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London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets
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Author
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Peter Ackroyd.
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Publisher
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Anchor
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Format
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paperback
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ISBN
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9780307473783
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Pages/Publication Date
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228/2012
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Daedalus Item Code
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29361
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This item is not available.
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Description
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The Whitbread Award–winning biographer of T.S. Eliot and William Shakespeare, as well as the River Thames and London itself, Peter Ackroyd here digs deep into London's underside to offer this intriguing alternative portrait of the city. London Under is an atmospheric, imaginative, at times oozing short study of everything that goes on under the capital, from original springs and streams to Roman amphitheaters, from Victorian sewers and gang hideouts to modern tube stations. The depths below are hot—warmer than the surface—and this book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting rats and eels, monsters and ghosts, and other real and fictional creatures that dwell in darkness. 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. 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." "A treasure of information and anecdote about one of the world's great cities, a book to be taken up again and again for the pleasures that lie within."—Seattle Times
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