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  • Published: 1 June 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099287377
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

London Under



From the author of the bestselling London: The Biography, a poetic and powerful urban history of life and legend beneath London.

London Under is an atmospheric, imaginative introduction to everything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheatres to Victorian sewers, gang hideouts and modern Underground stations. This book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting the creatures, both real and fictional, that dwell in the darkness - rats and eels, monsters and ghosts.

From the Anglo-Saxon graves under St Paul's, to the hydraulic device in Kensal Green cemetery which lowered bodies into the catacombs below, to the fossils uncovered when the Victoria Line was built and the gold bars within the Bank of England's vaults, London Under takes you into a hidden world, beneath our feet.

  • Published: 1 June 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099287377
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

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Praise for London Under

Ackroyd is a knowledgeable and evocative guide to London’s different archaeological levels

Times Higher Education Supplement

As ever his research is meticulous, his scope expansive, his writing definitive. Every sentence is delivered with judicial gravity and command...Once again, Ackroyd shares his vision of a mythical city most do not see

Euan Ferguson, Time Out

While many authors have shone a flashlight on London's catacombs and tunnels, Ackroyd's vision is infra-red...skilled at connecting the past, present and future...For those looking for a highly readable introduction, plumb and depth to get a copy

Londonist

[A] fascinating history of the capital beneath the surface... Irresistible

Dominic Sandbrook, Financial Times

There is much here that will delight Ackroyd's many admirers

Times Literary Supplement

This book is not a straightforward history of London's relationship with the clay on which it stands but a poetic invoking of what Ackroyd perceives as the diabolic terror of the earth

Claire Allfree, Metro

Other worlds lurk below London, and Ackroyd revels in them. The book is both an absorbing history of those parts of the capital that lie beneath our feet and a meditation on the meaning we give them

Literary Review

A literary, cultural and topographical sat-nav for going underground in London... With quick, deft stitches he sews the fantastical and the familiar into a macabre sampler of the city that exists beneath the feet of its citizens

The Times

London Under is written with Ackroyd's characteristic panache

Sunday Times

Ackroyd takes us through the layers of the city, lifting the covers to peer downwards

Camden New Journal

In a short but intriguing book, Ackroyd explores the idea that, beneath the surface, there has existed another world with rules and conventions of its own

Financial Times

Anyone intrigued by this tumultuous city will devour London Under in a few transporting hours... packed with revelations... Ackroyd's stylistic brilliance explains why the book remains a rattling good read

Christopher Hirst, Independent

Fascinating study of everything under London, from rats and eels to monsters and ghosts.

Lady (Five-star review)

As London's anatomist-in-chief, Peter Ackroyd turns his focus on what lies beneath the capital's surface. Peppered with erudite and literary references, Ackroyd's fluent style makes for entertaining reading

James Urquhart, Financial Times

Reveals the London beneath your feet in all its fascinating – and sometimes horrifying – glory. Historian and novelist Ackroyd invests his tales of buried rivers and catacombs with enormous energy

ELLE Decoration

Packed with anecdotes and fascinating trivia...Ackroyd never misses an opportunity to link this hidden realm with the underworlds of mythology

Leon Burakowski, Halesowen Chronicle