Cover via Amazon
I love books, TV and film set in London, I sometimes wonder if I didn’t live in London any longer would I get the same kick? But that’s a question unlikely to be answered for a long time.
Underground London by Stephen Smith is a non-fiction account of one man’s quest to find out about underground London in an effort to quell his slight anxiety about going on the tube. Did I say that I also like all things underground to?
As you would expect in a book about underground London, there is a lot of stuff on sewers and the tube network, there’s also a lot of history and I have to admit that some of the stuff only had a tenuous link to being actually underground. But still, it’s a good book and I particularly loved the stuff about the sewers, the Thames Flood Barrier, the plague and the giant water ring main (where I got my requisite local kick as it turns out that it’s controlled from somewhere relatively near me and I had had no idea it was even there).
It’s getting on to being a little bit of an old book, sorry I can’t tell you the publication date without going online, as I listened to this one as an audiobook (read very well by Karen Cass, although it was a little disconcerting listening to an audiobook where the writer is very clearly male and it’s a female reading it) but anyway, I think the book was probably written sometime in the beginning of the last decade and I know that shouldn’t really matter but the references to who was in power at the time and the London 2012 bid did date it a little, although I suspect not much has actually changed underground in the time since it’s been published. But overall, it’s a good book.
