Todd Longstaffe-Gowan The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 348 pp., 88 color and 202 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300152012 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 facade 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 …