Building Jerusalem: the rise and fall of the Victorian city Tristram Hunt Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 432pp, £25 ISBN 0297607677

There is a moment, not long into this lively analysis of the Victorian city, when readers might be forgiven for thinking that its author, rather than concentrating on his polite studies, is angling for some prurient television series. Was it pubic hair or menstruation, he asks, that caused John Ruskin to shy away from his wife, Euphemia Gray, on their wedding night? And then, in a deft turn, Hunt tells us of the Ruskins' trip to Venice in 1849. While John examined the damage to his beloved city, Effie flirted with Charles Paulizza, a suave officer who, "as First Lieutenant of the Austrian Artillery, had been in charge of the shelling of Venice and its monuments during the siege" of the previous year. Ouch.

Throughout Building Jerusalem, Hunt makes use of such telling anecdotes to bring alive his cast of Victorian city-builders, physical, political and intellectual. He describes what they were like as people, and how their thoughts were translated into steam-age brick, iron, terracotta, marble and glass. By examining such intriguing byways, Hunt sustains the reader's interest as he strides along the main avenue of his thesis. What were the ideas that gave rise to the at first terrifying, then grandiloquent, and ultimately civic-minded Victorian city? What ideas contributed to its decline after the Second World War? And can the latest thinking on urban regeneration bring it back to truly independent and self-confident life?

Hunt draws on the writings of a wide range of Ruskin's contemporaries to illustrate the dramatic impact that the industrial revolution had on British cities. Along with the usual suspects - Defoe, Cobbett, Southey, George Eliot, Dickens - he introduces us to less familiar figures, including the "prying French intellectual" Hippolyte Taine, one of many literary and academic tourists to visit Victorian Manchester. For Taine, Hunt writes, "The penning together of thousands of workmen, carrying out mindless, regimented tasks - hands active, feet motionless, all day and every day - was simply improper."

Conditions in early Victorian cities were certainly wretched. Life expectancy in Manchester in 1841 was just 26.6 years. Yet the French philosopher's comment could apply to many cities today. Those working in call-centres or Ricky Gervais-style offices may not die of cholera or typhus fever, but their labours are mindless, regimented and all but motionless.

Hunt shows how radical, sometimes eccentric, ideas were woven into the polychrome fabric of the Victorian city. Augustus Pugin's calls for a revival of medieval cities did not lead to the re- emergence of a 14th-century way of life, but by the 1880s, visitors to Britain would have been hard-pressed to discover a town of any size without at least one gothic revival church. Pugin was one of many 19th-century Romantics who hoped to counter the increasing secularism and commercialism of industrial cities by turning the clock back.

Yet he was fighting a losing battle. As early as 1848, the Economist was talking of our modern towns as "great wonders and great blessings . . . the home of advancing civilisation, the abodes of genius, and the centres of all knowledge, the arts and the science of our race". The rise of Nonconformism, of the professions, of a politically empowered middle class, of free trade, of the press, of sanitation - all these took the Victorian city high and away from its stinking roots.

By 1861, The Builder felt able to compare the glories of modern Manchester to those of Venice. Yet this was still not enough to prevent a flight, in the 20th century, from industrial cities to Ebenezer Howard's garden cities; and to suburbia, prim and proper. Today, our Victorian cities are struggling slowly back to some sort of eminence. In his final chapter, Hunt awkwardly discusses the implications of this. Are current campaigns to revive our cities so much hot air, or might they lead to a revival of civic glory? Hunt is unsure. In one paragraph he trots out new Labour dogma; in another, he questions how the spread of government-approved suburbia throughout south-east England squares with Lord Rogers's vision of an "urban renaissance".

Hunt would like to see a return of truly independent, civic-minded cities led by the Joseph Chamberlains of our own age. But, he suggests, the forces of globalism, big business and increasingly powerful central government make this unlikely. Recently, interviewing Tony Blair for the Observer, Hunt observed that the Prime Minister is beginning to show some interest in history. I hope, for the sake of the long-term future of our cities, that Hunt gave him a copy of this lucid and questioning book.

Jonathan Glancey is architecture critic of the Guardian

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