London Under

The Secret History Beneath the Streets

De: Peter Ackroyd

Narrado por: Matthew Waterson

In this vividly descriptive short study, Peter Ackroyd tunnels down through the geological layers of London, meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness and excavating the lore and mythology beneath the surface.

There is a Bronze Age trackway below the Isle of Dogs, Anglo-Saxon graves rest under St. Pauls, and the monastery of Whitefriars lies beneath Fleet Street. To go under London is to penetrate history, and Ackroyd's book is filled with the stories unique to this underworld: the hydraulic device used to lower bodies into the catacombs in Kensal Green cemetery; the door in the plinth of the statue of Boadicea on Westminster Bridge that leads to a huge tunnel packed with cables for gas, water, and telephone; the sulphurous fumes on the Underground's Metropolitan Line.

Highly imaginative and delightfully entertaining, London Under is Ackroyd at his best.

©2011 Peter Ackroyd (P)2020 Tantor

Enjoyable listen, wish it was longer

I enjoyed the book, but I wish it were longer for the price/credit. I enjoyed the reader more as the book progressed.

A Brief but Interesting Meditation

This is a fine book but, in many ways, a poor candidate for an Audiobook. This is less a typical didactic nonfiction work (though it does provide some interesting information about London's history) than it is a poetic meditation on what lies beneath the cities many of us dwell in. The reader does an adequate job, but any audiobook performance of this type of work will inevitably fall flat, if only because a great deal of the meaning in each sentence is up to the interpretation of the individual reader. An audiobook narrator, by necessity, has to (lacking any better way to phrase it) keep talking; this is fine for most books, but for something like this, half of the interest lies in the pauses, in the pacing and in what goes unsaid. The best this audio can do is meet the listener halfway.

Overwrought twaddle

Ackroyd relentlessly drags myth and metaphor and other such twaddle about the underworld into what is otherwise a pretty informative narrative. It finally just got insufferable and I bailed on the book with about an hour left. Narrator was adequate, though.