Peter Ackroyd: London - The Biography

Chatto & Windus

$85

Review: Margie Thomson*

The definite article is an odd component of this book's title: it implies something absolute, exact, final. And yet Ackroyd, in one of the most interesting chapters ("Maps and Antiquarians") of this endlessly fascinating book, describes the historic difficulty of either mapping the enormous and changing city of London, or of understanding it in terms of one central image.

London is not a graceful city. It is tortuous, inexact and oppressive, Ackroyd writes. One of the thousands of Londoners who make an appearance in the pages of this teeming work, Sir Walter Besant, the founder of the People's Palace, remarked on his deathbed: "I've been walking about London for the last 30 years, and I find something fresh in it every day." This, Ackroyd agrees, is an observation which could be confirmed by almost any admirer of London.

Phyllis Pearsall, originator of the A to Z, compiled the first edition in the mid-1930s by rising at 5 am and walking for 45km each day. She covered 4828km of streets and completed 23,000 entries which she kept in shoeboxes beneath her bed before eventually delivering it in a wheelbarrow to her publisher. By the time of her death in 1996, the number of London streets had risen to around 50,000.

Of her cartographic predecessors, John Roque in 1783 was almost bankrupted by the task of mapping the city. Another, Richard Horwood, produced at the end of the 18th century the largest map printed in England. It was 8.7 sq m and he died soon afterwards. The persistent and steady growth of London, in a sense, had killed its map-maker, Ackroyd notes.

This is why maps of London, as with books about it, have most often been plotted in terms of theme or subject: there have been cab-fare maps, maps of railways, trams and buses, maps of street improvements, maps which mark each public house with a red spot, and maps displaying the incidence of death by cholera.

It is indeed a city of maps, as Ackroyd says, one laid upon another like an historical palimpsest.

The dimensions of London and the task facing any biographer of this edifice of clay, stone, flesh and time are mind-boggling. In 1877, in a characteristically grand example of Victorian engineering, a well was sunk at the southern end of Tottenham Court Rd. Down 349m it went, through millions of years, through the Devonian, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. It dug through 198m of chalk, on which sits the thick London clay, in turn covered by gravel and brick earth, which for almost 2000 years have been employed to build the houses and public buildings of London. It is almost as if the city raised itself from its primeval origin, creating a human settlement from the senseless material of past time, Ackroyd says.

A mammoth was uncovered in 1690 beside what is now Kings Cross; skeletons of sharks in the East End, the skull of a wolf in Cheapside and crocodiles in the clay of Islington.

On top of the clay in which lies evidence of the primeval past are the leavings, if one were to excavate, of human settlement from at least 15,000 years ago. There is a certain pleasure to be derived from the prospect of human settlement in areas where, many thousands of years later, streets would be laid out and houses erected, Ackroyd says.

Today's city stands atop the detritus of both history and physical remains literally upon the rubbish and waste of the past, as Ackroyd says. Every now and then, something of that physical past is revealed, for instance in 1597 it was discovered that 30 tenements and 12 cottages had been erected upon a great dump of public refuse; parts of the Roman London Wall were uncovered by Hitler's bombs.

To write a biography of a city is to regard it as having some kind of human shape with its own laws of life and growth. Some of Ackroyd's writing is thus impressionistic and anthropomorphic. London itself becomes a dark accomplice to murder, is instinctively egalitarian. It celebrates its destiny, is both human and inhuman and turns all to commerce. It has its own momentum which defies rational explanation.

Ordinary human existence seems uninteresting or unimportant in this place where everything is colossal ... Against the magnitude of stone, the city dwellers are like wraiths, replacing others and in turn to be replaced. It is a function of London's size, and of its age, that all of its citizens seem merely its temporary inhabitants.

How to approach such a subject as London, the giant immortal octopus? While he begins in primeval ooze, Ackroyd quickly abandons all attempts at the usual kind of chronology. The themes and characteristics of London are allowed to unfold in their own way - chapters on crime and punishment, pestilence and flame, voracious London, violent London, London's outcasts ... every possible manifestation seems represented here, each illuminating the other.

This book has been described as the culmination of Ackroyd's life work, and it is an extraordinary, seemingly exhaustive achievement. You can try to skim it, but every one of its 800-odd pages is set with a snare. It seems mean to quibble about a mere part of speech, yet one knows no biography is absolute and that London, that historical palimpsest, will without doubt be written many times more.

* Margie Thomson is the Herald deputy books editor.