The Victorian era saw great changes to Britain`s capital. This book illustrates the nineteenth-century aspects of London that the Victorians were so proud of: the pioneering public health engineering of Bazalgette`s system of intercepting sewers; the magnificent public buildings such as the `new` Gothic House of Commons and Big Ben; impressive new expanded British Museum, the Classical National Gallery and Gothic Natural History Museum; the great railway termini and railway hotels; and, of course, the world`s first underground railway. The book also looks at the less savoury side of Victorian life: public hangings at Tyburn (now Marble Arch), and the world known to Charles Dickens, contrasting scenes of squalor around St Giles to the magnificence of the the Inns of Courts. Through a fascinating selection of photographs, postcards, illustrations and engravings, this book compares the `world city` that was so imaginatively and confidently developed by the Victorians with the present dynamic, multi-ethnic city of commerce and culture, which so often hits the headlines.