the war against France and Nathan Mayer Rothschild provided the gold that crushed Napoleon at Waterloo; how a newly embellished Paris stimulated the reconstruction of central London and fuelled its expansion; and how this moment of Britain’s greatest imperial expansion revived briefly the London slave trade before it was finally ended in 1807. It was this turbulent period of war and political turmoil that created London as we know it today.

Jerry White

Praise for Birth of a Global City

Jerry White is truly the historian of London, and this may be his crowning achievement: a stunningly ambitious and brilliantly executed study of the great, indispensable city – in all its human drama and begu ...

This beautiful book is Jerry White at his best. An elegantly written and thought-provoking account of London during the Industrial Revolution, drawing fascinating interconnections across trade, money, empire, slaver ...

Books by Jerry White

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