London Under

Author: Peter Ackroyd

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 19.95 AUD
  • : 9780099287377
  • : Vintage
  • : Vintage
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  • : 0.368
  • : January 2012
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 29.99
  • : April 2012
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Peter Ackroyd
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  • : Paperback
  • : 612
  • :
  • :
  • : 942.1
  • :
  • :
  • : 208
  • : HBJD1
  • : Illustrations, maps, ports.
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Barcode 9780099287377
9780099287377

Description

Secondhand.


"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.

Promotion info

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

Reviews

"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." - 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." - Adrian Tinniswood, "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"

Author description

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning novelist, as well as a broadcaster, biographer, poet and historian. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers, Thames: Sacred River and London: The Biography. He holds a CBE for services to literature.