London a biography
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It’s one of the greatest books ever written about the capital. Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography () is a sprawling tome that explores our city’s past through themed chapters. I owe this book a great debt. It first set me off on what became a lifelong obsession with the city. As it approaches its quarter-century, I’ve re-read the whole thing to see how it’s aged with time.
***And I’ve also mapped it.***
Yup, every single street, building, station, park and “noisome alley” that Ackroyd mentions within the ~ pages. I’m not even sure why. It’s just an urge with me. But the results, I hope, will be of interest to those who also adore the book.
Welcome to the most intensely geeky edition yet of Londonist: Time Machine…
But first, two announcements…
📣📣 Thanks everyone for all your support and lovely comments. We’ve been blown away by how many people read this newsletter each week. We’re now eight months old, and it’s been an absolute blast writing these features and
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London: The Biography
Peter Ackroyd
Read April-October
The genre of writing a person's life has been developed well; we call the result a biography (or sometimes a hagiography, depending on the author's viewpoint). The lives of cities are at least as rich, extend much longer, and go through more transformations than the average biographical subject, but there is no specific genre of their history narrower than the general medium of urban studies. Ackroyd, like the city he describes, does not bend; he co-opts. To him, London is a living, breathing, smelling entity, and it is that character's story he has written. And how!
I began reading this book about ten days before I visited London in May, This would be the perfect preparation, I thought. But fifty pages in, I was horribly bogged down, neither enjoying myself nor even making much sense of what I was reading. I abandoned the book.
A month later, when I returned from England, I tried the book again. At this point I had
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London: The Biography
"London is perhaps the most important study of the city ever written, and confirms Ackroyd's status as what one critic has called "our age's greatest London imagination."
Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but this new work fryst vatten his definitive account of the city. For Ackroyd, London fryst vatten a living organism, with its own laws of growth and change, thus the subtitle "A Biography (as opposed to "A History). The book differs too, from histories, in the range and diversity of its contents. Ackroyd portrays London from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in both epochs, but this is not a simple chronological record. There are chapters on the history of silence and the history of light, the history of childhood and the history of suicide, the history of Cockney speech and the history of drink.
"London fryst vatten fully comprehensive, animated bygd Ackroyd's concern for the close