DISCOVERING LONDON, exploring as much as I can. John Strype's Survey of London Online. In the century following Stow’s death, however, the Tudor capital so lovingly depicted and recorded in Stow’s Survey was dramatically transformed.
The huge growth of the metropolis, the devastation wrought by the Great Fire of 1666 and the subsequent rebuilding of the City made an updating of the Survey highly desirable. It was to answer this need that John Strype (1643-1737), the ecclesiastical historian and biographer, published a new, hugely expanded version of Stow’s Survey of London in 1720. Time Travel Explorer. This is the Aylesbury Estate, a vast block of concrete that was plonked down in Walworth, near Elephant and Castle, between 1967 and 1977 as part of an extraordinary plan to revolutionise and regenerate working-class living in South London.
The idea was that the Aylesbury, the largest estate in Europe, would link up with the Elmington Estate in Camberwell and the North Peckham Estate by overhead pedestrian walkways that meant Londoners could travel three miles across South London without touching the ground. Needless to say, this utopian dream never quite came off and the Aylesbury has come to be seen as emblematic of the worst kind of post-war planning. London Historians' Blog.