London Under - Peter Ackroyd

LONDON UNDER – PETER ACKROYD

"It's what?" asked Bill Grundy to a petulant Johnny Rotten. "Nothing. A rude word. Next question." Rotten shot back. "No, no, what was the rude word?" persisted Grundy. "Shit." replied Rotten. Which in a roundabout way brings us to Peter Ackroyd's London Under, where among many other things the author tells us all about the rivers of shit that flow beneath the streets of our capital city. It's a whole other world down there and shit, apparently, is the least of it particularly when compared to how it used to be. For example, Jonathan Swift once observed in his poem A Description Of A City Shower that: 'Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts and Blood, Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud, Dead Cats and Turnips-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.' The Flood he refers being the River Fleet, the largest and most well known of London's subterranean rivers.

Ackroyd is like a tourist-guide on an open-top bus tour of London, calling out a veritable avalanche of obscure points of interest about different places but before you can strain your neck to see, the bus has moved on and he's onto his next obscure point regarding an entirely different place. London taxi drivers are but amateurs when comparing Ackroyd's 'Knowledge' to theirs. If anything, London Under is like Guy Debord's Situationist theory of the 'derive' and psychogeography where you wander through an urban setting allowing yourself to be drawn to any experience or attraction you encounter.

Ackroyd's focus, however, is on what lies beneath. The hidden and forgotten stories of the hidden and forgotten places of the London underground. The rivers, the tunnels, the cellars, chambers, catacombs and buried amphitheatres that most people have no awareness of as they go about their daily business. The closest most ever come to them being when travelling on the Underground but even there what can be seen is but the tip of the iceberg.

Beneath the streets of London, Ackroyd informs us, innumerable rivers flow, wending their way to the Thames. Under the pavements and roads, under tower blocks, housing estates and mansions countless rivulets and streams run their course like veins under the skin. Nowadays only the names of various streets, roads and areas give any hint of these hidden tributaries and it's only when you stop and think about them that their origins make sense, having some kind of connection to water: Fleet Street, Effra Road, Coldharbour Lane, Walbrook Street, Brook Street, Holywell Street, Conduit Street, Cromwell Road, Sadler's Wells, Millbank, Bayswater, Shoreditch, Spa Fields, Deptford, Stockwell, Shadwell, Clerkenwell, Camberwell, Chadwell Heath, Bridewell, etc, etc.

For all that, it's not only water and sewage that lies beneath but also the dead. Under areas near to churches, of course, are the graveyards but also under vast areas where history has been forgotten such as plague pits, pauper burial grounds and unconsecrated ground where suicides were once buried. These are the places of myth, legend and fear where dreams, nightmares and speculations are woven. Ackroyd explores them all, even referencing the influence of the underground upon culture in such books and films as War Of The Worlds, A Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, The Time Machine and Quartermass And The Pit. It all makes for a dizzy, bewildering yet eye-opening and enlightening trip.

As with most of his books, Peter Ackroyd's attention is upon London but an interesting thing about this particular book is what it illuminates without actually giving mention to. That being how the underground worlds that he writes about are not only unique to London but applicable also to any major city throughout the UK. For example, when I was teenager I worked for a wine company based in the centre of Bristol and whilst there discovered there were tunnels and vast labyrinths beneath the streets that very few people were aware of.

The tunnels and catacombs I had first-hand experience of was where wine was stored but there were also countless extensions of those tunnels that had been bricked up that were said to have once led down to the city docks. There was also the River Frome that was covered over that went from the city dock, right under the city to emerge uncovered on the other side in the St Judes area. As in London, there are also many streets, roads and areas of Bristol whose names are connected to water. There are also pits, pipes, sewage, water and drainage systems everywhere that are not given a second thought by those walking or driving above them. Similarly, the same would apply to Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Cardiff and so on.

Anyone living in London would or should find Ackroyd's London Under a fascinating read, giving much food for thought and a whole new insight into the city that could potentially make every day-to-day journey into a whole new adventure and experience. And if indeed London Under is an example of psychogeography and the Situationist 'derive' theory then it is much more than simply a book about shit and water and underground tunnels but is in actual fact nothing less than a revolutionary guide to combat the malaise and boredom of the society of the spectacle.

John Serpico