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The period 1660-1720 saw the foundation of modern London. The city was transformed post-Fire from a tight warren of medieval timber-framed buildings into a vastly expanded, regularized landscape of brick houses laid out in squares and spacious streets. This work examines the building boom and the speculative developers who created that landscape. It offers fresh information on their working practices, the role of craftsmen and the design thinking which led to the creation of a new prototype for English housing. The book concentrates on the mass-produced houses of "the middling sort" which saw the adoption of classicism on a large scale in England for the first time. McKellar shows, however, that the "new city" maintained a surprising degree of community with existing patterns of urban use and traditional architecture. The book presents the late 17th and the early 18th century as a distinct phase in London's architectural development and offers a reinterpretation of the adoption of Renaissance styles and ideas at the level of the everyday, challenging conventional interpretations of their use and reception in England.