兩本倫敦的地下世界: LONDON UNDER: The Secret History Beneath the Streets

地下倫敦 北京:新星2006

Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets

by Stephen Smith 2004

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In this marvelous work, Stephen Smith explores the life and history of London from an unusual angle—underneath. Beginning with the rivers that run under the capital and ending in the system of tunnels beneath the Thames Barrier, Underground London is an enthralling journey into a subterranean world. We find the author descending into St. Andrew’s crypts, where the dead are being raised; joining miners digging tunnels; and exploring the culverts beneath Hampton Court, a stunning feat of engineering designed as a secret passageway for Henry VIII’s mistresses. Smith visits Victorian sewers, wartime bunkers, and secret vaults. He explores tube stations and the now-defunct Mail Rail, the miniature railway that once transported twelve million letters a day.

Synopsis:

In this marvelous work, Stephen Smith explores the life and history of London from an unusual angle—underneath. Beginning with the rivers that run under the capital and ending in the system of tunnels beneath the Thames Barrier, Underground London is an enthralling journey into a subterranean world. We find the author descending into St. Andrews crypts, where the dead are being raised; joining miners digging tunnels; and exploring the culverts beneath Hampton Court, a stunning feat of engineering designed as a secret passageway for Henry VIIIs mistresses. Smith visits Victorian sewers, wartime bunkers, and secret vaults. He explores tube stations and the now-defunct Mail Rail, the miniature railway that once transported twelve million letters a day.

***

Beneath the Streets of London

By MARY JO MURPHY

Published: November 10, 2011

Is that vast labyrinth beneath London the Eighth Wonder of the World or the Ninth Circle of Hell? I’ll admit to a bias. As a longtime commuter on the infernal Long Island Rail Road and a rider of a subway whose signs are in fluent fuhgeddaboudit, I know what I like in a train system. Even as an American pre-teenager growing up in London, I marveled at the Underground and navigated it alone with ease and awe. I’m opting for Eighth Wonder.

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M. McNeill/Fox Photos — Getty Images

Another world: the Underground as air-raid shelter, December 1940.

LONDON UNDER

The Secret History Beneath the Streets

By Peter Ackroyd

Illustrated. 228 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $25

Don’t make me go down there again. The prolific Peter Ackroyd, having written histories and fictions covering every square inch of London above ground (“London: The Biography,” “Thames: The Biography,” “The Great Fire of London,” “The Lambs of London”), has turned his attention to the world below, dashing off a windy treasure called “London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets.” He seems obsessed with reminding us that the living aren’t meant to linger underground — and when we do, that we shouldn’t be surprised to encounter the dead and occasionally the undead. “There may be monsters,” he writes. Mind the gap indeed.

Twenty-first-century readers may not be in danger of slipping deep beneath London and never emerging, but a fascinating, chilling chapter on the use of the Underground during World War II, when tens of thousands of people sheltered there and created an alternate city, complete with its own newspapers, suggests how close we can come. It’s the second half of “London Under” that tells this story of the Tube — the true reward of the book — but Ackroyd makes readers work for it. First he takes us on a tour of the ancient subterrain. The current London is sinking, and as it does all the Londons before it are rising up. The 30 compressed feet of clay, gravel, wood and stone where these Londons meet has coughed up basilicas, markets, amphitheaters, bathhouses, taverns, temples, a Roman ship sunk by a stone cannonball, even a mammoth. And, of course, bodies. Many, many bodies.

Ackroyd follows seemingly all the rivers, streams, pipes, sewers and tunnels that ever crisscrossed the city. Since many routes are mirrored in the streets above, he enumerates warrens within warrens of place names, at times sounding like a London cabby who has “done the Knowledge,” the legendary test of such map memory. It’s lovely to hear the names, though. Even without meaning they have melody: Cowcross Street, Turnagain Lane, Budge Row, Tooting, the Wandle, Cockfosters.

The hero of this narrative is Joseph Bazalgette, the city engineer who after “the great stink” of 1858 devised a sewer system that is largely still in use today. Before Bazalgette’s sewers, London pretty much routinely smelled rank, its rivers the repository of first resort for its filth. (“The sinks ran grease, and hair of measled hogs,” Ben Jonson wrote in a poem about the River Fleet.) Ackroyd puts Bazalgette in the pantheon of London builders with Sir Christopher Wren and John Nash. His were cathedrals that grew below ground.

Plenty of other “mole men,” diggers with missions both practical and psychological, make up this history. One took his inspiration from a shipworm when he built the first tunnel beneath the Thames — 4,000 years after the Babylonians had constructed theirs under the Euphrates, but still just the second under-river tunnel.

About the same time, Charles Pearson was seeing his derided proposals for subterranean train lines take shape. Ackroyd fills the final chapters with wondrous tales of that project: its earliest successes and failures, its characters and its lore. The first escalator to the depths? “A man with a wooden leg was employed to ride up and down,” Ackroyd informs us, “to instill confidence in the nervous passengers.” The first trainmen? They petitioned the railroad company for permission to grow beards “as a protection against sulfurous deposits.” An early commuter? Oscar Wilde, who rode to his job editing a women’s magazine. The first trains? They were christened Czar, Kaiser, Locust and Hornet. And, of course, Pluto — god of the underworld.

Mary Jo Murphy edits the Weekend Arts section of The Times.