[( Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets )] [by: Stephen Smith] [Feb-2005]

by Stephen Smith

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, London, Travel, British Literature, Historical, Research

Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Stephen Smith works for Channel 4 news and writes regularly for the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Reviews

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lights the dark places

I was worried about reading a Travel book. It’s not a genre I’ve ever read, beyond stilted guide books in an effort to find that there’s no vegan restaurants in Vienna, Montreux, Copenhagen etc. But, this time, I needn’t have worried. Stephen Smith’s trawls, wades, duckings, crawlings through the land beneath the streets of the capital is fascinating.

He divides the book into historical periods and takes the reader on appropriate journeys in each. Thus, after introductory chapters looking at The Vertical City and Monster Soup (the rivers of London), he guides us through the city of the Romans, the Anglo Saxons, Mediaeval folk, the Tudors, Guy and his Gunpowder plot, the Plague years, the Victorian era and into the modern arena with the Underground and finally, the Cold War of the 1970s.

Each chapter has its gems. And Smith as man-in-the-street (man-below-the-street?) gleans tidbits of juicy information from any experts that he can pay, bribe or deceive him into parting with their wisdom. Indeed, one of the great delights of this book is his depictions of these people, as much as the stories they reveal about those pars of London usually hidden from sight.

Thus we hear about guide Jane, who ‘has an almost Tourettic fixation with the c-word’, as Smith describes her theory on the etymologies of the words C**TIPOTENT in connection with the place name KENDITCH (the name of one of London’s lost rivers. Did you know there are at least 13 tributaries of the Thames?) And Hedley Swain, whom Smith romanticises as a sort of Heathcliff figure, having ‘a suggestion of the wind in the hair about [his name]’, in the chapter on Roman London entitled ‘Within these Stones’. He turns out to look nothing like this!

Anecdotes could stretch from here along all 1300 miles of sewers built or revamped by engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette in 1875. The only one I shall repeat here is that in Custom House there exists a collection of artefacts confiscated by HM officials through the ages. One such exhibit is a statue of one of the Seven Dwarves, hollowed out for use as a container of hashish. ‘Yes’, Smith says, ‘you’re ahead of me: it was Dopey’.

My only reservation with the book is that it comes with no pictures, diagrams or maps. All of these would far enhance the great descriptions. But Smith’s lightness of touch, his eye for the flamboyant, the quirky, the smelly - those parts of history that we all want to know about but rarely get taught - have conspired to produce a book that I will take with me next time I visit the capital.

[❀⊱RoryReads⊰❀ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 Stars

There's plenty here to interest the history buff but there's also the irritating and unnecessary chatter about things that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. Skim the introduction and keep an eye out for when it wanders and you'll find some fascinating underground history.

[Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

An occasionally rewarding read, but one that doesn't quite live up to either its title or the blurb on the back. The narrative is supposed to be a thorough exploration of all things subterranean in London, but many of the chapters are to do with other extraneous things: London's waterways, politics and most jarringly a trip up the A1 at one point.

When it does get to the London parts, it becomes a thoroughly fascinating read, particularly when the author visits some of the old disused Underground stations and explores catacombs beneath Kensal Green. These chapters are engrossing and atmospheric, allowing the reader to picture the locations in places and feel - almost - as if they were there. More of this and less of the other material would have made for a greater read as a whole. The book came out just before the 7/7 bombings so the section on Underground security makes for particularly interesting reading.

One other thing that becomes apparent as you read is that Smith doesn't seem to be a very nice guy. He makes disparaging comments about the appearance and behaviour of the many people helping him in his research; one guy is described as "roly poly" and another "tending towards corpulence". Another guy has the mickey taken out of his voice. I can't imagine these subjects thought much of the author when they actually got around to reading his book. The icing on the cake is a long-winded digression where the author becomes a Freeman, which has nothing to do with the subject matter and everything to do with ego.

[Alisa Kester · Rating 1 out of 5]

This should have been such an excellent book; combining history, london, and the dark places underneath, it's such a perfect match to my tastes. But unfortunately the writer was so dry that it was a slog to finish. Every time it got interesting, the author immediately veered away into dull pop culture references, or dull explanations of why *he* found this all so interesting.

I did discover one thing, however: next time I go to London I am definitely NOT taking the sewer tour, which I might have done, had I not read this book! It must be a British thing, because nowhere in America can I imagine the authorities allowing tourists to walk through in use sewers, with rats swimming past while they wade through human waste and have highly dubious liquid drip down the collar of their shirts!

[Maggi LeDuc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting information lost in poor organization and too many SAT words.

[Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this on my last trip to London (years ago, sadly) and didn't finish it on the plane ride home - and somehow it got set aside. Suddenly now seems the time to remedy that. (I left my bookmark in the book too - I was using a ticket stub from the Tower Bridge Exhibition, dated 8 May 2007.]

...I'm now on the part about London's hidden rivers and remembering how much learning about them delighted me. Multiple, entire rivers vanished from sight, but still flowing under the city and other built over areas. It sounds completely unreal.

p. 31 "...But shipping still preferred to steer clear and the river continued to fill with waste. As London has grown, so the Fleet has disappeared. It has been landscaped out of sight. This trend, affecting not only the Fleet but other lost rivers too, has had very little to do with sanitation and everything to do with the demand for land in central London. Broadly speaking, the covering of the Fleet has proceeded in the opposite direction to the flow of the river, beginning close to the point where it discharges into the Thames and retracing its route back towards its source."

p. 32 "...As London expanded, so did the demands on its sewers. In 1846, the pressure of trapped gases became too much for the Fleet and a section of it spectacularly blew up. Traffic couldn't move for effluent at King's Cross, three poorhouses in Clerkenwell were swept away in a tidal stream of sewage, and a Thames steamboat rammed into Blackfriars Bridge on a bow wave of crap.

If you've been leafing through this book in the hope that subterranean London will be a respite from the vulgarity of the world above, I'm afraid I can only apologise. Dear reader, it gets worse."

Obviously I'm really enjoying rereading this part.

...Ok, I don't remember this bit, and though I've read about bear baiting and dog and cock fighting, this scenario is new:

p. 51 "...A landlord called Jimmy Shaw claimed to buy 26,000 rats a year, at 3d each, from farm labourers in Enfield and Essex. Never likely to attract the Marquess of Queensberry's seal of approval, these bouts were bloodbaths involving dogs and scores of rats at a time."

And that's all there is on that point - I'm not being coy and withholding any more from that story. But then this is the sort of detail that I'm always going to glom onto and wish for more, when there probably aren't more details provided in the original sources anyway. Still, rats vs dog fights are going to sink into that part of my brain that likes to ponder the nasty bits of history.

...I think I'm jealous of the author's childhood field trips:

p. 77 "...I had vivid childhood memories of visiting the Guildhall. ...School outings were always to one or other of London's celebrated institutions: St. Paul's, the Monument, the Stock Exchange. These excursions were referred to as city visits and they always culminated in the ritual of tea with the Lord Mayor in Guildhall crypt."

From the Guildhall website: East and West Crypt, and from Flicker: 1, 2, 3 (stained glass of the hall on fire).

...Another quote, this time about a London ceremony at All Hallows:

p. 85 "...In a few minutes, one of their peers, by tradition the smallest boy among them, would be dangled upside down over the river from a barge linked to no less a London personage than the Lord Mayor. The child would be lowered so that his head was within a foot or two of the water. From this precarious and tortuous position, he would then batter the river with a bamboo pole. This spectacle was a curtain-raiser to the annual rite of beating the bounds, the marking out of parish boundaries on Ascension Day."

Imagine wandering by that scene and having no idea what was going on.

...I'm going to have to make a list now of obscure places the book mentions because I know eventually I'm going to want to refer to them.

[And because that tangent went on a bit too long - I tucked it away over here.]

...So far my favorite chapter is Lifting People which combines the stories of clearing the bodies in the crypt of Saint Andrew's (Holborn), the team of "lifters" moving the bodies, and local history of the plague. The lifters have some great stories:

p. 197-198 "...They recalled a previous job, in which they had been engaged to lift bodies from beneath the car park of Guy's Hospital near London Bridge. 'We found loads of arms and legs,' Mark told me.
'By themselves?'
'By themselves. People used to get paid to donate their limbs. The doctors would practice amputations on them and then get rid of them.'

There's also lots of great pondering about the fact that stirring up the bodies potentially means stirring up the plague itself and fun things like smallpox.

...It's always likely that I'm going to enjoy almost anything having to do with cemetery history, and so the chapter Going Out With a Bang, which involves both history and a guided tour of a crypt, is another favorite. In the following, Kevin is the tour guide at the catacombs of the General Cemetery of All Souls at Kensal Green

p. 248-249 "...If the embalming was not carried out correctly, Kevin continued, watching our faces, there was a risk that the coffin could explode. There were gasps and giggles. Kevin went on quickly that the blasts were caused by a build-up of waste gasses in the caskets. Exploding coffins! We were all thinking the same thing. What noise would it make? What would it look like?...
...Kevin said that old fashioned clay pipes were used to forestall detonations...
...'Down here we only really make use of the pipe stems,' said Kevin. These were thin enough but also sufficiently hardy and discreet to be slotted into apertures in the caskets. Tin plates were slid aside like peepholes, and the clay pipes were put into the narrow punctures behind them. The decomposition gases were burnt off. I imagined Kensal Green flaring at night like an oilfield."

The chapter on the Underground (Euston, We Have a Problem), forgotten/closed stations, and use of Tube stations during the bombings of World War II makes me think I need to dig up a book specifically on the Underground and the war. Holding back on quoting because I've probably thrown out quite enough quotes at this point. Oh and there are two ghost stories related in that chapter.

...In the chapter Post Restante about the Post Office and its miniature railroad system to transport mail - and this comes up about Mount Pleasant:

p. 296 "...Mount Pleasant was where I had paused in my walk along the route of the buried Fleet [river] and learned from Jane the guide that the locale had been named ironically, after a high-smelling rubbish dump."

One of my favorite Noel Coward plays is Present Laughter, and in the play Gary (an Actor) tells his secretary to put a letter he doesn't want to answer "in Mount Pleasant." And only now do I get the joke. (Stage directions earlier had specifically noted that at the secretary's feet is a waste basket.)


...Summing up!
Smith hops a bit from topic to topic, and while his facts all are relevant to the point he's making or the area he's visiting, some may not like this style of telling history. He also cited English authors that you may not have heard of, but those are usually in either the index or the bibliography. He'll often tell more than one story at the same time - hopping from a present day tour he's taking to the distant past and the history of the area. Smith's writing style is very much that of a long magazine article in each chapter, which is nice if you want to pick up the book, read a few chapters, then set it aside for a bit.

Depending on what subject you're researching this could be a problematic source because Smith doesn't footnote anything, though you can track down most of his sources via the bibliography.

[Kathleen (itpdx) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is written like a series of columns for a London newspaper. It tells the stories of Stephen Smith's explorations of what is beneath London's surface. He has organized it from the oldest (the rivers) to recent underground construction projects. The book assumes a working knowledge of the layout of London. I read it with my tourist map of London at hand because, even though I have visited London a number of times, I do not always have the relationship of bridges, buildings and roads in my mind.
The British English was fun but occasionally puzzling to this American reader. I had lorries, lifts and loos down. I think I puzzled out boiler suits, potholers, Portakins and JCBs. But I was left in the dark as to what the ICA is and how someone becomes an anorak (when he was obviously not becoming a parka).
It would have been great to have maps. I would love to see a map of the underground rivers superimposed on the road system; a map of the Roman Wall over the current London map pointing to places where bits of the wall can be seen today; a map of known plague pits; etc.
I was fascinated to find that during WWII, the authorities originally discouraged the use of the Underground system for bomb shelters and then ended up digging some additional shelters which have not been linked to the system and have had some interesting other uses.

[K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, this was fascinating. It's equal parts "London has lots of cool history" and "London has lots of weird shit under it", and it's pretty damned great. It's really readable, often entertaining, and well written.

Each chapter focuses on a different element of London's underground - train tunnels, the Thames Barrier, bunkers, catacombs, wine cellars, sewers, underground rivers etc etc. I loved that it divided things up by type rather than looking at London's underground chronologically. Sure, there are occasionally dry segments about dams and tunnel construction. But on the whole, I really enjoyed this.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smith has a great voice for telling stories. It is also quite clear that he loves his subject matter. The book is very intersting and the last chapter in particular is fasincating.

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stephen Smith is claustrophobic. He needs to take a prophylactic kit of “smelling salts, a battered rosary, a ring...a phial of tonic (neat alcohol)” before he’ll travel on a tube train. He dislikes crowds and small spaces. So it makes utter sense for him to write a book about underground London: the mines, tunnels, rivers, subways, catacombs, cellars, dungeons, and bunkers that make up the land beneath our feet, buses, cars, bikes.

To write creative non-fiction well you need a voice, or at least a style and I like Smith’s. Not too over-sharing, not too overly factual, he writes a nice sentence – compare “Houndsitch, now a suit-thronged street in the heart of the City, but once an insalubrious trench between the Fleet and the Tower into which Londoners tipped all their rubbish, their late best friends included.” or “...the blank maquillage and widow's weeds of the fashion-resistant strain of youth culture known as goths.” with Iain Sinclair's verbless micro-sentences or Will Self's verbal dysentery.

He also recommends other books: “Told by An idiot” by Rose Macauley, Andrew O’Hagan’s “Personality”, “The Director's Cut” by Nicholas Royle, and “The Underground Man” by Mick Jackson (I like a book that is well-read), and he references such London luminaries as Freud, Harry Beck, Mary Wollstonecraft, Daniel Defoe, Christian Wolmar, Doris Lessing, Joseph Bazalgette, VS Pritchet, George Orwell, Chaucer. London is a well-lived place.

Nor could I find any errors in the book, although I do take issue with: “It's one of the secret attractions of manual work for men that there are no women to frown at our beloved puerile jokes and make dreamworld demands for self-improvement” - maybe men working in arty jobs just like blue collar blokes because they feel their manliness rubs off on them? There's also tedious sexism: referring to women as if their hair colour defines their very being (“The blonde at reception”), some posthumous perving over long dead female gladiators (I think he's imagining them as Racquel Welch in that bikini), describing Marie Lloyd suffering domestic violence as: “She was one of the ruins that hubby knocked about a bit”, and he reports without comment some guys who work at the House of Commons complaining that the place has been “invaded” by women.

Some places he goes to are familiar (in writing if not in person); Royal Mail’s post train, the hidden Fleet & Westbourne rivers, the necropolis railway, several sewers. He writes a fifteen page advertorial for Berry Bros. and Rudd, presumably because they invited him to their port tasting, gratis. But other chapters are endlessly interesting, I had to keep pausing to relay interesting facts. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the royal palaces of Westminster and Whitehall, which detailed the gradual changeover from kings to ministers. The early rulers lived peripatetically in many residences around London and beyond, but they kept the palace at Westminster because Edward the Confessor was buried next door in his own massive mausoleum, Westminster Abbey. Kings going off to war would touch his corpse (or even remove bits of it) for luck. Most people know that the Victorian name for Big Ben was St Stephen's Tower, this is presumably because the chapel that king Eddie set up in Westminster, used for debates by early MPs, was dedicated to St Stephen.

[The Final Chapter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Low 2. This evokes the subterranean regions of the capital from the murky depths of the sewage system to the buried treasures of the centuries of inhabitation of this stretch of the Thames. Smith manages to overcme his anxiety of being below the surface to uncover an illuminating history of London's dark and distant past. He charts the fetid and pestilent nature of this city's past, from the horrific demise of Richard the Raker who fell into a cesspit in 1326 and drowned in excrement, to the 'Great Stink' of 1858 which drove Disraeli from the Houses of Parliament in pure disgust. Just a year earlier, Dr John Snow had claimed that contaminated water supplies lay behind the scourge of cholera, but before such a connection could be directly confirmed, 40,000 perished in a cholera outbreak during the 'Great Stink'. This loss of life sparked much needed change, with the Metropolitan Board of Works, under the leadership of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, ordered to solve the mounting risks caused by untreated sewage. Bazalgette, an architect who had designed many bridges, thoroughfares, and parks, who had previously reclaimed the Thames embankment, sought to end this health hazard by constructing a massive underground sewage system and diverting waste from entering the Thames in central London near the major populated areas. By the time he had completed it in 1875 he had revamped 1,300 miles of the sewage system and greatly enhanced the lifestyle and health of the capital's citizens. Unfortunately, such captivating passages become subsumed under the writer's ill-judged prose, while the content strays far from it's titular premise. Underwhelming.

[H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wealth of information here--there are many times where I felt (and methinks rightfully so) that I was being treated to some deeply-buried gems, secrets of which only a select few could know the true nature. Some chapters are as surprisingly naughty and funny as what Smith is unearthing for readers in a particular strata. One or two are extremely dry--an agonizingly detailed and technical chapter on a dam system is a violent break in pace and interest. It seemed a well-meaning tribute not to readers or the subject matter but to a guide who had done Smith a big favor in letting him tour a normally off-limits area, nevermind that it didn't turn out to be as worthwhile as rumored. The rumor-mongers are a community of London Underground enthusiasts and the chapter might have been dedicated to the purpose of appeasing/impressing them as well, a testy issue Smith does mention several times in the text (in more amusing chapters). Despite this major mistake and some minor detours of the blander kind, Underground London is a rich feast of an adventure, presenting wonderful stories and spaces and journeys in an entertaining, intimate manner studded with important historical moments and fabulous little anecdotes. I will definitely be revisiting this.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having been to London, I was familiar with some of the names so I could visualize while reading. Being American, some of the verbiage and history was lost to me, but the book was pleasurable and informative. I had to sometimes fight to keep my interest in some bits because of the writing style that I found too wordy. I think the book would have been just as informative if Mr. Smith had left several of his words down in those famous sewers and places underground. I am glad I read it....mgc

[Scarlett O.H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book for spending a quiet afternoon.
If you already read a lot about London there will not be many new facts.
I liked the writing style.

It is a bit like the underground series on history channel (I was a fan)

[Batsheva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prolix, enthusiastic & entertaining- the author would be most at home at a meeting of the Philolexian Society elaborating on his subterranean escapades.

[Lauren Lewsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not what I expected.
Journalist Stephen Smith has a fascination with the underground workings of London. From the Tube to the sewers. He pieces together his exploration of underground London with funny tales and colourful characters.
The cover, title, and description all point you in the wrong direction in regards to this book. I would class it as more of a quirky travel guide than anything historical.
While I was expecting a book focused on history and archaeology Underground London did not come as a disappointment to me. I am sure Smith's engaging writing had a lot to do with that.
My advice in approaching this book would be, if you are after a complete chronological history of London then this book probably isn't for you. But if you are the type of person who wants to discover something new with every page then I would definitely push this book upon you.

[Ruth Collier · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fairly interesting in places although it suffers a little from being 20 years old now.
When it was written it was probably a fairly unique book but now there's a lot more out there in the form of books, blogs, YouTube channels etc so a lot of the facts here might not be so surprising to readers as they once were.
There's humour but most of it was a bit glib for me. I think part of it was the author not being too respectful or honest with his sources. It may be a minor complaint and I understand that journalists sometimes have to be a bit sneaky, but it felt unnecessary to include in the book that certain people had told him things off-record and he was including them anyway.
Altogether not bad but I have the feeling there are better books on the subject.

[Erwin · Rating 1 out of 5]

So boring.

This should have been such an excellent book; combining history, london, and the dark places underneath. Unfortunately the writer was so dry that it was a slog. Every time it got interesting, the author immediately veered away into dull pop culture references, or dull explanations of why *he* found this all so interesting.

Don't bother.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amusing and fun in a totally unexpected way - honestly I normally hate these kind of books, but this one was interesting and amusing and just great. If you are interested in the oddities of London this is a book worth reading.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting from the opening page
Just wish it was longer

[Charles Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of interesting information told in a manner that wasn't too dry. You can't ask for much more than that out of a book that combines history with travel.

[Rick Chagouri-Brindle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this one! A fascinating insight into the historical depths of our capital city . . . sometimes smelly, often odd, but always interesting.

[Anna Williams · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn’t even finish the first two chapters. Dull.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned on page 14 of 366. I wanted to learn about London not the author.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic insight into the hidden world bellow London. The author documents his personal adventures in an informative, humorous fashion that keeps the book warm and fun.

[Molly Flores · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a dry read on an otherwise fascinating topic: underground structures throughout London.

[Simon Barney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting in bits but didn’t really hang together, could have been more interesting

[Mark waite · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read that unfortunately looses its way at times but enough fascinating facts to keep me turning the pages

[D Cox · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 25% very very dull and quite mixed up. No sense of organisation. Things that should be fascinating are told in a very dull way.

[Stephen Tubbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always entertaining thanks in no small measure to the quality of the narration.