I've lived and worked in London for most of my adult life and am perpetually astonished, amazed, and fascinated by the city around me. It's histories, small and large, are a constant delight and surprise for me, and its hidden places of enchantment fire my imagination. So, when I came to write my first novel, for Claret Press, there was no other place where it could possibly be set and I chose central London which I knew very well and had layer upon physical layer of history. Given that it was a crime thriller, it had to use those hidden places, which mirrored the surface world, as part of the plot. Walk with me along one of London's lost rivers on my website.
I wrote a novel, a thriller set in and around Westminster, a place I know well because I was a senior civil servant in Whitehall for many years. This included a number of little-known and ancient subterranean locations, including Roman baths, plague pits, the sewers, the Underground, the 'lost' River Tyburn, and World War Two bunkers. The Subterranean Guide filled in the blanks in my knowledge and opened up other aspects of this hidden world to me. It's a treasure trove of information and written with a light touch that engages everyone from the casual reader to the history geeks like me.
A revised edition of a guide covering the latest underground developments in London, such as the substation beneath Leicester Square, underground railways and glass fibre communication together with a gazetteer of places open to the public.
I have always admired the pioneering Victorian engineers like Stephenson and Brunel, but especially Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who is less recognised and honoured than others, but whose genius provided a sewage system for London which improved sanitation, reduced disease, and death, allowed for the development of the Embankment and lasted for over a century! This book tells the story of those sewers and ones like them across the world and the remarkable men who designed and built them, many of them little known to their countrymen and women. It's absolutely fascinating, from the technical details to the social impact. It has turned me into a sewer aficionado.
A global guide to sewers that celebrates the magnificently designed and engineered structures beneath the world's great cities.
The sewer, in all its murkiness, filthiness, and subterranean seclusion, has been an evocative (and redolent) literary device, appearing in works by writers ranging from Charles Dickens to Graham Greene. This entertaining and erudite book provides the story behind, or beneath, these stories, offering a global guide to sewers that celebrates the magnificently designed and engineered structures that lie underneath the world's great cities. Historian Stephen Halliday leads readers on an expedition through the execrable evolution of waste management—the open sewers, the…
I enjoy Ackroyd's novels as well as his biographies, the former almost always being set in London which he, as a noted flaneur, loves. London Under is not fiction, though it often references the literature and mythologies which have grown up around certain places and landmarks within London, from its earliest incarnation before it was even a city to the present day. Ackroyd chronicles how the London of one time reappears and impacts upon the London of another time, one stratum intruding upon another and shows how the world below mirrors and reflects the world above. This is not unlike how I wanted the clandestine and criminal world to mirror and reflect the above ground and above-board world in my novel Plague.
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…
OK, this isn't focused on the subterranean, but it does touch frequently upon underpasses and tunnels and is a personal journey, passing through the parts of London where the 'Ginger Line' - the London Overground railway - runs. Sinclair uses his experiences to illuminate the changing city, a jumping-off point for explorations of places, their past, and present. His journey is bound up with writers and artists of all kinds. He, like Ackroyd, has an eye for the bizarre, but Sinclair has a sense of danger, real and modern, while Ackroyd summons the haunting past.
Iain Sinclair explores modern London through a day's hike around the London Overground route.
Echoing his journey in London Orbital over a decade ago, Iain Sinclair narrates his second circular walk around the capital. Shortly after rush-hour and accompanied by a rambling companion, Sinclair begins walking along London's Overground network, or, 'Ginger Line'. With characteristic playfulness, detours into folk history, withering assessments of the political classes and a joyful allegiance to the ordinary oddball, Sinclair guides us on a tour of London's trendiest new transport network - and shows the shifting, changing city from new and surprising angles.
The System is the third book in the Baroque Cycle which begins with Quicksilver and continues with The Confusion. The whole Cycle is a rip-roaring, wildly inventive, and massively ambitious saga, ranging from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, spanning the globe and casting an amazing set of characters from Leibnitz and Newton, to King George, Thomas Newcomen and William Teach the pirate. It's astonishing and has some of the best subterranean London episodes I've ever read, including an escape from Newgate Prison which takes in the Bank of England, a Roman Temple, and a medieval privy. Read all three books and hang on to your hats, it's a thrilling ride.
Neal Stephenson follows his highly-praised historical novels, Quicksilver and The Confusion, with the extraordinary third and final volume of the Baroque Cycle.
The year is 1714. Daniel Waterhouse has returned to England, where he joins forces with his friend Isaac Newton to hunt down a shadowy group attempting to blow up Natural Philosophers with 'Infernal Devices' - time bombs. As Daniel and Newton conspire, an increasingly vicious struggle is waged for England's Crown: who will take control when the ailing queen dies?
Tories and Whigs clash as one faction jockeys to replace Queen Anne with 'The Pretender' James Stuart, and…
Work on a London tube line is halted by the discovery of an ancient plague pit and in it, a very recent corpse. A day later another body is found, which is linked with the Palace of Westminster. As the number of deaths climbs Government assurances are disbelieved and a disgraced civil servant and a policeman must find the killer before more die. Power, money, and love curdle into a deadly brew that could bring down Parliament itself.
Curiosity is certain she saw fairies at the bottom of the garden. Little does she know . . . they saw her first.
Emotionally abandoned by her mother and infatuated by a figurine of a fairy ballerina she discovers in an old toy shop, eight-year-old Curiosity Portland steals the figurine, unleashing strange and frightening happenings around her home, which, in turn, reveals a disturbing family history.
Curiosity is certain she saw fairies at the bottom of the garden. Little does she know . . . they saw her first.
Emotionally abandoned by her mother and infatuated by a figurine of a fairy ballerina she discovers in an old toy shop, eight-year-old Curiosity Portland steals the figurine, unleashing strange and frightening happenings around her home, which, in turn, reveals a disturbing family history.
