City of Stirling Library Services

London under, Peter Ackroyd

eng

Includes bibliographical references aand index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

London under

bibliography

Peter Ackroyd

BRITISH & IRISH HISTORY. This is a wonderful, atmospheric, imaginative, oozing short study ofeverything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheatres to Victorian sewers and gang hide-outs. The depth below is hot, much warmer than the surface and this book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting the creatures that dwell indarkness, real and fictional - rats and eels, monsters and ghosts. There is a bronze-age trackway under the Isle of Dogs, Wren found Anglo-Saxon graves under St Pauls, and the monastery of Whitefriars lies beneath Fleet Street. In Kensal Green cemetery a hydraulic device lowered bodies into the catacombs below - 'Welcome to the lower depths', while a door in the plinth of statue of Boadicea on Westminster Bridge leads to a huge tunnel, packed with cables - gas, water, telephone. 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