Read it in Books:London - The Biography.

"The byways of the city resemble thin veins and its parks are like lungs. In the mist and rain of an urban autumn, the shining stones and cobbles of the older thoroughfares look as if they are bleeding. When William Harvey, practising as a surgeon in St Bartholomew's Hospital, walked through the streets he noticed that the hoses of the fire engines spouted water like blood from a cut artery". - Peter Ackroyd, London - The Biography.

I'd set myself a challenge to read Peter Ackroyd's biography, not history, of London in full one chapter a day (it was a challenge I fell short of but I got there in the end). It seemed to be the ultimate complement to mine and Shep's London LOOP project and an invaluable source of information for my ongoing series of London architectural and historical walks, but would I enjoy it?

With chapter titles like 'Where is the cheese of Thames Street?', 'I met a man who wasn't there', 'The stinking pile', and 'He shuld neuer trobell the parish no more', not to mention a digression into the popularity of the words 'fucking' and 'cunts' among Londoners, it certainly appeared there was a strong chance I would.

Ackroyd makes clear in his opening gambit, 'The City As Body', that he is "not a Virgil prepared to guide aspiring Dantes around a defined and circular kingdom" but just "one stumbling Londoner who wishes to lead others in the directions" that he has "pursued over a lifetime". London can't have one history, one biography. It's too vast (so vast that Robert Southey observed, not incorrectly, that "they who live at one end know little or nothing of the other"). There are eight million stories in the city. These are just some of them.

But what stories they are. In the first section, 'The Sea', alone, Ackroyd rhapsodises about the projecting fossils of sea urchins and starfish embedded in the equestrian statue of Charles I on the traffic island near Charing Cross which has historically been used to define the very centre of London, the seaweed in the marble of Waterloo station, the disputed etymology of the word London itself, and the skeletons of sharks found in the East End, crocodiles (Islington), a wolf in Cheapside, and even a mammoth in King's Cross.

London may sometimes feel like a human zoo but it's long been home to numerous and varied animals. Think of the pigeons, parakeets, waterfowl, squirrels, deer of Bushy Park, and the urban foxes. Not to mention all the cows and pigs that were marched to their slaughter in Smithfield, the bears that were baited on Bankside, the monkeys that entertained the masses at Bartholomew Fair, or the rats that bought the deadly bubonic plague with them which killed an estimated 100,000 people, a quarter of London's then population, in the 17th century. Horse testicles were smoked and used as drugs.

These critters, like us humans, would have gone about their business on roads with names as evocative, or plain strange, as Bevis Marks, St Mary Axe, Grotto Passage, Old Jewry, Pope's Head Alley, Amen Court, Knightrider Street, Prudent Passage, Cock Lane, Gropecuntlane (both known for prostitution), and Paegantmaster Court. The names of churches, too, reverberate through the centuries. All Hallows-on-the-Wall, St Martin's Ludgate, St Clement Danes , St James Garlickhythe, St Andrew Undershaft, and St Alban the Martyr. Then there are the many bridges of London. From the wooden Roman crossing that was later replaced by the stone London Bridge, now adorned with the city's totemic red and silver dragons (but minus the houses and shops that were once resident upon its flanks), and on to Waterloo Bridge (which Dickens paid a toll-keeper a halfpenny to cross), and Westminster Bridge:- "opened in 1750 to the accompaniment of trumpets and kettledrums". London is its architecture and its messy unplanned sprawl as much as it is the people that live, love, and work there.

The chapter on maps, 'Maps and antiquarians', covers a 16c map, believed to have been commissioned by Queen Mary I, that was so detailed it included dog kennels and the scales of Leadenhall Market (unsurprisingly, in the circumstances, it was eight foot wide), the great pre-fire panoramas of Wenceslaus Hollar and Anthony van den Wyngaerde, and, of course, the history of the map of the London Underground and Phyllis Pearsall's simple but revolutionary A-Z. Mary I's map was bested several times over by Richard Horwood's which was ninety-four square feet in size leading one to wonder if anyone ever proposed making an actual size map of London. Is London a map? If it is it's an ever changing one and the problems with these epic projects was always that these maps, and the guide books that came in their wake, were outdated by the time they were completed. London simply moves too fast.

Correctly for a city that millions call home, millions more work in, and yet further millions choose to visit the book's cast list is wide and varied. Poets like Shelley, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Milton, Dryden, Pope, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, Verlaine, W.H.Auden, Heine, Mallarme, Spenser, and even Ovid rub shoulders with Julius Caesar, Lenin, William the Conqueror, William Rufus, Boudicca, Alfred, Elizabeth I (like Teresa May more than four hundred years after her, demanding the deportation of 'blackamoores'), George III & IV, Henrys I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII (the full set), Dick Whittington, Nell Gwynne, the Venerable Bede, Catherine of Aragon, the Duke of Wellington, Karl Marx, Sweyn Forkbeard, Cnut, Oswald Mosley, Mithras, Hitler, Thomas a Becket, Edward the Confessor, Tacitus, Thoth, Brutus, John Sessions, Casanova, Sylvia Pankhurst, Tubby Isaacs, Stanley Green (Oxford Street's 'Less Passion from Less Protein' man, and the twins Gog and Magog.

Writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer, George Orwell, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, D.H.Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, William Makepeace Thackeray, Virginia Woolf, Thomas More, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Washington Irving, Henry James, Michael Moorcock, Iris Murdoch, Arthur Machen, Joseph Conrad, John Wycliffe, Thomas Malory, Iain Sinclair, Italo Calvino, and Geoffrey of Monmouth rub imaginary shoulders with architects like Christopher Wren, Inigo Jones, Nicholas Hawksmoor John Nash, John Soane, and George Dance the Younger while painters such as JMW Turner, William Hogarth, Vincent van Gogh, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, Joshua Reynolds, Canaletto, John Constable, Henry Moore, Thomas Rowlandson, Piranesi, Gustave Dore, Theodore Gericault, Walter Sickert, Rachel Whiteread, and Gilbert and George capture the scene. Even God crops up. Well he is omnipresent.

Londoners travel from as far afield as the destroyed city of Troy in Asia Minor, Constantinople, ancient Rome, and the Celtic lands. They're joined, over the centuries, by Germanic troops and Danes (both invading forces) as well as Icelandic poets, merchants from Rouen and Liege, brewers from the Low Countries, 'Moors', Greek pilgrims, Venetian chaplains, Viennese professors, Oriental students, Flemings, Hanseatics, "Montserratians in Hackney", "Dominicans in Paddington", "Grenadians in Hammersmith", "Jamaicans in Stockwell" (in one very timely pair of sentences Ackroyd states that "those who attacked immigrants were in effect attacking the business ethic which required the constant influx of new trade and new labour. That attack did not succeed; it never has") , and, of course, people from elsewhere in the UK, "Cornwall to Cumberland" our author has it.

Bakers came from Scotland, labourers from Ireland, cobblers from Northampton, cheesemongers from Hampshire, and dairymen and milk-maids from Wales. Even the materials that London is built with come from all over. The Caen stone of the White Tower was mined in Normandy and Cleopatra's Needle had stood in Heliopolis in Egypt for 1,600 years before making its journey north. The food, too, came from France, Italy, Spain, China, and Russia between the wars and then after, as we all know, India, Turkey, Japan, Greece, Brazil, Ethiopia, and almost any country you could care to mention.

All to the soundtrack of Mozart playing the harpsichord in Spring Gardens, Handel's Water Music in Vauxhall, Indian drummers, German bands, and, ultimately, the rather conservative buskers who serenade us in the liminal spaces of tube station corridors and underpasses. Music (and noise) echoes down the alleys and lanes, and centuries, of the capital. Hector Berlioz, while visiting, claimed no city in the world was consumed so much by music.

Music can elevate the soul but it can, hopefully, also give way to lust. So, it's appropriate that musical and lustful London should be damned by so many. A city, according to the monk Richard of Devizes, of "pretty boys, effeminates, pederasts" who were joined, over the centuries by quacks, belly-dancers, sorceresses, extortioners, night-wanderers, pornographers, strumpets, sodomites, thieves, magicians, mountebanks, and mimes. A city of riots, massacres, stinking fish, bad oysters, xenophobia, dust, mud, soot, slime, smut, gobbing, prostitution, harlots, vagrancy, excrement, "people looking out of upper windows", and, of course, a general drunkenness that often resulted in violence or fatal accidents.

Death comes in many guises. Jack the Ripper prowls Whitechapel, Joe Orton is bludgeoned to death by his lover Kenneth Halliwell in Islington, heads are opened with swords, legs chopped off with axes, a builder is stabbed in the heart, a man is hanged for "tampering with the royal seal", a 'childe' has his or her 'limbes' 'bitte' off by a dog or cat (which is uncertain), 'Tiddy Doll' plunges through a crack in the ice at the Frost Fair and drowns, a ventriloquist named 'Talking Smith' uses his skills to slay an innocent viol di gamba player in Clerkenwell, unwashed children die lingering deaths with cancerous 'sooty warts' on their scrota, and one poor unnamed lady falls "into a tub of hot mash". Liquor with that?

PC Blakelock was decapitated by an angry mob during the Broadwater Farm riots as recently as 1985. The Gordon Riots of 1780 saw 285 people shot dead. Public hangings of murderers could draw crowds of over forty thousand spectators and then, with a flourish for showmanship and brutality that ISIS would later steal, heads of rebels and traitors were displayed on London Bridge. They'd boil the heads first though. They weren't animals.

Not all London punishments were so brutal. Rogue traders could be forced to ride backwards on a horse wearing a fool's cap, those who'd sold stale slices of cooked conger could look forward to an hour in the pillory being showered with excrement, a priest caught in flagrante delicto was paraded through the streets with his breeches down, prostitutes and pickpockets were ducked, and cuckolded husbands were forced to listen to scornful music made from tin cans, kettles, and marrow bones. Oftentimes 'violent delights' were carried out for pure pleasure. Ackroyd writes about cock-fights and boar-fights, the baiting of bears, bulls, and dogs and relays 17c tales of blind and chained bears being whipped or packs of frenzied dogs being forced to attack horses. For some cruel and bizarre reason, there was a period when it became the height of entertainment to madden bears by placing peas in their ears!

It wasn't just innocent animals who were punished. Blameless humans got it too. 'Old Simon' lived with his dog under a staircase in a ruined house, beggars starve to death, and we've all seen the people whose entire worldly belongings amount to a few bags and cadge in piss stained subways in all weathers. London can be a brutal place when you're poor. Not only may you lose the roof over your head, the shirt on your back, and, eventually, your life (Rosamond's Pond near St.James's Park was as popular a suicide spot as the Archway Bridge is now) but as a poor Londoner you may become a stock character in a neo-Gothic novel, your life wasted but not a waste as your misfortune is utilised to instruct, and improve, others.

Dickens strolled St Giles with policemen to inspect the degradation and ensure the lurid descriptions in his books rung true, Henry Fielding bemoaned that the price of a bed for the night encouraged men and women "to lie together". The odours of booze and sex intermingled in the knotty warren of streets in St Giles or The Rookeries that were eventually pulled down to create New Oxford Street, a thoroughfare Ackroyd correctly derides as one of the most soulless in the whole of the Great Wen. As anyone who's ever been depressed or penurious will know sex and the drink are often the only two things that can lift, albeit temporarily, the gloom. The burden of humanity is sometimes so cumbersome it takes these transformative experiences to be rid of it. Some Irish immigrants felt that London, and The Rookeries (a slum now pulled down and replaced by Covent Garden) in particular, was simply the last staging post on the road to Hell.

Were the likes of Hogarth and Fielding punching down, blaming squalor on Irish immigrants or the vices of the 'lower orders' instead of looking at the hierarchical structures and capitalist imperatives that not only allowed this to happen but needed this to happen and, to bring us to the present day, not only still allow this to happen but still need this to happen?

It's no wonder some chose to make the ultimate sacrifice. People jump to their deaths from the Whispering Gallery of St.Paul's or the Monument, they drown themselves in the rivers, canals, and even the ponds of London's parks, and they were observed by a five year old Daniel Defoe jumping out of windows following the Great Fire. London was the suicide capital of Europe and it was put down to a variety of reasons. The fog, the bad winter weather, the bad wine, eating too much beef, the ghost of Richard the Third, and the theory that the English are "a very sad race". Dostoevsky observed that even "in the midst of gaiety" a Londoner would remain full of gloom.

Full of insanity too. A 1970s psychiatric survey observed that depressive illness was three times higher in the East End than in the rest of the country, schizophrenia was common, and as early as the fourteenth century St Mary of Bethlem had begun to care for the mentally unwell, giving us the word 'bedlam'. Thomas More went so far as to wonder if London wasn't, perhaps, one gigantic lunatic asylum. Certainly the 'madhouses' became tourist attractions and foreign travellers would flock to them. The amusement these 'lunaticks' provided visitors was matched with the expedient way they served the city by showing how lunacy was managed and restrained. Prostitutes would wait outside the hospital gates, believing lustfulness to be excited by the antics of the mad!

A star of the book is Bacchus. In 1730, Thomas Brown noted that "to see the Number of Taverns, Alehouses etc. he would imagine Bacchus the only God that is worshipp'd there". We learn that as early as the thirteenth century, London was already notorious for "the immoderate drinking of the foolish", some speculated it was a place where one must get drunk in order to survive, Dostoevsky observed "everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility", and Samuel Johnson declared "a man is never happy in the moment unless he is drunk". Londoners drank ales brown and pale, beer, porter, stout, wines of Spain, Portugal, and Germany, stingo, and, of course, gin.

Samuel Pepys spoke to a lady who could down a pint and a half of white wine in one swig and one ale drinker reported, three months into a bender, that he could no longer raise the glass to his lips so bowed down to sup it up. Like a cat. A pissed cat. But the gin drinkers were worse still. One Judith Defour strangled her two year old daughter, sold her clothes, and spent the proceeds in one of London's 17,000 'geneva shops'. Only one hundred years before people had been worried that Londoners were drinking too much tea! Despite all this obvious horror, it's still hard not to be amused when Ackroyd runs through a list of names for drunkards and drunkenness that includes 'piss-artists' and 'piss-heads' who are 'off their tits', 'rat-arsed', 'shit-faced', and 'arse-holed'. Even 'up the Monument' was a euphemism for being sozzled.

From where you could enjoy panoramic views of the book's two leading characters. London itself and the mighty river Thames that flows through it cutting it into crude halves now bridged and tunneled for easy access but once the heart of the city and the reason for its success. The head of a statue of Emperor Hadrian has been discovered in the river, the Vikings sailed an invading force of 350 ships along it, and Henry VIII and Anne of Cleeves enjoyed a wedding party on its waters. 

But Old Father Thames, like the city, has his dark sides too. So many human skulls have been found in the river by Chelsea that it was given the name 'our Celtic Golgotha', multiple axes and swords have been discovered in its waters, those accused of crimes on the high seas met their end at Execution Dock in Wapping, and it was also in Wapping where the police station kept a book, described as 'one of the saddest books in the world' containing the narratives of attempted local suicides. The German poet Heinrich Heine was so affected by 'the black mood' which struck him on viewing the Thames that he declared "I was so sick in spirit that the hot drops sprang forcibly out of my eyes". Even the pre-Celtic origin of its name, Tamasa, means 'dark river'.

But the Thames is merely the grandest of London's rivers. Not the only one. Its tributaries include the Fleet, the Effra, the Peck, the Ravensbourne, the Wandle, and the Earl's Sluice. Many of them are now hidden underground, occasionally briefly surfacing, but not all. The Wandle and the Lea both make for fascinating walks and even the Ravensbourne has its moments. These rivers are said to provoke allergies, agues, and rheumatism. The Fleet was once so wide that an anchor has been discovered as far north as Kentish Town. More regular discoveries include keys, coins, medals, and daggers. Mostly it is now hidden from our eyes but some rivers hide in plain sight. On the platform of Sloane Square tube station there is a large iron pipe that carries the rushing water of the Westbourne river out towards the Thames. Similar pipes in Baker Street and Victoria make up part of the culverted course of the Tyburn before it discharges at Whitehall Stairs.

Ackroyd's words flow circuitously but definitely towards their destination, much like these rivers. It's descriptive but not flowery, precise but poetic. "Houses dance upon the ruins of the old city" and the founding of Westminster Abbey is "enwrapped in dreams and visions". He uses adjectives like invidious, heterogeneous, stenterophonic and, most of all - barely a chapter passes without this one - noisome. He pairs these with nouns like magniloquence, congerie, disquisition, encomium, amanuensis, and efflorescence and yet never comes across as pretentious. Erudite, learned, loquacious, and verbose - yes. But pretentious - no.

Ackroyd often divides the city up across occult lines, sees an urban form of genius loci that transcends time, race, and redevelopment. He sees the stones that built London's houses as carrying "the burden of their own destiny". He talks of nymphs, minotaurs, and labyrinths. He recalls London being compared to Sodom, Babylon, Nineveh, and Tyre. He delves into psychogeographical ideas regularly and capriciously, seeing viaducts and crossroads as "objects of inexplicable gloom", the Essex and Balls Pond Roads as "areas of manifest greyness", and New Oxford Street as "an anonymous unhappy place". Poor Kingsway is "merely dull". Not even gloomy! Just dull!

I loved the book, its evocations of a London I knew, a London I'm yet to discover, and a London that has been lost to the sands of times. I loved how Ackroyd's horrific descriptions of the war rebut the lie peddled by 'Brexiteers' that 'we got through the war' unharmed by mentioning just how many Londoners (approx 30,000) and British citizens (approx 450,000) resolutely did not get through the war at all.

My two, very minor, complaints are that it could occasionally be a bit 'shopping listy' and that, like London itself, it can sometimes be so huge and all encompassing that it becomes daunting (I was, on more than one occasion, ready to throw the towel in) and hard work in places. It's nearly eight hundred pages long but even when Ackroyd criticizes London, citing Henry James' assertion that the city's vastness can lead to indifference and, ultimately, depression, or suggesting the city drains one's energy like a succubus, he does so with a poetic ease that belies the humdrum that so many see in the UK capital.

I enjoyed the bizarre stories of cutting hair off sick children to put in sandwiches to feed to dogs so that they could contract the malady and leave the child healthy, stories of how keys have long been considered taboo in London (the art of lock-picking was known as the 'Black Art'), and the Anabaptist preacher with the brilliant name Isaac Praisegod Barebone who lived on Fetter Lane. I was gobsmacked to find out children were once taught to smoke tobacco at school. I giggled at the idea of a ghost called Scratching Fanny, tittered at Tiddy Doll (the 'eccentric seller of gingerbread'), and I chortled at the idea of the Humdrum Club ("composed of gentlemen of peaceable dispositions, who were satisfied to meet at a tavern, smoke their pipes and say nothing until midnight).

But Ackroyd also made me realise, as I'd long suspected anyway, that London has so many stories, so many myths, and so much history that I could spend every single day of my life exploring the city and still barely scratch the surface. London can be a cruel mistress. To paraphrase Ford Madox Ford "she loves nobody more than they need her, she needs nobody more than they need her, and yet she tolerates all". You can never win London's heart. London must win yours.

Despite its seemingly constant conflagrations, the ever present threat of violence, the terrifyingly high property prices, and its clogged up roads I loved London anyway but Ackroyd's tales of mazes, caves, prehistorical festivals, punch ups, paganism, Druids, physicians, and the London Stone itself only made me more fascinated with the city's rich, and often arcane, history. I look forward to making further psychogeographical surveys of my home city, taking more walks around it, and reading more about its history. To me it is the gift that keeps giving.

"London conquers most who enter it" it is said. I am no exception.

"Go where we may, rest where we will. Eternal London haunts us still" - Tom Moore.