WORDVIEW

Of lows & highs

A look at travel and culture through the world of words.

 

London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets

by Peter Ackroyd
# Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Nan A. Talese (November 2011)

 

The prolific Peter Ackroyd, having written histories and fictions covering every square inch of London above ground (London: The Biography, Thames: The Biography, The Great Fire of London, The Lambs of London), has turned his attention to the world below, dashing off another wonderful read called London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets.

He acknowledges as much: having “explored the city above the surface ... I wish to descend and explore its depths, which are no less bewildering and exhilarating.” You sense immediately the strength of Ackroyd’s engagement with this underground quest and his uncanny sensitivity to the urban riches below: “Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers.”

London Under is a wonderful, atmospheric, imagina­tive, oozing short study of everything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheatres to Victorian sewers, gang hideouts, and modern tube stations. The depths below are hot, warmer than the surface, and this book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting the creatures, real and fictional, that dwell in darkness—rats and eels, mon­sters and ghosts. When the Underground’s Metropolitan Line was opened in 1864, the guards asked for permission to grow beards to protect themselves against the sulphurous fumes, and named their engines after tyrants—Czar, Kaiser, Mogul—and even Pluto, god of the underworld.
To go under London is to penetrate history, to enter a hid­den world. 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.” With characteristic obsession and stellar accompany-ing images, the book does home in on the breathing vitality of London’s underworld—”If you put your ear close to it, you can still hear the sound of the river pulsing underneath—and is a “votive offering to the gods who lie beneath London.”

 

High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky

by Joshua David & Robert Hammond
# Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 2011)

 

The High Line, a new park atop an elevated rail structure on Manhattan’s West Side, is among the most innovative urban reclamation projects in memory. The story of how it came to be is a remarkable one: two young citizens with no prior experience in planning and development collaborated with their neighbours, elected officials, artists, local business owners, and leaders of burgeoning movements in horticulture and landscape architecture to create a park celebrated worldwide as a model for creatively designed, socially vibrant, ecologically sound public space.

Joshua David and Robert Hammond met in 1999 at a community board meeting to consider the fate of the High Line. Built in the 1930s, it carried freight trains to the West Side when the area was defined by factories and warehouses. But when trains were replaced by truck transport, the High Line became obsolete. By century’s end it was a rusty, forbidding ruin. Plants grew between the tracks, giving it a wild and striking beauty.

David and Hammond loved the ruin and saw in it an opportunity to create a new way to experience their city. Over ten years, they did so. In this candid and inspiring book— lavishly illustrated—they tell how they relied on skill, luck, and good timing: a crucial court ruling, an inspiring design contest, the enthusiasm of Mayor Bloomberg, the concern for urban planning issues following 9/11. Now the High Line—a half-mile expanse of plants, paths, staircases, and framed vistas—runs through a transformed West Side and reminds us that extraordinary things are possible when creative people work together for the common good. n.