For Peter Ackroyd, the subterranean world holds a potent allure. London Under, his brief account of the capital’s catacombs and other murky zones, manages to radiate a dark mystery and sulphur reek. ‘There is no darkness like the darkness under the ground’, Ackroyd announces, like a Victorian raree-show merchant. This is an entertaining if slightly daft book, that reveals what a weird world lies beneath our feet. Whether Ackroyd has actually been to all the places he describes is uncertain. Journalists have contorted themselves through narrow, stinking cave-galleries and risked leptospirosis from rat urine in their quest for London subterranea. But the stately Ackroyd?
The London sewers are vividly described here. Access today is most often through a manhole near Blackfriars Bridge. As you descend into a Victorian darkness, the sound of traffic above grows fainter and you approach the Fleet Main Line. This giant sewer runs five miles north to Hampstead. Built in 1858 — the year of the ‘great stink’ — it had served to divert drainage from the main sewers along the Thames. Until then, says Ackroyd, the river had been an open latrine, brimming with refuse and jetsam. An impressive 12,500 miles of sewer now criss-cross Greater London. To visit them requires considerable agility. ‘Sewers can never wholly be trusted’, Ackroyd cautions gruffly.
His chapter on the London Underground is fascinating, if strange. The acrid, faintly singed smell down there apparently ‘resembles the smell of hair cut with electric blades’. The fatty smell of McDonalds and KFC may be more familiar to passengers. But Ackroyd’s is a poetic pen. The cylindrical design of the Arnos Grove tube station wins his approval, as does the amazing statue of the archer atop the East Finchley tube.
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