In the illuminated distance of Elias Martin’s 1769 View of Hanover Square, Trinity Chapel sits on the horizon line. A Protestant edifice situated at the end of a long axial view across this new London square, it is a counterpoint to the imposing façade of St. George’s Church. This painting suggests that streets were designed to converge perspectivally on this diminutive chapel, a fact borne out by contemporary maps. Trinity Chapel was a recent addition to London’s cityscape and was made to replace a temporary wooden chapel on wheels. The wooden structure was replaced by a “chapel of ease,” shown in Martin’s image, and was designated as such by the Parish of St. Martin’s in the Fields. Its parish church was overflowing with new members after the construction of sophisticated London squares in the West End.1 Trinity Chapel was hence a product of the city’s expanding population and the new geography of parish life responding to the construction of London’s ubiquitous squares.Martin’s image serves as the cover for Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town, and although the image is briefly described for its representation of the new Hanover Square, Trinity Chapel is nowhere mentioned in the text. Longstaffe-Gowan’s book is not about painting, nor is it about London’s myriad churches, and yet not discussing a central aspect of the book’s cover image—a chapel so implicitly woven into the narrative of landscape, urban development, and the outcomes of London’s rampant square-building—is the sort of omission that occurs too often in this large and well-illustrated text. For many images, the author provides little interpretation, and there are contradictions, especially in the early chapters, between images and text. Within the text itself, each chapter has its own host of loose threads: topics never fully explained, terms left undefined, or historiographical issues unchallenged.The London Square synthesizes much published work on these unique urban spaces, and it outlines a useful chronological development for them. While the ambition of such an undertaking is admirable, the author routinely avoids the larger contexts that shaped London’s squares. He offers little historical, social, economic, or political analysis that would clarify and enliven his narrative about the motives and operations of London’s elite, nor does he provide information regarding the urban context that would serve as a backdrop to this development. Furthermore, Longstaffe-Gowan does not question his own sources and allows vague definitions to run rampant throughout his work, such as his use of rus in urbe, a term that first appears in his preface, hinting that it will be a recurring critical concept, as indeed it is from chapter 3 onward. However, rus in urbe is explained only as “the visual encroachment of nature and rural associations into the urban fabric” (2) and remains unexamined beyond Henry Lawrence’s definition of the square as a specific kind of urban form that aims to “introduce rural landscape values into the urban fabric” (11–12).2In his preface, Longstaffe-Gowan warns that his book could be viewed as “haphazard” because of his selection of themes and his reporting of issues that may or may not have been more commonly recorded at specific points in time. In short, he absolves himself of trying to write a “comprehensive guide” while also acknowledging that his book cannot possibly chronicle all London squares, which it certainly cannot do. Yet this statement highlights his lack of methodology by rationalizing: “I have generally followed a practice of mentioning specific squares when they illustrate a point in the narrative” (13). This narrative is constructed by terms or methods that he never reveals and on evidence he has surmised from “issues” that have cropped up in his historical sources, which are by no means exhaustive. An ambitious topic still needs a critical framework clearly defined.Chapter 1 begins in the seventeenth century and concerns the early development of London’s squares. Longstaffe-Gowan explores two initial phenomena in the urban landscape: the enclosure of waste fields, with an aim to keep them public, and the establishment of visually unified residential areas. Both of these early ideals expressed the desire for municipal-scale magnificence for London. Urban magnificence was a common feature in the cities and the emergent states of early modern Europe, and the qualities, conditions, and references for magnificence varied from place to place. The idea of magnificence is not parsed out here or in successive chapters. It is never particularized within an English context nor explained how it is activated in the public space of the square. In this chapter, Longstaffe-Gowan introduces the competing stakeholders who will determine the aesthetics and diffusion of London squares: the monarch, citizens of the city, and urban speculators. However, the author jumps too quickly to the aims of the sovereign in this regard and only returns to discuss the other groups in later chapters. A brief introduction to the stakeholders and the general mechanisms of power, use, and influence that defined the establishment of London’s squares would have been helpful. Rather, these relationships remain shadowy elements for readers unfamiliar with the vagaries of English landowning policy and its unique qualities for the City of London.Chapters 1 and 2 highlight earlier prototypes. There are notable precedents such as the Place des Vosges for the development of the square typology. Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers influenced a specific proposed fountain in King’s Square as well as characterized the general feature of the centralized fountain that became a seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century commonplace. The Place des Victoires served as a counterpoint to challenge size, scale, and grandeur. Direct links between specific built references and London squares are only tentatively demonstrated, however, and are offered by quick visual perusal and affirmation that evade direct historical evidence. This would be fine if the aesthetic ideals that London’s squares were made to espouse were more definitively elaborated here. Likewise, there is a vast literature on aesthetic developments in early modern Europe that Longstaffe-Gowan could have fruitfully mined. While many of these sources deal with other art forms, even those that demonstrate specific historiographical precedents for garden history are largely absent here. For example, the author’s description of the design and planning for Grosvenor Square—one that opted for an elongated and dynamic oval—elicits no mention of baroque design. Rather, Longstaffe-Gowan accepts Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s dictate that London squares offer a form different from the baroque spaces of the Continent (9). The author never critiques this stance nor underlines how his findings suggest that Rasmussen’s assertion is indeed true. Is it possible to discuss magnificence and its display adequately while ignoring the larger European context?The ideals of landscape aesthetics imported from Europe and their adoption into the unique context of London are persistent omissions in the text. Longstaffe-Gowan’s exploration of St. James’s Square offers an early instance of this. This square plays a recurring role through the entire book as an exemplar of comprehensive design, incorporating side streets for contingent staff, the location of a church, and allowance for varying façades on the square. Two illustrations undermine this conclusion and highlight one of the ways the author overlooks the gap created through the relationship between prototype and object. The author surmises that the cohesiveness of the square responds to European types that often incorporate regularized forms and axial entranceways. To support this, one aerial perspective renders St. James’s Square as an ideal iteration of this symmetrical, regular form, with a street in perfect alignment with a doorway of St. James’s Church. The opposite illustration, a map view, shows in minute detail the reality that this doorway is off-center. Then, as today, as one walks up York Street from St. James’s Square to the church, one is confronted not with a centrally placed doorway but with a heavy stone wall. This adaptation reveals a different texture to the streetscape of London—one that goes unremarked by Longstaffe-Gowan.Chapter 3 explores the expanding types of squares and begins to summarize how they were actually constructed and overseen. To this end, the author offers a synopsis of the changing relationships of landowners, builders, and designers. Unfortunately, he leaves the boundaries between these sectors vague and selective. Chronologically, chapter 3 engages the critical late eighteenth century, a period in which controversies over landscape and garden aesthetics were profound in England. Longstaffe-Gowan reintroduces the generalized term rus in urbe here but engages picturesque rhetoric only briefly. He conflates the naturalistic visions of John Claudius Loudon and Humphry Repton, neglecting their different approaches to design, instead emphasizing their respective appeals for more open access to exclusive garden squares. This chapter explores a progressive introduction of more varied features and materials, from the use of more plants to hedges, walls, and fences, though it does not mention the impact on the market for these materials affected by overseas trade. There is some discussion of the fear of illicit behavior in garden spaces, the rule-breaking exchange of householders’ garden keys, and the few spontaneous riots taking place in squares, but without critically examining the evidence.The second half of the book turns to the multiplicity of forms of squares as well as the challenges to their uses from the early nineteenth century into the early twentieth century and is more successful in its aims. This period of development was marked most profoundly by the gradual opening of various squares to larger user groups and the ways that appropriate behaviors, and to some degree aesthetics, were prescribed to accommodate the public access that increasingly mark the squares. Chapter 7 considers the challenges of modernity and summarizes the ways in which squares cross over into the realm of aspirational, industrially produced epicenters. This theme is carried into an epilogue that considers how London squares will fare in the future, the recent efforts to assess what they offer as London embraces new values such as ecology in landscapes, and the advent of new gated communities that adopt the appearance of historic squares. Chapter 7 especially offers valuable information on postwar landscape in London and the tensions that arise from the prevalence of garden squares in the context of modernity. The relevance of squares came into question after the bombing campaigns of World War II dramatically remapped open spaces in the city. Longstaffe-Gowan describes preservation movements, and adoptions of the square’s role in urban development. These manifestations are outcomes of the need for high-density housing, the nostalgia for a quintessentially English landscape, and the codified language of urban redevelopment. The smaller amount of material in this second half provides Longstaffe-Gowan the opportunity to focus more critically on the issues at hand. There are still gaps in the explanation of economic and political change incumbent to the study of urban systems, but the expansion of design vocabularies in these chapters seems more fitting to the author’s fluid style.