London Under, Peter Ackroyd
London Under, Peter Ackroyd
List: $12.99 | Sale: $9.10
Club: $6.49

London Under
The Secret History Beneath the Streets

Author: Peter Ackroyd

Narrator: Matthew Waterson

Unabridged: 3 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/28/2020


Synopsis

In this vividly descriptive short study, Peter Ackroyd tunnels down through the geological layers of London, meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness and excavating the lore and mythology beneath the surface.

There is a Bronze Age trackway below the Isle of Dogs, Anglo-Saxon graves rest under St. Pauls, and the monastery of Whitefriars lies beneath Fleet Street. To go under London is to penetrate history, and Ackroyd's book is filled with the stories unique to this underworld: the hydraulic device used to lower bodies into the catacombs in Kensal Green cemetery; the door in the plinth of the statue of Boadicea on Westminster Bridge that leads to a huge tunnel packed with cables for gas, water, and telephone; the sulphurous fumes on the Underground's Metropolitan Line.

Highly imaginative and delightfully entertaining, London Under is Ackroyd at his best.

About 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by K.C. on March 20, 2012

The subject is fascinating, but the book itself is poorly written and doesn't go in-depth about the subject. It's all surface (ironically, considering the subject matter). Many quotes are unattributed and there is not a notes section in the back of the book. And the constant portentious statements h......more

Goodreads review by Mark on January 07, 2013

This is not a work of history, though it relies on history. It is not scholarly, not footnoted to the point of immobility, skewering reality on a butterfly pin, so that what we see is a lifeless visage of something beautiful and great. No, it is a piece of poetry in prose form. And perhaps that was......more

Goodreads review by Stephen on June 01, 2017

A story of the secret rivers, sewers, and subways, the government shelters, and people who dwell beneath London. A journey through time and legend, digging up ghosts and ghouls along with the past. Who can resist the idea of all those deserted stations underground, of hybrid mosquitoes and river god......more

Goodreads review by Cordelia on August 23, 2015

excellent book, maybe a bit..sensationalised. doesn't cover as much archaeology as i thought it would. also covers London's rivers, the Tube, misc. peppered with accounts from roman, anglo-saxon to present day.......more

Goodreads review by Denny on December 16, 2016

The few chapters I really liked made this 4 stars. The mole men and also the war below.......more