The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey

by Gillian Tindall

It is the largest building project in Europe today, buried deep beneath the city of London. The great scheme for Crossrail, offering high speed links across the capital, has been a dream on planners’ desks for decades, but construction is now well under way, with tunnelling and earth-shifting machines moving slowly but inexorably, like underground monsters, from separate directions to their final meeting point. As evidence of the line surfaces behind screens in the heart of London, spectators get to gaze down into immense holes where thousands of engineers are at work.

Focussing in on key Crossrail stations – Stepney, Whitechapel, Liverpool Street, Farringdon, Tottenham Court Road (alias St Giles in the Fields), and the route along Oxford Street (alias the Way to Oxford and also Tyburn) Gillian Tindall traces the route of the new line, including the thrilling archaeological obstacles it encounters, to reveal the city’s history through the events, buildings and lives of the Londoners who have witnessed change across the centuries. Crossrail is just the latest audacious scheme to have visited the ancient sites of London over hundreds of years – and Gillian Tindall is the perfect writer to describe this major transformation.

Genres: History, London, Nonfiction, Railways, Transport

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Gillian Tindall began her career as a prize-winning novelist. She has continued to publish fiction but has also staked out an impressive territory in idiosyncratic non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of place.

Her The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village which first appeared thirty years ago, has rarely been out of print; nor has Celestine: Voices from a French Village, published in the mid 1990s and translated into several languages, for which she was decorated by the French government.

Well known for the quality of her writing and the meticulous nature of her research, Gillian is a master of miniaturist history. She lives with her husband in London.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

Years ago, if walking north from Charing Cross I would generally go up St.Martin's Lane and then in to Monmouth Street, past the memorial from the Dutch Queen or maybe her government thanking Britain for the hospitality extended during the war, then on the right hand side of Monmouth street there was an undertakers, by convention undertakers don't display their coffins in the shop window, this one instead had a map of eighteenth century London in the window - a subtle Momento Mori bearing witness to various deceased fields and villages long since gobbled up by the greedy growing metropolis. Any how that undertaker's is gone now, replaced by a shop or probably a boutique selling expensive clothes, but the improbable Ships' chandler's is still there further up the road on the corner ideally situated if you happen to be wandering through central London in need of replacing the rigging on your boat. If those street names mean nothing to you then this book will very probably not interest you at all.

I picked up this book with the expectation that it would be a middle of the road, ok kind of book - so in Goodreads terms about 2.6 stars, and that is what it turned out to be. Hooray! Low expectations met!

The Crossrail project is the inspiration behind this book which rambles forwards and backwards from Tottenham Court Road to Farringdon, to Bishopsgate and Stepney. Tindall discusses the history and development of each of these parts of modern central London all of which in the near future will be the site of newly opened and functioning Crossrail/Elizabeth Line stations. This is a slightly curious project because the Crossrail project will run from Reading to Romford, so the book only focuses on the very central underground portion of the line, Paddington is hardly mentioned for the reason that apparently it hardly existed before the Great Western Terminus was built there. Tindall tells us that she will not write about Stepney because she could write a book about it by itself - but then she writes about it anyway. She draws heavily on the Elizabethan John Stow and other antiquarian writers to create pictures of London life as far back as the Middle ages - when Moorfields, for instance, was a marshy field rich with bird life, another nice point was that condemned persons being taken to Tyburn "going west", Tindall tells us, was a euphemism for death, would stop at the church of St.Giles where they had the right of receiving a bowl of ale other drinks are available, but not to the condemned in old London This is all nice and mildly interesting. Though I was regularly puzzled when she referred to Centrepoint as a skyscraper - but perhaps the sky is unusually low there.

An enjoyable theme running through the book is how the Dukes of Bedford and Grosvenor who owned much of central London in the nineteenth century prevented the railway companies from building their Termini on their lands and so left a line of stations north of the Euston Road and others out to the east. west and south. Planners since then have tried, she says to link those stations and that Crossrail is the latest iteration of such dreams though if so one would have expected the line to run in radically different directions, a big X under central London maybe rather than just from Paddington to Liverpool Street, anyway I nit pick.

The second half of the last chapter of the book was the most interesting part to my mind, this dealt with the actual construction of Crossrail and the establishment and maintenance of the literary image of London as a particularly foggy, dirty, loud, and seedy city, good marketing I think, you need to have a brand and tourism numbers suggest that the prospect of Dickensian poverty as expanded upon by George Orwell, Graham Greene, J.B. Priestley, Patrick Hamilton, George Gissing and so on (pp261-3) is extremely attractive.

This is a book ideally for the few millions who live or have lived or you often have been in and around St.Giles, Farringdon, or Stepney and the areas inbetween Tindell points out that in the children's rhyme "Oranges and Lemons" the churches bells are in pairs, one in the centre of London paired with one from the surrounding district, though with civic sprawl all the churches named are now well within the city , people with an obsessive or professional interest in Dickensian London may also find bits of this book of interest.

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfectly enjoyable, but intensely forgettable (in similar fashion to the one about the house by the Thames - my only memory of which now is that a film actor lived there in the thirties).

The Crossrail dimension is a little bit of an excuse, but it's a nice way of hanging together more detail from a section of the city. I can listen to Gillian Tindall for hours, but I'm discovering that with 'microhistory', unless we're talking about a street or a building that's more or less in a place that's recognisably still there, along a street pattern that's more or less still there (and that I know very well), it can become all a bit of a yawn.

I know the St Giles area well, so that works. The downturn in the fortunes of Stepney is pretty interesting - onetime Hampstead turned clear-it-away slum. The timeless sensationalisation of plague pits and East End bad 'uns is still with us. My favourite section was actually where Tindall was talking about her own entry into that world - discovering the Sephardi cemetery as a child.

Where I struggle is with the domestic detail. Lady Eustace Frott lived here; the minutes of the parish recording that the gate of the church needed repairing; they repaired it, but then it was knocked down. They built another. Or another denomination did. Then there was a spital. Blake mentioned it (or maybe he meant that other spital). Then there wasn't a spital. Then the Earl de Bovril - onetime favourite of Elizabeth - was given it, then gave it to the second cousin of Thomas Cromwell. Then they cut his head off. Then they cut the head of the man who cut his head off. The head then showed up in Plymouth, attached to a prosperous vintner who then drowned in Calcutta. In his honour they built a gateway with a statue on it. Someone cut the head off that too. Then the post war council turned it into a park. It gets a bit exhausting. Like poring over an Ordnance Survey map - you lose yourself in it.

Enjoyable, but tiring. Like London, see.

[Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally a good read with some interesting and enjoyable vignettes of London history. Rather a lot about the village of St Giles and sundry graveyards, while there is not enough flesh on the bones of other parts. It feels to me like a slightly lumpy mixture of archaeology, architecture and social history.

[Susan Grimshaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hoped for more details of what had actually been excavated. However it was quite interesting to read about life in London in previous times although there was such a lot about certain areas like St. Giles which felt rather like TMI.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scrapped three stars as some of the stuff was interesting. However jumped around too much so I seldom felt like I knew where or when was being discussed.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

7/10 an interesting read with many of the streets mentioned being very familiar to me on my trots around London.

[Gerard Hogan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting rather than gripping book which uses Crossrail to talk about little pockets of the city, specifically St Giles and Stepney. For anyone with even a passing interest in London history.

[Ipswichblade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this book albeit it jumped around a bit from area to area

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting, and fun look at London through the centuries - through the lens of the (then) in-building Elizabeth Line. I wish there was an interactive map on-line that went along with this book, that helped orient the reader to the geographic places and eras which overlap so elegantly throughout the course of the book. If I knew anything about kml files and computers...maybe I'd do it myself. Either way, this is enjoyable and worth the read!

[Jeremy Jl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look at the history of London

[Kate]

Economist review

[Robert Meijer · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a nice read about the history of some of the places the crossrail is going through. Some of the place described where places i am not familiar with a were of lesser interest to me.

[Sue Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting - a book to dip into.