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London Under

London Under

The Secret History Beneath the Streets

by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd

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London Under is a wonderful, atmospheric, imaginative, oozing short study of everything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheaters to Victorian sewers, gang hideouts, and modern tube stations. The depths below are hot, warmer than the surface, and this book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting the creatures, real and fictional, that dwell in darkness--rats and eels, monsters and ghosts. When the Underground's Metropolitan Line was opened in 1864, the guards asked for permission to grow beards to protect themselves against the sulfurous fumes, and named their engines after tyrants--Czar, Kaiser, Mogul--and even Pluto, god of the underworld.

To go under London is to penetrate history, to enter a hidden world. As Ackroyd puts it, "The vastness of the space, a second earth, elicits sensations of wonder and of terror. It partakes of myth and dream in equal measure."

From the Hardcover edition.

London Under is a wonderful, atmospheric, imaginative, oozing short study of everything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheaters to Victorian sewers, gang hideouts, and modern tube stations. The depths below are hot, warmer than the surface, and this book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting the creatures, real and fictional, that dwell in darkness--rats and eels, monsters and ghosts. When the Underground's Metropolitan Line was opened in 1864, the guards asked for permission to grow beards to protect themselves against the sulfurous fumes, and named their engines after tyrants--Czar, Kaiser, Mogul--and even Pluto, god of the underworld.

To go under London is to penetrate history, to enter a hidden world. As Ackroyd puts it, "The vastness of the space, a second earth, elicits sensations of wonder and of terror. It partakes of myth and dream in equal measure."

From the Hardcover edition.

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Chapter 1
1. DARKNESS VISIBLE

Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day.

A vast concourse of people, buried deep within the clay of the Eocene period, move beneath your feet in underground trains. Rooms and corridors have been created for the settlement of thousands of people in the event of calamity. You are also treading on the city of the past, all of its history from the prehistoric settlers to the present day packed within 24 feet of earthen fabric. The past is beneath us. It exists still as the companion of the present city. It is crowded. It has its own heat. A hundred feet beneath the ground the temperature hovers at 19° Celsius or 65° Fahrenheit. It was once a little cooler, but the heat of the electric trains has quickened it. The clay surrounding the tunnels has absorbed the warmth.

In a previous book I have explored the city above the surface; now I wish to descend and explore its depths, which are no less bewildering and no less exhilarating. Like the nerves within the human body, the underworld controls the life of the surface. Our activities are governed and sustained by materials and signals that emanate from beneath the ground; a pulse, an ebb, a flow, a signal, a light, or a run of water, will affect us. It is a shadow or replica of the city; like London itself it has developed organically with its own laws of growth and change. It was said of the Victorian Londoner, wrapped in fog and darkness, that he or she would not know the difference between the two worlds. The underworld is haphazard and wayward, with many abandoned passages and vast tunnels of brick leading nowhere. Beneath Piccadilly Circus is another great circus of myriad ways. The roads that converge on the Angel, Islington, have their counterparts beneath the surface.

It is an unknown world. It is not mapped in its entirety. It cannot be seen clearly or as a whole. There are maps of gas facilities, of telecommunications, of cables and of sewers; but they are not available for public perusal. The dangers of sabotage are considered to be too great. So the underworld is doubly unknowable. It is a sequestered and forbidden zone. It must be said, too, that there is little interest in this vast underworld. To fear is added indifference. What is not seen is not respected. The majority of pedestrians do not know or care that vast caverns exist beneath their feet; as long as they can see the sky, they are content.

Yet there may be monsters. The lower depths have been the object of superstition and of legend as long as there have been men and women to wonder. The minotaur, half man and half bull, lived in a labyrinth buried beneath the palace at Knossos in Crete. A dog with three heads, Cerberus, guarded the gates of the underworld in classical myth. The Egyptian god of the underworld, Anubis, was a man with the head of a jackal. The journey under ground prompted strange transformations. Anubis was also known as "the lord of the sacred land," with the world beneath the ground creating a spiritual as much as a material presence. The great writers of antiquity-Plato and Homer, Pliny and Herodotus-have described the underground worlds as places of dream and hallucination. Most of the great religions have created temples and shrines beneath the surface of the earth. Terror lingers in caverns and caves, where there may be subterranean rivers and fires. Sixteen thousand years ago the wandering people of Europe lived in or beside the...

About the Author-

PETER ACKROYD is the author of London: The Biography, Shakespeare: The Biography, Thames: The Biography, and Venice: Pure City; acclaimed biographies of T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Sir Thomas More; and several successful novels. He has won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, among others.

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