Vaughan Hart, Christopher Wren: In Search of Eastern Antiquity (New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2020), 209 pp. incl. 180 colour and b&w ills, ISBN 9781913907079, £45

by the early modern city, such as the problem of finding drinking water for the city’s population, or the fact that the canals functioned as an open sewer that spread an almost continuous stench. Connection with the Amstel, set lower than the canal system, was also problematic, solved only two centuries later with a system of new sluices and pumping stations around the city. Rather than lofty ambitions and a single unified town masterplan, it was the pragmatism of the ruling merchant elite that characterised the approach taken to expanding Amsterdam, and makes it stand out as an interesting case of early modern planning. The spatial development of its harbours, its stacked warehouses, the ordering of its urban structure, its residential environment of the canal district and the regulations to design, build and maintain it, were all governed by the city’s commercial interests. Abrahamse’s achievement is to show in detail how this seventeenth-century city was built.