This modestly self-styled ‘little book’ comprises an account of the development of Penge as a suburb of the first capitalist world-city, from its humble rural manorial origins, when economic survival rested on the exploitation of ancient woodlands, to its role as semi-rural retreat for the increasingly prosperous middle classes wishing to escape the stink of the City, and through to the socially heterogeneous late nineteenth-century melting-pot of a commuter stop. Along the way we learn of the consequences of speculation and accumulation, failed communications and national monuments and morality and loyalty for the ‘ordinary, resolutely unfashionable’ suburb. Spence provides an admirably broad view of a rapidly industrializing and modernizing suburban society, its landscape and its people, and does so within a very short space.

The book begins with a disclaimer clarifying what it is not, notably that it is not intended to be an exercise in local history, nor a ‘miscellany of recollections of bygone days . . . a chronicle of colourful local characters, events or anecdotes’. Instead it is to be a study of the transformation that took place in the landscape and society of Penge as the railways arrived. The structure of the book sets this aspiration up nicely, as it moves from a general discussion (in fact an extended definition) of the concept of capitalism in the abstract, with the identification of the key components of capitalism as it has operated in historical cities, to a closer look at the effects of these components upon Penge during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first part of the book consists of a concise overview of the extraordinary growth of early modern London as context to the explosion's consequences for Penge, a brief discussion of the creation of the city's southern suburbs and a (necessarily) sweeping overview of the history of Penge from the Conquest to the early eighteenth century. These background chapters are followed with more detailed thematic sections on the areas that Spence sees as being crucial to an understanding of the effect of urban capitalization upon suburban communities. Thus there are chapters on land disputes and enclosure, canals and railways, the selling of the ‘commodity’ of Penge as an idyllic middle-class residential haven and the impact of the high-stake financial gamble that was the Crystal Palace. Finally the book ends with a qualitative look at some of the households enumerated in various census returns with the aim of illustrating the complex character of the population.

Basing his account almost exclusively on fairly general secondary works, Spence is careful to avoid slipping into anecdotal narrative, and makes a fairly successful job of drawing his discussion back to the theoretical framework he sets up in his introduction. He does occasionally find it hard to resist being briefly distracted into a thought-provoking aside which is somewhat tangential to his main argument, or by a particularly amusing, touching or otherwise resonant piece of local Penge trivia, but the book is not the weaker for it. Indeed, if anything it might be argued that the pains taken to ground the account in the theoretical leads to sections which might benefit from a little more ‘local life’ being breathed into them, perhaps drawing from the kinds of detail to be found in primary sources. A consequence of this is that the book sometimes finds it difficult to avoid an overly deterministic sense of the development of Penge, both in terms of a historically privileged view of the seeming inevitability of the way the suburb developed, but also and this is the more disappointing, that the story being told could have been about any London suburb. Nevertheless The Making of a London Suburb is an interesting ‘little book’, not least in its spirited approach to a complex set of interrelated broad social and economic urban issues (and its muscular turn of phrase) and it is a good example of a particular kind of local history that seeks to place itself in wider historical contexts. There is a distinct tang of political perspective about some of the subjects broached, most notably a largely unreconstructed Marxist viewpoint on both the forces of urban capitalism and social class relations (the agents of capitalism, for example, often find themselves appearing in the text with the adjective ‘ruthless’ in close attendance). While this book may not contribute much to debates about the impact of industrialization, entrepreneurial innovation and commoditization upon the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suburban landscape, it does offer a preview of how the local and the theoretical might be combined to produce interesting ways of looking at these issues.