London Through Time From An Oil Platform With One Weak Leg.

Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London …I’ll show you something that will make you change your mind - (Streets Of London – Ralph McTell)

There is a thing I always do whenever I am in London, and that is to get off the tube at Piccadilly Circus and take the tube exit near Eros from which I exit with Eros being behind me; as I ascend the stairs and then once I am on the top of the stairs on the street, spin around and soak it all up in one go …the lights, the billboards, the life, the red buses, the crowd, the theatres, the musicals, the agent stalls… everything…! Absolutely Magic!

This love affair with the city of London started out with a childhood passion for old Victorian London starting quite predictably from Jack The Ripper, Oliver Twist, My Fair Lady and Sherlock Holmes. So I was actually searching for a book about the history of London, something that could tell me how London evolved as a city to the darkly secretive yet beautiful cosmopolitan metropolis it is today.
This brings me to the book I got which is London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.
What’s different and surprisingly extraordinary about this book is that Peter Ackroyd does the history in a unique way. He looks at London as being a living person … so each chapter instead of examining the various ages specifically, looks into each of its traits through time like for example The Accent, The Noise, The Silence, The Theatre, The Signposts, The Crowd, The Mob, The Lights, The Smells, The Pubs, The Sex, The Gambling… (i.e its vices …drinking , gambling and prostitution),The Food, The Mornings, The Nights, The Fog, The Violence, The Death , The Rebirth after the War…
So Much so that along with the words and the illustrations you can actually feel what he has written and you can actually smell the coal fires, the horse dung, the sewers, the poverty, the bakeries, the Life… taste the ales, the roast beef, the veal, the fish ‘n’ chips, the black pudding…and hear the church bells, the market vendors, the newsboys, the watchmen announcing the time at daybreak, the carriages, the drunks, the squeaking of the shop signs blowing in the wind…of London. Although drenched in history, the book doesn’t come across like a history textbook, but is very light, generalised and narrative. Weaving together folktales, urban legends, history, quotes from essays and selected novels of their time (some worth mentioning are Dickens, Defoe and Thackeray) and news archives, Peter Ackroyd makes his mammoth book of London an energetic, informative, exciting, captivating and thoroughly enjoyable read.

While browsing through the illustrations in the book, I came across a sketch of Victorian London which really seemed to capture the mood perfectly, it was a sketch by a French artist Gustav Doré who had visited London in the late nineteenth century and published a book called London, A Pilgrimage in 1872 which now available as Dore’s London. Dore’s has captured some fantastic everyday characters, locations and events of London, like the baked potato vendor, the Cockney flower girl, the men working on the ships at the docks, thieves gambling in a shed by candlelight, a homeless family sleeping under the gas street light on a bridge, the steamboats along the Thames, the ‘traffic’ jam of that time…which shows a street packed with carriages, sellers, beggars and commuters, the views from the overhead steam trains and boat races.
The lighting expressed in his sketching seems to bring the characters to life with all the filth, the soot, the rags and the chaos in an almost gothic, shadowy yet animated way. With this book as a companion to the Peter Ackroyd book, I was able to put vivid pictures to the words and it made my journey through London an absolutely enchanting experience. (although I was reading it sitting in a cabin on an oil platform with one weak leg in the middle of the North Sea and hoping that the corrosion will hold up for another 5 days!).