95 Books Like London Under London

I have always admired the pioneering Victorian engineers like Stephenson and Brunel, but especially Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who is less recognised and honoured than others, but whose genius provided a sewage system for London which improved sanitation, reduced disease, and death, allowed for the development of the Embankment and lasted for over a century! This book tells the story of those sewers and ones like them across the world and the remarkable men who designed and built them, many of them little known to their countrymen and women. It's absolutely fascinating, from the technical details to the social impact. It has turned me into a sewer aficionado.

I enjoy Ackroyd's novels as well as his biographies, the former almost always being set in London which he, as a noted flaneur, loves. London Under is not fiction, though it often references the literature and mythologies which have grown up around certain places and landmarks within London, from its earliest incarnation before it was even a city to the present day. Ackroyd chronicles how the London of one time reappears and impacts upon the London of another time, one stratum intruding upon another and shows how the world below mirrors and reflects the world above. This is not unlike how I wanted the clandestine and criminal world to mirror and reflect the above ground and above-board world in my novel Plague.

OK, this isn't focused on the subterranean, but it does touch frequently upon underpasses and tunnels and is a personal journey, passing through the parts of London where the 'Ginger Line' - the London Overground railway -  runs. Sinclair uses his experiences to illuminate the changing city, a jumping-off point for explorations of places, their past, and present. His journey is bound up with writers and artists of all kinds. He, like Ackroyd, has an eye for the bizarre, but Sinclair has a sense of danger, real and modern, while Ackroyd summons the haunting past.

The System is the third book in the Baroque Cycle which begins with Quicksilver and continues with The Confusion. The whole Cycle is a rip-roaring, wildly inventive, and massively ambitious saga, ranging from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, spanning the globe and casting an amazing set of characters from Leibnitz and Newton, to King George, Thomas Newcomen and William Teach the pirate. It's astonishing and has some of the best subterranean London episodes I've ever read, including an escape from Newgate Prison which takes in the Bank of England, a Roman Temple, and a medieval privy. Read all three books and hang on to your hats, it's a thrilling ride.

Because the ground itself obscures virtually all of the subterranean worlds of cities, the best way to actually represent and visualise them is through drawings and diagrams.

This book opened my eyes – as it has done for many – to the complexity, density, and depth of the foundations, pipes, tunnels, conduits, and infrastructures below cities.

In it, David Macaulay uses his unequalled drawing skills to illustrate everything from sewer valves; skyscraper foundations; the worlds beneath manholes to an amazing cross-section of New York showing shipping lanes, deep transport tunnels, and huge skyscrapers whose hidden, deep pile foundations can be almost as deep as their above-surface structures. 

Another fantastic evocation of the vast and complex subterranean world of cities, this time, the focus is on New York.

When I first read this I was immediately transfixed by its cover: A giant hand, holding the Empire State Building and pulling up a huge, dusty, and steaming clump of Manhattan’s underground world – replete with all manner of tunnels, subway trains, wires, pipes, and water mains – in the manner of someone pulling up a tree to expose the roots below.

Whilst obviously dated, the book’s superb prose and fabulous maps and images really take the reader into the vast worlds burrowed over centuries with enormous dedication beneath New York’s bedrock which, in contrast to London’s clay and alluvium, is made mostly of incredibly hard igneous schist.

The subterranean worlds of cities have long been represented as a literal ‘underworld’ – a hidden and shadowy realm inhabited by all sorts of marginalised and spectral figures and communities.

Very often, such communities – real, imagined, and mythical – have been deemed by elites to be morally, socially, and biologically threatening the above-surface city. As someone who does not generally read a huge amount of fiction, Heise’s wonderful book was a huge inspiration for me.

It explores and reveals like no other book how American urban underworlds have been represented across a range of American literature.

From New York through Chicago and Los Angeles, what emerges is a rich a vibrant history through which the lived and imagined world below cities have been pivotal in key novels.

Anyone who has ventured down into Paris’s many catacombs, tunnels, and quarries will quickly realise that no city has a more storied, evocative, and influential subterranean culture.

With stunning colour photography, amazing maps, and an unrivalled discussion of the remarkable histories, cultures, and physical realms beneath Paris, this book was a revelation to me. 

What I found particularly fascinating is the way the book shows that, in sharp contrast to above-surface Paris, which is constantly ‘regenerated’, repaired, and cleared of the detritus of the past – beyond immaculately repaired historic buildings – the ‘stuff’ of Paris subterranean world  largely just continues to accumulate!

The photos in this remarkable book take readers on tours of underground signs from the days of Victor Hugo; sketches of the guillotine from the time of the Revolution; Nazi military signs, and a vast array of art, graffiti, and remnants from Paris’ remarkable present-day ‘catophile’ culture.

This is the first book I’ve read where I truly believed in a world existing alongside our own.

One where the ordinary and the supernatural live side by side and quietly shape each other, even if they don’t fully realise it. I absolutely loved the humour.

It’s a remarkable book that made me feel like I’d been pulled into another world entirely. One that’s dirtier, stranger, more magical, and just a little bit beyond understanding.

With a razor sharp eye Wolmar (author of many other excellent books on railway history) concentrates his focus on the machinations of the establishment of the world's first railway built under the ground. Overcoming the travails of unbuilt fantasy concepts, the Victorians fear of the dark, finances and the problems of running steam trains in tunnels, London's City Solicitor Charles Pearson, managed to get the first route, the Metropolitan Railway, built and opened by January 1863. Wolmar unpicks the struggles to expand the line, private capitals, a rush to build more lines and the eventual nationalisation of the system in 1948.