6/4/2023 0 Comments London under ackroyd![]() Peter Ackroyd CBE is an English novelist and biographer with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. It partakes of myth and dream in equal measure." Writes Peter Ackroyd, "elicits sensations of wonder and of terror. "The vastness of the space, a second earth," Going under London is to penetrate history, to enter a hidden world. ![]() When the Metropolitan Line was opened in 1864 the guards asked for permission to grow beards to protect themselves against the sulphurous fumes, and called their engines by the names of tyrants - Czar, Kaiser, Mogul - and even Pluto, god of the underworld. ![]() A door in the plinth of statue of Boadicea on Westminster Bridge leads to a huge tunnel, packed with cables - gas, water, telephone. In Kensal Green cemetery there was a hydraulic device to lower bodies into the catacombs below - "Welcome to the lower depths". There is a bronze-age trackway under the Isle of Dogs, Wren found Anglo-Saxon graves under St Paul's, and the monastery of Whitefriars lies beneath Fleet Street. The depth below is hot, much warmer than the surface and this book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness, real and fictional - rats and eels, monsters and ghosts. ![]() ![]() London Under is a wonderful, atmospheric, historical, imaginative, oozing little study of everything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheatres to Victorian sewers and gang hide-outs. ![]()
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