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Peter Ackroyd

London Under

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London Under is a wonderful, atmospheric, imagina­tive, oozing short study of everything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheaters to Victorian sewers, gang hideouts, and modern tube stations. The depths below are hot, warmer than the surface, and this book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting the creatures, real and fictional, that dwell in darkness—rats and eels, mon­sters and ghosts. When the Underground’s Metropolitan Line was opened in 1864, the guards asked for permission to grow beards to protect themselves against the sulfurous fumes, and named their engines after tyrants—Czar, Kaiser, Mogul—and even Pluto, god of the underworld. To go under London is to penetrate history, to enter a hid­den world. As Ackroyd puts it, «The vastness of the space, a second earth, elicits sensations of wonder and of terror. It partakes of myth and dream in equal measure.»From the Hardcover…
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204 printed pages
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Quotes

  • Darya Bukhtoyarovahas quoted7 years ago
    Yet what if there is no sound? What then? A silent station is a disquieting and even a cursed place. The forty-four disused and forgotten stations of the system are known as “dead stations.” The earth is the place for the dead, is it not?
  • Darya Bukhtoyarovahas quoted7 years ago
    The passenger travels within the origin of the city. It is a curious fact that the further the train moves from the centre of the city, the more anonymous it becomes. The journey becomes less intense. It becomes less intimate. It loses its mystery.
  • Darya Bukhtoyarovahas quoted7 years ago
    by nineteenth-century travellers, have gone.

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