This feature first appeared in 2024 as two instalments of Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter.
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“Yet the ancient city and the modern city literally lie beside each other; one cannot be imagined without the other. That is one of the secrets of the city’s power.”
I’ve read London: The Biography three times. Once when it debuted in 2000; again a decade later; and once more at the tail end of 2023. I can confirm that, on a third reading, it is still utterly enchanting.
If you’ve never had the considerable pleasure, London: The Biography is a ~900 page history of the capital told with idiosyncratic gusto. It is vaguely chronological, but with themed chapters (fire, ghosts, play, smells…) that ricochet through the ages like temporal popcorn.
What really sets it apart from other London histories, though, is the tone. London is anthropomorphised into some kind of quasi-sentient organism. It remembers. It anticipates. It has a life of its own. Certain areas maintain their essence or character through many centuries, as though guided by a genius loci. At one point the city “dances upon its own ashes”. This is a history full of romantic flourish. It’s a device that has won Ackroyd many fans, but also many critics.
Reading for a third time, I can appreciate both views. But I remain a card-carrying fan of the Ackroydian method. If you want the cold, hard facts of history, then buy a reference book like the London Encyclopaedia. If you’re after a compelling read that inspires you to further action, then nothing, nothing beats London: A Biography.
It can change your life.
I first read the volume in 2000, the year it came out. I didn’t know the city particularly well at that stage, having moved down from Yorkshire a couple of years before. I’d never been to Hackney, or Shoreditch, or even Notting Hill. Ackroyd opened my eyes to a wider London, but more especially to a deeper one. No book I’ve read since has bettered it for describing London as a series of overlapping layers of incident, anecdote and human interaction. It inspired me to get out there, to walk the streets and to look for their hidden histories.
It’s a habit I never kicked. Indeed, the habit somehow — miraculously — grew to become my career. I’ve had the most wonderful 20 years, exploring and writing about the capital, and eventually writing my own books and articles about London. And it all began with this one inspirational read at the turn of the Millennium. I owe Peter Ackroyd an incalculable debt for sparking that interest. And I know I’m not alone.
So I wanted to take a closer look at London: The Biography. In fact, I’m going to take a closer look than anyone’s attempted before: because I made this…
London: The Biography’s Geobibliome!
What, prey tell, is a geobibliome? It’s my made-up word for a map of all the geographic content within a book, or series of books. You may remember that I did it for the works of Charles Dickens a few months ago. This time round, I re-read London: The Biography and, every time the author mentions a mappable location, I added it to the growing chart. If a street or location is not mentioned, then it doesn’t go on. This map even includes buildings and streets that no longer exist. These are shown in red.
In this way, we build up a map that shows everything the author is interested in, but leaves white space in places he has not covered. That is a geobibliome.
What I learned by mapping the Ackroydian Geobibliome
As you can see, it’s quite the beast. Here’s what leaps out at me:
Peter Ackroyd is a very location-hungry author. He namechecks (almost) all the major streets in central London and many, many minor ones. He finds something to say, for example, about every single turnoff from Cheapside, including several that no longer exist. I mean, look again at how densely packed this area is.
The two areas he writes most expansively about, perhaps inevitably, are the Square Mile and West End. It was a challenge to fit in all the labels. The only other area that gets similar density is his home turf of Clerkenwell. (Or lack-of-turf, given that one chapter describes the absence of green on Clerkenwell Green.)
Like the cliche of the London taxi driver, Ackroyd doesn’t like going south. Aside from a few sites around Borough High Street and the South Bank, we find mostly white space immediately south of the river. There’s even less to the deeper south, but this is also true of the east, west and north. London: The Biography is mostly Central-London-North-of-the-Thames: The Biography. (Though, to be fair, that is the area with the longest habitation.)
Green Park is perhaps the largest central location not to get a mention. The under-construction Millennium Dome is also absent, even though it was often in the news during the period in which Ackroyd was writing. Rosebery Avenue is a surprising omission, given that it links up to his favoured patch of Clerkenwell. On the whole though — my goodness, he’s thorough.
By the end of the book, I feel like Ackroyd is trolling me. The final chapters spit out a couple-dozen Greater London areas that have not previously been mentioned, as though he’s deliberately trying to get as much as he can onto my map. (Even so, coverage of areas beyond Zone 1 is very thin on the ground, and it makes me think that somebody should write Greater London: The Biography.) It’s at this point – 3.59am on an insomniac Wednesday morning – that I start to question my sanity.
Why bother?
In truth, I don’t have a good reason for making the map. I’ve always felt a compulsion to make lists or maps when reading a book. I’m very much the kind of person who will scribble notes in the margin, or doodle a family tree at the back of a novel. Mapping Ackroyd was just something I’ve always wanted to do.
I was particularly curious to see if Peter Ackroyd had any large biases for certain parts of London. I’d heard others say that he doesn’t bother much with the south. Making a map is a semi-objective way to measure his coverage. And, yes, it’s definitely true that south London misses out somewhat.
It started out as a personal project, but I do hope that at least some readers will find it interesting to explore. In particular, I think it’s instructive to glance over some of the details coloured in red, which show places that have vanished. These include ancient coaching inns and demolished slums, but also more recent losses like the Museum of London and the Hardy Tree.
Finally, the map can also serve as a kind of visual index to the book. At a glance, you can see if the Biography ever visits the parts of town you’re most interested in. (Bad luck if you’re in south London.)
Overall, the experience of re-reading and mapping London: The Biography only increased my respect for Ackroyd’s achievement. Yes, it has its moments of giddy self-indulgence and romanticism. But its ability to enthuse and excite outweighs, in my opinion, any scholarly shortcomings that professional historians might highlight.
10 things mentioned in London: The Biography that have since been lost
The book was published in the year 2000, a quarter of a century ago. In that time, many of the places Peter Ackroyd mentions have changed or disappeared. Here are 10.
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The Hardy Tree. Famous ash near St Pancras Old Church, which collapsed in 2023.
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The Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Closed in 2017 after almost 450 years of trading.
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The weekend silence in the Square Mile. I can remember when very few people visited the City at the weekend. Today, it seems much more lively.
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The Museum of London on London Wall. It closed in 2022 but will reopen in a new Smithfield venue in 2026.
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Tubby Isaacs’ seafood stall on Petticoat Lane. Closed in 2013 after 94 years of dispensing slimy sea snacks.
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King’s Cross as an area of bleakness and ugliness. The area has been utterly transformed by a landmark development behind the stations. It still has its seedy corners, but not many.
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The Planetarium. The much-loved annexe to Madame Tussauds closed in 2006 to house more stars of the waxwork rather than stellar persuasion. The Royal Observatory Greenwich is now the place to go for astronomy shows.
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The Gay Hussar. Legendary Hungarian restaurant on Greek Street, Soho, which closed in 2018.
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The Colony Rooms. Another famed Soho venue. Its heyday had come in the 1960s and 70s under the infamous Muriel Belcher, but it carried on attracting celebrities until its closure in 2008.
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The expectation that you’ll see sparrows in central London. These small birds once an icon of the city, as commonly spied as pigeons. Now, they are rarely seen in the centre.
10 things that London didn’t have when London: The Biography was first published
2000 was a very big year for London. The position of Mayor of London was created, along with the Greater London Authority. Transport for London got going at the same time. The Millennium Dome, Tate Modern and London Eye all opened. Even our phone numbers changed from 0171 and 0181 to the 020 system. All of this happened just before London: The Biography came out in October. And all of this was yet to come ⬇️
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The Shard. Britain’s tallest building did not get underway until 2007, although architect Renzo Piano first sketched the idea in 2000 — the same year as London: The Biography.
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A megaton of other skyscrapers. Add to the list the Gherkin, Cheesegrater, Walkie Talkie and pretty much any of the skyscrapers at Canary Wharf apart from the pyramid-topped One Canada Square.
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The Elizabeth line. The east-west rail line has its notional origins back in the Second World War. But no shovel hit dirt until 2009.
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Mobile tech. I got my first mobile phone in 2000. It was a basic, Nokia thing whose most sophisticated feature was a warbley ring-tone. There was no Google Maps to find your way around. No e-tickets. No virtual wallets. No journey planner in your pocket. We all read books or newspapers on the tube.
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Oysters and contactless payment. The only way to pay for your tube or bus fare was to buy a paper ticket or travel card. And most people used coins and notes. Oyster cards were introduced in 2003.
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The Olympic Park. Nobody (Bob Hoskins aside) was talking about bringing the Olympics to London at this point. Twelve years on, vast swathes of Stratford brownfield had been turned into the Olympic Park.
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Congestion Charge. London’s first attempt to cut traffic pollution came into effect in 2003. It would later be supplemented by two waves of Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ).
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New Wembley Stadium. Back in 2000, football fans still flocked to the famous twin towers of Wembley. It would be demolished three years later, with the rubble used to build Northala Fields. A new stadium, designed by Norman Foster, would open in 2007.
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The Dangleway. The cable car between North Greenwich and the Royal Docks was not something anyone thought necessary in the year 2000. Just as we continued to think this after it was built in 2012.
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Londonist. The parent website of Londonist: Time Machine would not have been possible with the web tech of 2000. We had to wait until 2004 to write our first articles.
Number of times Peter Ackroyd uses the word “Noisome” in London: The Biography
Twenty-six.
How often do you utter the word “noisome”, meaning “bad smelling”? I think I’ve used it about 20 times in my whole life, and 19 of those were in affectionate mockery of Peter Ackroyd.
10 things that Peter Ackroyd believes “London has always been…”
Ackroyd has other literary ticks. You can’t miss the phrase “London has always been…”. He deploys it on the first page and then never looks back. In total, I counted 23 occasions, plus a dozen further variations. Purely for the whim of it, here are 10 things that Peter Ackroyd thinks “London has always been…”
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London has always been… a vast ocean in which survival is not certain.
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London has always been… considered to be the home of stock theatrical characters - the ‘shabby genteel’, the ‘city slicker’, the ‘wide boy’.
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London has always been… troubled by ghosts.
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London has always been… the scene of covert debauchery.
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London has always been… the abode of strange and solitary people who close their doors upon their own secrets in the middle of the populous city.
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London has always been… the capital of masculine fashion
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London has always been… energetic and powerful enough to buttress itself against distress and disaster.
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London has always been… an ugly city.
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London has always been… a city of crowds and mobs, which gather instinctively before disappearing as mysteriously as they congregate.
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London has always been… characterised by the noise that is an aspect of its noisomeness. (I don’t know what that means. I think he’s trolling himself by this stage.)
A few errors
With around 900 pages to compile, the author inevitably made a few errors along the way. Some of these are simple typos that I’d never have noticed had I not been putting a map together. Kerry Street in Kentish Town should be Kelly Street, for example. Little Turnstile in Holborn is rendered as Little Turnmill. Less forgivably, the famous Moka coffee bar in Soho is misnamed as the Mika. The old Stangate Horse Ferry is written as the Stargate Horse Ferry, which suggests a very different mode of transportation. And the Walworth Road is written as the Walford Road… he must have been watching Eastenders.
A few bigger errors creep in too, such as mention of a tunnel under the Thames between Greenwich and… Deptford? From the context, he’s talking about the Greenwich foot tunnel, which actually goes to the Isle of Dogs. One of the most curious errors is a discussion about poverty that uses Summer Gardens off Drury Lane as an exemplar. Charles Booth, he of ‘poverty map’ fame, is cited as the source. But there was never a street called Summer Gardens near Drury Lane. Booth made it up as a pseudonym for a real street in what would later become the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green — nowhere near Drury Lane. Some crossed wires there, methinks.
Ackroyd also has the irksome habit of stating hearsay as fact. For example, he reckons that Boudicca fought the Romans in Islington and that the Thames gets its name from the Celtic words for “dark water”. Both are possible, but unsubstantiated.
And to finish, a few choice quotes…
Minor faults aside, London: The Biography is a magisterial accomplishment — easily the best general history book about London ever published, in my humble but not inexperienced opinion. I’d like to finish on a high, then, by quoting some of my favourite descriptions of London from the book:
“London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.”
“Contemporary theorists have suggested that linear time is itself a figment of the imagination, but London has already anticipated their conclusions.”
“It is the riddle of London which is perpetually new and always old.”
“It is a city endlessly destroyed and endlessly restored, vandalised and renewed, acquiring its historical texture from the temporary aspirations of passing generations, an enduring myth as well as a fleeting reality, an arena of crowds and rumour and forgetfulness.”
“It is a strange city beneath the ground, perhaps best exemplified by worn manhole covers which, instead of reading SELF LOCKING, spell out ELF KING.” (This is, I think, the only example of wordplay in the whole book, and it jars a little with his usual tone. Good observation, though.)
“Where the past exists, the future may flourish.”
“It is a city which has the ability to dance upon its own ashes.”
“Yet the ancient city and the modern city literally lie beside each other; one cannot be imagined without the other. That is one of the secrets of the city’s power.”
And, of course, that perfect concluding paragraph:
“London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.”
