Book Review: "London" by Peter Ackroyd (Pt. 2)

London by Peter Ackroyd is another one of my big reads. If you've been paying attention, I've been wanting to replace my 'big book review' with something because I feel like this is a more accessible way of streamlining these reviews with my own thoughts, rather than trying to be too academic about everything. I mean, I guess I am kind of an academic, but that's not why we are here. Peter Ackroyd is one of those writers, I have to admit, you have to be really into the subject matter in order to get into the book. Back when I read Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, I was ultimately grabbed by the fictional world created through the lens of Victorian England. If you're looking for a way into his work, I would recommend beginning with that one. But, we're on London - and so, back to part 2 of the series.

London is noisy and that's a fact. That's a fact for forever and a day. For those of us who have been to London, it never really sleeps (which is great if you're going away in your 20s, but not so great as you get older). Peter Ackroyd talks about all the churches that were everywhere, but then there's also markets and people and carriages and horses and all the rest. Ackroyd talks about Samuel Pepys who once saw a bunch of animals fighting outside his window in the midst of the night. But there's something even more than that, something that really did intrigue me. People who sleep at night in the city - especially in the Middle Ages - were awoken during the night not because of the noise but because of the lack of it. The silence would be more unsettling than relaxing, there's more anxiety than there is serenity. That is something that really made me think. As someone who hears the city constantly, I would think that really weird too. The more I thought about it, what if there were no more cars? what if I couldn't hear the hum of the city as I walked through it? what if there was no noise whatsoever? That would definitely unnerve me. Definitely unnerve me.

Peter Ackroyd presents these two chapters are dichotomies. Yes, London was once considerd the loudest city in the world and Haydn was looking on moving to Vienna in order to work in silence. But then again, experiencing silence in a city of this size and this growing population would be equally horrifying. The more you look at it, the more you see.

The next chapters concern the darkness of the streets and the way in which danger can be lurking around corners. I think that Peter Ackroyd does a great job of painting a portrait of London as being this city where this has clearly always been the case. What we see of London today is a city of great versatility yes, but there is also a great amount of darkness and filth in the city too. What Ackroyd tries to say with his analysis therefore is not that our observations of modern London are wrong, but instead that they have always been present in some way, shape or form. The dirty and disgusting nature of the carts pulling fruits and things all the way down to the decadence of royalty, all the way through to the violence and carnage in the streets is something that London has experienced since it became a city.

We are always reminded of the city's history. At every step, Ackroyd takes us back to the Roman and Saxon eras, we work through to the era of Henry VIII and even further on and we learn about these themes and how they changed London. One thing I have really enjoyed is perhaps learning about the city at night and how that itself has changed depending on the age the person lived in. There's something about London at night that can be beautiful, and also can be horrific and threatening. But I guess the one place I would not like to be is in the situation of someone who is listening for the noise of the city, but finds only unnerving silence.