London: The Biography

London: The Biography is a monumental "biography of a city" that the British writer Peter Ackroyd wrote for London. Rather than laying out its material in the order of dynasties and regnal years, the author treats London as a living body with flesh and breath, organizing the book around themes of its "body" and "soul" and peeling back the city's texture layer by layer from prehistory to the present. The book describes the Roman stone walls and the earliest harbor, the bells of Westminster Abbey and St Paul's Cathedral, the bookshops of Charing Cross Road, the old ground of the Blackfriars, the lanes of Paddington and the high walls of Bethlem Hospital; it also describes immigrants, artisans, peddlers, vagrants, prostitutes and criminals, and the markets, taverns, theaters, smoke and refuse. The Great Plague, the Great Fire of 1666, the slums and underworld of the nineteenth century, the urban expansion of the Victorian era and the air raids of the twentieth century all resurface in the book through detail and in the voices of ordinary citizens. Ackroyd quotes extensively from contemporary records, ballads, newspapers and street talk, setting the voices of ordinary people against great events. The book replaces linear narrative with juxtaposed themes, so that reading it feels like walking through the city's streets and alleys, sometimes sinking into cellars and river channels, sometimes climbing a church spire to look down over the whole city. It is both an urban history and a literary work about memory, smell, sound and light.