It’s a skill to make fact-filled non-fiction readable. Ben Wilson has it in spades: an easy narrative style that’s engaging without being facile. Far from delivering a straight, dry history, he weaves myth, art and literature into the city story. Unafraid to draw parallels between ancient and modern, Metropolis does not simply recount events but also meditates on ideas and customs. As much as it’s about cities, it’s about humanity: cities are places where people live, work, trade and innovate. Cities have always changed and evolved and it has never been more timely to acknowledge that they play a crucial part in the world.
The chapters are loosely chronological according to the heyday of their headline cities but there are pleasant meanderings off the timeline. The description of the street food available in Baghdad in the first millennium would revive even the most deadened appetite. I liked nuggets such as the quintessential English dish being thought up by a teenage Ashkenazi Jewish refugee in Victorian London.
I like the mixture of place- and theme-based writing; stories are naturally intertwined rather than artificially separated. It seems obvious that rather than rising and falling in isolation, cities and civilisations interacted with others, some far away even thousands of years ago, but reading some histories you’d be forgiven for thinking that was the case.
I enjoyed reading Metropolis but at times thought it could have been a little more concise. It’s a fascinating and engaging read, one I think would be enhanced by being enjoyed in the print version with illustrations. I found myself compelled to look at a map to accompany my reading, especially for far-flung trading routes. I’d not come across this author before but I see he’s written other books; I look forward to choosing my next one.

This was a huge, wide ranging book, from the very first city mentioned in the epic of Gilgamesh, to modern Shanghai. It was full of fascinating facts, and I found it gave a really interesting new perspective on major historical events, like the rise of Portugal's empire through taking over Asian and African cities. I had to read it in a number of sittings to absorb all the information. I particularly enjoyed learning about how cities were founded and run before the European model that now predominates. I found the final chapters dragged a little, particularly about walking through Paris and the literature written about it, but this may have been as I was more familiar with this area. Generally, a great read from a fresh perspective.

Ben Wilson has written a book of astonishing scope and breadth. It has been been an eye opening read from start to finish. His title Metropolis is almost misleading. He takes a city - in the first instance the Mesopotamian city of Uruk dated 4000-1900 BC and gives us the world. He tells us how civilisation began and started to develop. He then moves forward to Harappa and Baylon 2000-539 bc; then Alexandria, Baghdad. Then over to Europe using Lubeck as the handle to talk of the rise of the western cities. He follows through the centuries picking others almost at random except Chicago and Manchester where the Industrial Revolution was particularly revolting in the city. Then Paris, new York and he ends in 2020 in Lagos - an already vast city that looks set to grow into the biggest megacity this planet has ever seen.

Overall I felt that the book did resonate with today as historically it shows that trade is the mover and shaker and shaper of all things - from the wealth of a city and therefore citizen; to philosophy and medicine - to culture as a whole. It was true then as it is now. Scarily it shows the cities that have risen, blossomed and then died to quiet backwaterism. At one stage he quotes the 14th century Italian merchant Francesco Datini 'in the Name of God and Profit'.

I've enjoyed reading this very much especially for the many little facts he's given us. The first coffee house in London was opened in 1654; fried fish was a staple of Jewish diet but it took one man in the East End to add chips and hence the national dish of Britain. However one thought will stay with me is the bath water in Roman baths must have been an awful swill of dirt, oil, sweat, muck and heavens knows what else - and how often was the water changed??? Yuck! marvellous book.

A review from part way through this book, as it is a wonderful tome to dip in and out of, but quite a challenge to swallow in one gulp! Clearly very thoroughly researched and hugely informative from many perspectives - historical, societal, architectural, developmental, environmental, futuristic, and with some excellent story telling to boot. The author covers most of the major cities on the planet, getting right inside the skin of how they tick and exploring and extrapolating past, present and future. This is a book that will be by my side for a while yet and is highly recommended as an entertaining, intelligent and thought provoking read.

With over half the world’s population now living in cities, and with the cosmopolitanism of the significant world metropolises under attack from revived nationalism and hostility to globalisation, it has never been more important to understand cities and the role they have played in making us who we are.
An exciting, compelling and persuasive piece of work. A thought-provoking personal opinion on the climate crisis and overpopulation. The history is fascinating, but I would say that the storytelling was lost amongst the ideologies, theorisation and optimism of the author.
I want to thank NetGalley, Vintage and Ben Wilson for a pre-publication copy to review.

Starting with the foundation of Uruk in the fourth millennium BC, and stopping off at everywhere from Rome to Lagos via Babylon, Rome, London, Manchester, Paris, Warsaw, Leningrad , Berlin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Tokyo, Shanghai and many more, Ben Wilson traces the development of urbanisation. He examines the way that cities transform their environments, the people who live in them and, ultimately, the entire history of our species.

Interestingly, rather than taking a strictly chronological approach, he focuses instead on the way that attitudes towards cities have affected their development, and, in particular, the tension between the ideals of the urban planners, who have so often achieved the opposite of the utopias they sought to create, and the creative energy of the favelas and shanty towns whose illegal occupants are forced to be entrepreneurial simply in order to survive.

It's a great subject for a book and Ben Wilson can be fascinating when he turns his spotlight on the particular, like his descriptions of the way life carried on as normal during the jacking up of Chicago, block by block, in order to install a sewerage system. But, for my liking, there's a bit too much generalisation and optimistic assertion and not quite enough storytelling.

I am a city person, I love being in the centre of things, I love the opportunities for art, culture, business and society all mushing up against each other. I also fancy myself as a systems person, so seeing how complex organisations work, often due to design flaws or the inability to actually understand what is going on means I find the history and workings of city endlessly fascinating. So I came to this grand history of cities described hyperbolically as "A History Of Humankind's Greatest Invention" with a lot of interest but with quite a high bar for it to jump. And despite a few initial qualms, once I worked out how it was working, and that actually the writing was actually this good, it became compulsive.

My qualms? It is a history and it goes back as far as it can to Uruk in 4000BC. And when I got to the Uruk chapter my heart sank slightly because I feared it was going to be a strictly chronological history. That's an pretty common and obvious way of organising a history, particularly if you are looking at development, but cities aren't merely chronologically as much as subject to parallel evolution and planned (or not) to death. And whilst the book has a chronological throughline, I should not have worried. Instead he takes a number of example cities through time as jumping off points, often to discuss and go off on tangents through time. Its the kind of book where in the chapter ostensibly about Rome, he quotes Carlito's Way rather than Cicero. (The diversion is by way of the history and importance of public bathing, up to the surf and turf wars in New York over who got to use the swimming pools). We get Flaneurs, but we get more on NWA and how they were a product of a racist Los Angles designed to be that way. Wilson is awed by cities, about how they live, survive and often how they refuse to die, and he peppers the text with no end of well researched and rounded diversions like the ones above (my favourite being the oversaturation on ranch style bungalows in LA and most US cities being because the had the highest survivability ration in a nuclear war). The London chapter i subtitled The Sociable Metropolis (1666-1820) and is as much about coffee shops and how ideas and politics promulgate and prosper than London. You feel the righteous anger in the firebombing of Lubeck and the almost total destruction of Warsaw - and the wonder in these cities still actually existing, crawling from the ashes.

This is a great book to dip in and out of as well as a fascinating narrative read. And it is Utopian to a grand degree, the final chapter on Lagos describes a supermegalopolis in the making, with scant infrastructure and extreme poverty, but also as the most exciting cultural place on earth, He reclaims the suburbs (they are part of the urbs), and the last few chapters which talk about LA, Lagos and Tokyo, he sketches a broad theory of how successful cities thrive - put the development in the hands of the people, and never try to overplan. Always accept unintended consequences, and get the people invovled in solving their own problems. The history is interesting, and he certainly has little time for the moralising anti-city brigade, but its the present and his hints for a future in a majority urban world, with climate crisis and overpopulation at its heart which is fascinating and I got a genuine sense of excitement about how these futures will unfold. A terrific piece of work.

[NetGalley ARC]

History books are always a great way to gain some context into the present world, thank you for the advance review copy - would recommend!