From the author of the bestselling London: The Biography a poetic & powerful urban history of life & legend beneath London. This is a wonderful atmospheric historical imaginative oozing little study of verything that goes on under London from original springs & streams & Roman amphitheatres to Victorian sewers & gang hide-outs. The depth below is hot much warmer than the surface & this book tunnels down through the geological layers meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness real & fictional -- rats & eels monsters & ghosts. There is a bronze-age trackway under the Isle of Dogs Wren found Anglo-Saxon graves under St Pauls & the monastery of Whitefriars lies beneath Fleet Street. In Kensal Green cemetery there was a hydraulic device to lower bodies into the catacombs below -- Welcome to the lower depths." A door in the plinth of statue of Boadicea on Westminster Bridge leads to a huge tunnel packed with cables -- gas water telephone. When the Metropolitan Line was opened in 1864 the guards asked for permission to grow beards to protect themselves against the sulphurous fumes & called their engines by the names of tyrants -- Czar Kaiser Mogul -- & even Pluto god of the underworld. Going under London is to penetrate history to enter a hidden world. " The vastness of the space a second earth " writes Peter Ackroyd "elicits sensations of wonder & of terror. It partakes of myth & dream in equal measure.""