look out! it's coming after you!

After writing about how we're living surrounded by the past, I happened to stumble on this review - by Peter Ackroyd - of a book called London: City of Disappearances, edited by Iain Sinclair. It amused me, I have to say. Its basic premise can be summed up in this paragraph:

"So the past is rarely visible in London. The city devours its former incarnations, leaving not a wrack or wraith behind. It buries its dead, and forgets where they lie. That is the source of its strength and its power. The living will in any case soon enough pass into darkness. The city itself will always rise again. It will be renewed when those who read these words have utterly disappeared and been forgotten."

...and it goes on - and on - and on! Are we actually seeing it? - because I don't think so! Ackroyd must have found the book pretty exciting, because the review reads more like a Gothic confection, piling macabre on macabre, than like the Times Online website. And, though it's hard to tell from his description what the book is actually like, the review does make a good pre-Halloween read.

Of course, I've always been fascinated by the "under London" idea - all the old sewers and rivers and plague pits, to say nothing of the Post Office tunnels. For example, there's a building site at the end of Essex Road, just as you get to Islington Green, which was held up for years because, when they dug up the foundation of the previous building, they came upon a plague pit - now, who wouldn't be interested in that? I had to look every time I went past on the bus (and I also know where a few more are). But it does seem to me to be evidence that the past stays with us, rather than that it disappears. The review smacks of fanciful balderdash - a phrase our precursers might have used. So I confess I had to laugh when I got to this bit, much as I love the previous Londoners:

"And there are the endless dead who, if they returned from their graves beneath the London soil, would far outnumber the living. It is a city of revenants built upon the dead, their bones part of the fabric."

Maybe Peter Ackroyd's had too many Halloween sweets?