Peter Ackroyd - London. The Biography [2003][A]

Here are two thousand years of London’s history and folklore, its chroniclers and criminals and plain citizens, its food and drink and countless pleasures. Blackfriar’s and Charing Cross, Paddington and Bedlam. Westminster Abbey and St. Martin in the Fields. Cockneys and vagrants. Immigrants, peasants, and punks. The Plague, the Great Fire, the Blitz. London at all times of day and night, and in all kinds of weather. In well-chosen anecdotes, keen observations, and the words of hundreds of its citizens and visitors, Ackroyd reveals the ingenuity and grit and vitality of London. Through a unique thematic tour of the physical city and its inimitable soul, the city comes alive.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Plato Papers; T.S. Eliot; etc.) offers a huge, enthralling "biography" of the city of London. The reader segues through this litany of lists and anthology of anecdotes via the sketchiest of topical linkages, but no matter not a page is dull, until brief closing chapters in which Ackroyd succumbs to bathos, for which he's instantaneously redeemed by the preceding chapters. He admits to using no original research, openly crediting his printed sources. Ackroyd examines London from its pre-history through today, artfully selecting, organizing and pacing stories, and rendering the past in witty and imaginative ways. "The opium quarter of Limehouse," he tells readers, for example, "is now represented by a Chinese take-away." Fast food, it seems, was always part of the London scene. When poet Thomas Southey asked a pastry cook why she kept her shop open in the worst weather, she told him that otherwise she would lose business, "so many were the persons who took up buns or biscuits as they passed by and threw their pence in, not allowing themselves time to enter." Ackroyd covers unrest and peace, fires and ruins, river and rail transport, crime and punishment, wealth and poverty, markets and churches, uncontrolled growth and barely controlled filth. If there is a hero among the throngs, it may be engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who in 1855 began building 1,265 miles of sewers to contain the Stygian odor of progress and keep the huge, ugly metropolis livable. No one should mind the extraordinary price of this extraordinary achievement. B&w illus., maps not seen by PW. (On sale Oct. 16)Forecast: Published to acclaim in England, this is virtually guaranteed major review coverage here, and the publisher will also shoot for national media. Anglophiles and others will rejoice.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal
This trip through London, conducted by novelist/biographer Ackroyd, is less concerned with chronology than with human drama.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
Biographer/novelist Ackroyd (e.g., The Life of Thomas Moore) offers a sweeping, highly readable account of London's colorful and complicated history. In encyclopedic detail, he discusses everything from the city's crime and its theater to the notorious fog, plagues, and Great Fire of 1666, from which the city had to be almost built. He also provides a useful travelog, discussing London's many notable buildings, neighborhoods, and other features rich with stories, among them Newgate Prison, "an emblem of death and suffering," the "dirty" East End, and, of course, the Thames, London's "river of commerce." Characters such as infamous "prison-breaker" Jack Sheppard are vividly re-created, as are scenes like the sights and smells of the market in 1276 and the bloody Notting Hill riots in 1958. The book is full of both horrors, including the overwhelming number of beggars and the "impaled heads of traitors" in the 1600s, and soaring achievements, as London rises to the "center of world commerce" in the 1800s. Ackroyd's passion for this remarkable city is clearly evident. Recommended for all public libraries.
- Isabel Coates, Boston Consulting Group, Brampton, Ont.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker
Believing that London "defies chronology," Ackroyd jettisons linear history in favor of a huge collage of his home city. Most of his seventy-nine chapters take a theme—noise, nature, violence, sex—and range back and forth in time with confusing alacrity. Ackroyd, who has an almost mystical interest in patterns of repetition, is never happier than when, say, he is walking across a parking lot and notices a security camera at a spot where the medieval city wall once stood. He is also more interested in London's outsiders—radicals, eccentrics, criminals—than in its palaces and monarchs; Queen Victoria doesn't rate even a mention. Ultimately, the book successfully emulates its subject: it is hard to navigate but fun to explore—baffling and fascinating by turns.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist
Yes, an 800-page history of London! Granted, it will take a persevering reader with a definite interest in European history and culture to undertake this major reading project. But readers who fit that bill will be both edified and charmed by the renowned British novelist and biographer's chronicle of the "life" of the British capital. Ackroyd perceives London "as a human shape with its own laws of life and growth." From Celtic settlement in the misty days of yore, to its reinvention as a Roman fortress, to its uncontrolled growth as the undisputed political center of England in the Middle Ages, to its majestic rise as the epicenter of a mighty empire in the nineteenth century, to a city of immigrants in the twenty-first, the overarching theme of London's "biography" is that the city "is based upon power" and is "truly the epitome of all England." Glorious detail limns how life was led down London's streets and byways during these epochs. For all its length, this is an irresistible read. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap
Here are two thousand years of London?s history and folklore, its chroniclers and criminals and plain citizens, its food and drink and countless pleasures. Blackfriar's and Charing Cross, Paddington and Bedlam. Westminster Abbey and St. Martin in the Fields. Cockneys and vagrants. Immigrants, peasants, and punks. The Plague, the Great Fire, the Blitz. London at all times of day and night, and in all kinds of weather. In well-chosen anecdotes, keen observations, and the words of hundreds of its citizens and visitors, Ackroyd reveals the ingenuity and grit and vitality of London. Through a unique thematic tour of the physical city and its inimitable soul, the city comes alive.

From the Back Cover
“Magnificent. . . . Succeeds in animating on the page the life of one of the oldest and greatest cities in the world.”--The New York Times Book Review

“Ackroyd is the most effortless guide. . . . This is much more than history: it is a tapestry of inspiration and love.” --The Observer

“An erudite labour of love, a fan-letter to a fabulous city. . . . As exuberant, energetic and alarming as the city itself.” --Independent on Sunday

“A fat and filling feast: pretty much everything of interest about the capital is crammed into the eight-hundred pages.”--The Times

“If London had the ability to choose its biographer it undoubtedly would tap Peter Ackroyd.”--Vanity Fair

“A wonderful book, a treasure of information and anecdote about one of the world’s great cities, a book to be taken up again and again for the pleasures that lie within.”--Chicago Tribune

“A book to match its subject . . . one gratefully rediscovers that urban unreality, the city of romance and mystery as well as the one of shops, pubs, and thoroughfares.” --The Washington Post

About the Author
Peter Ackroyd is a bestselling writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books include the biographies Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More and the novels The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, Milton in America, and The Plato Papers. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award (jointly), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Guardian fiction prize. He lives in London.