London: The Biography

Written by Peter Ackroyd

Narrated by Nigel Patterson

London: The Biograph is the pinnacle of Peter Ackroyd's brilliant obsession with the eponymous city. In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the listener through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction.



Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city's riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anecdotal, insightful, and wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd's concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar "echoic" quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.



London confirms Ackroyd's status as what one critic has called "our age's greatest London imagination."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jul 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781705200803

Peter Ackroyd

PETER ACKROYD is an award-winning novelist, as well as a broadcaster, biographer, poet, and historian. He is the author of the acclaimed London: The Biography, and the History of England series. He holds a CBE for services to literature and lives in London.

Reviews for London

[Tim · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Magnificent! One of the greatest books ever written about a city.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The word thorough does not do London: the Biography justice. Think of it as a chronology of London's biggest events from 54 BC to 2000 AD. It is an explanation and examination of culture, architecture, religion, invention, society, education, slang, literature, food, immigration, sanitation, crime, entertainment, commerce, economics, weather... I could go on. There are a lot of opinions about this book floating around. Someone said it took them six months to read it. Someone else said you have to read it before visiting London, while someone else suggested using London: the Biography as a walking guide. Good luck carrying the thing around. It's heavy!
London is the book to read if you want to know what Charles Dickens thought about London cats or the pervasive fog; what Daniel Defoe thought about the poor, the prison system, or London's suburbs; or Samuel Johnson's thoughts on public intoxication or witnessing a well-attended execution in a courtyard. Ackroyd's meticulous research has uncovered those opinions and more. You will learn about the Great Fire of 1666 and how no one knew how it started; yet it burned for five days straight. You will hear stories about the infamous London fog and how a man could get lost in the ominous mist. Speaking of ominous, penal and criminal behaviors are discussed at great length. I particularly liked the man who couldn't stay imprisoned. Time and time again he found ways to escape.

[datrappert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ackroyd is a keen observer of so many quintisential London things, and if you are a frequent enough visitor to London, there's much here to take away and enjoy and perhaps even apply on your next trip. The downsides are first, that this book is about a quarter century old, and it shows. So many of the places he talks about, especially the downtrodden areas, have changed significantly since he wrote the book. Secondly, as a very gifted author, sometimes it seems like he is reaching just a little bit too much for the perfect turn of phrase, when something a bit more down-to-earth would be more effective.

The audiobook is well read (and 32 hours long!), although the narrator does have a few strange pronunciations, and I don't think they are just British English. Of course, the audiobook lacks all the pictures in the print edition, but you can Google things to your heart's content.

[sjflp · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Just re-read this book and have upped my rating from 2 to 3 stars. Last time I was annoyed by the length, the over-poetic language and the unfounded mysticism along the lines of asserting that there is continuity of spirit in London's locations, because he can find several examples of places where similar activities have occurred at different times. These things annoyed me on the re-read as well, but I found compensation in the sheer volume of interesting information & the sweep of the historical coverage. I like the way he arranges the book by theme - fire, poverty, natural environment - rather than a strictly chronological approach.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a book composed of short essays on some general topics containing a large number of factoids. While the author has assembled a large amount of information about the city it is often, and far too often, dispersed among a number of rapsodies about the wonder and hidden conflicts of the city. It could well have used a timeline, or several essays arranging a connected account of the themes he returns to so constantly. From a marketing point of view it is admirably designed to be consumed in short visits, thus a good book for the morning commute, or for idle moments during a structured day. and a number of historical maps could have aided the non-resident reader a very great deal. Another lack in a book of such an episodic nature, the indexing is very weak. While Mr. Ackroyd, a good stylist, has made a book that will enjoy good sales, it will not in the long run be a keeper.

[miaculpa-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent living history of one of the great cities of the world. Ackroyd has researched London history thoroughly and presented in a way that makes you want to book a flight to London, stet. I haven't spent a lot of time in London but I can imagine using "London: the biography" as a guide to the city, learning of the history of suburbs and streets and how, over the centuries, some buildings seem to attract particular types of business.

This was the first book I've read by Peter Ackroyd and I eagerly dived in to read more of his, only to be left slightly disappointed. No doubt I'll eventually find another of his books to love.

[tommi180744 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very entertaining & informative account of the foremost city in Europe if not the world.

[sscarllet-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have no words for this book - it's just amazing. I've read it three times now, once before I moved to London as a student, once just because and once before I moved to London permanently, and I will read it again. For a 800 page book thats pretty impressive.

Ackroyd personifies London. Its not just this city with some nice buildings and history, its a living breathing thing. I feel it so much more every day that I commute into the city because of this book.

Ackroyd splits up the massive history of London into easy to read and facinating tidbits. Its a book that you could read in small pieces - if the sheer weight of it is too much. I find that I mean to read just a bit and end up half way through the book before I know it.

If your a lover of London read this book - there are no excuses.

[sageness · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Atrociously bad. It could be turned into a drinking game -- drink any time Ackroyd uses fallacious logic or uses a completely unrelated and non-universal example to "prove" an absurd point. Of course, then you'd have alcohol poisoning by the end of the first chapter.

If his thesis were that London, as a city, has a particular culture unlike other cities in Britain, then this book might be an interesting amble through different elements of that culture. However, his thesis is that the city itself, in its pavement, sewer systems, buildings, etc., literally speak to the residents and dictate their ways of life.

Yes, that is exactly as crazycakes as it sounds. Up to including his claim that the actual tarmac of the street told the poor, nonwhite protestors to riot against their white oppressors. Also, there's the constant impossible superlativing, making ridiculous claims that London was the first city ever to do ______ in all of history. As if Rome and other ancient metropolises had never been. Calling it shoddy scholarship is generous.

This book IS kind of interesting as an adjunct to Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series, if you pretend London is actually fiction. I only made myself finish the book because the anecdotes he paraphrases are fascinating. Sadly, there are no footnotes or endnotes, and he doesn't list his sources for particular stories, so this book is pretty useless as a diving off point into something better.

So...yay badly quoted anecdotes?

[switchknitter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was just fucking brilliant. It's not a linear history. Rather, each chapter is a new topic, and Ackroyd covers the history of that topic before moving on to the next topic/chapter. There are chapters on the history of lighting London (torches, gas lights, etc.), one on the behavior of crowds over the centuries, one on churches, one on effluvia (read: poop), one on the buried rivers of London (yes there's more than one)... It's amazing. And 79 chapters long. This mother is HUGE. And worth it. Ackroyd plays it pretty straight, but every so often he'll say things like, "The bowels of God moved, and he took a shit on London." Peter Ackroyd is AWESOME.

[randystafford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've only had the opportunity to spend a few days in London, so I can't claim to know the city well. But, says Ackroyd - himself seemingly a lifelong Londoner, it's been centuries since anyone can claim to really know the city. His bibliographic essay notes there are at least 21, 778 works on the city, and he doesn't claim to have read them all. Still, he has overturned a fair sized library for this book , added some personal observations, and produced an impressionistic, kaleidoscopic book.

Ackroyd eschews a straightforward chronological history. There are sections on London from its beginnings to 1066, medieval London, the Great Fire, Victorian London, and the city's destruction in the Blitz and its later rebuilding. But most of the book is essay like chapters built around themes covering every aspect of London life from its Underground and buried past to its notorious fogs and smogs, its wildlife and street life, markets illicit and licit, disasters and buildings, festivals and executions. And it's not exactly a celebration of the city. Again and again he returns to the metaphor of London as prison. The exemplar here is Jack Sheppard who escaped from London prisons six times. Yet, he never left the city for more than a few days even though it cost him his life.

London as theater is Ackroyd's other metaphor. It extends far beyond the literal stage to the garb of its inhabitants or the speeches of the soon to be hanged at Newgate. London, emphasizes Ackroyd, is a great commercial maw. All has been subsumed in trade at one time or another from the goods of empire coming in at the Thames docks to the sewer hunters and mudlarks scouring muck for treasures. Men, women, and children all played their roles. Even would-be rebels became a trade in Carnaby Street.

One of the most fascinating things in the book is Ackroyd's frequent quotes from foreign visitors. Yoshio Markino, a Japanese painter, noted that the garish colors of London's buildings became beautiful when seen in a fog. Dostoevsky remarked on Londoners haste to drink themselves insensible. (After reading the book's accounts of London riots and drinking, one is tempted to see some modern London problems as a return to some sort of default state for the city.)

How certain London neighborhoods have long been associated with certain acivities is also well told by Ackroyd. He not only talks about the famous Soho but Clerkenwell as well. The latter has, for centuries, been associated with religious heretics and revolutionaries. (Lenin lived there for a time.) And the same neighborhood has a long tradition of clockmaking. (Perhaps explaining why Hiram Maxim worked on his machine guns there.)

Given Ackroyd's many books on literary figures, quotes from British literary figures are to be expected. (Ackroyd notes that it is exceptional for them not to have a London connection.) Dickens, Defoe, Smollett, Milton, Boswell, Orwell, and Wolfe all had things to say about London in essays, letters, and fiction. The literary minded reader may be tempted to make a game of remembering relevant quotes and writers not in the book.

As well as being associated with literature and the capitol of empire, London's bustle helped develop the theories of Darwin and Engels - though Ackroyd asserts this in passing without much proof. The instrument makers of London were crucial to developing the science of the Enlightenment.

There are three minor quibbles with the book. Some of the anecdotes do get repeated though not many in a book so long. Second and more seriously, Ackroyd exhibits some unquestioned pieties. Seeing the poor as diseased and dirty is not a totally groundless stereotype. Mental illness can underlie all three conditions as well as less pathological mental traits. And Ackroyd, in a section on immigrants to London, makes the lazy analogy that complaints about today's immigrants are the same - and equally groundless - as those of the past. That ignores the numbers and cultures of Britian's current immigrants and the corrosive effects of modern transportation and communication on assimilation. One wonders, now that Islamic terrorism has made its way to Britain and sharia law can be enforced by the state, if he feels the same eight years after the book was published. The third quibble is that sometimes Ackroyd thinks he is describing a unique trait of Londoners when it's really more universal. For instance, in what city aren't children attracted to dangerous and forbidden places?

Still, this is a remarkable book in its variety, and it almost never bores despite its length. Anybody interested in one of the great cities of the Western Mind will want to read it.

[kidzdoc_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This weighty tome about the life of the city of London was a massive disappointment, and a grueling and nearly impossible book to read. It isn't a biography in the linear sense, rather it is a collection of short chapters about different aspects of the city throughout its history, including its rivers, churches, theatres, and outcasts. Each chapter consists mainly of quotes from other sources, and its lack of narrative flow makes for an exceptionally dry and thoroughly unrewarding read, which reminded me of an 800 page essay written by a college freshman. Anyone brave enough to tackle this book is advised to read it in tiny segments, or, as I did, skim the book to read the most interesting sections.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I brought this book home from the library soon after my trip to London, all excited to dig into the history of the places I had been and learn more about this great historic city. In the beginning, my reading was going well. Thought it is structured thematically rather than chronologically, I got a kick out of recognizing street names that I had walked or passed and got a kick out of imagining the city during the Middle Ages.

Fast forward several hundred pages and several weeks later. I'm still enjoying learning the history, but reading has become slow. Ackroyd includes several quotes and then interprets them, English-major fashion, making a comment about "London itself" and sometimes, IMHO, stretching things a bit. This is getting old, and repetitive. His quotes come from both fiction and nonfiction, but there is not one note included at the back for me to look at his sources. Instead, he has an eleven-page-long "Essay on Sources" that, should you have the energy after 760 pages of text, you can read if you like. Frankly, the book was due back at the library a few days ago, and I thought it was safe to skip (though I did briefly glance through it last night and added London at War to the TBR list). Comprehensive, but a bit repetitive. I daresay I would've liked it better if I hadn't read the last 300 pages in the last 5 days.

[thronm · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ackroyd's literary talents create a living creature rather than a straight history or guide to London. It is best to know London's surfaces well before wading into this book so that the depths explored can be felt as you walk London or remembering it. A biography written by one who knows what is above and below the streets and what lurks around each corner. I would highly recommend Ackroyd's novel Hawksmore if you like this book.

[furriebarry · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Less a biography and more a love letter. In fact more a collection of 5000 word love letters ranging on subject from the inane to the simply boring. Overuse of quotes and a lack of analysis beyong the fawning, there is nothing here for anyone other than trivia fans. It manages to be too narrow during each chapter, to broad overall and unfailingly shallow. Disappointing.

[cabegley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography is a huge, sprawling, messy book, somewhat like London itself. Rather than look at London chronologically, Ackroyd moves back and forth in time while exploring different topics. This structure worked very well, as the various layers gradually form a picture of London as a whole. While Ackroyd does touch on major historical points (the Great Fire of 1666, the Blitz of World War II), his main focus is on broader themes such as economic development, poverty, health, urban sprawl, and crime.

London: The Biography was a long, sometimes tough read. I was interested in the social history, but not so much in the topography and geography. I tended to fade a bit when Ackroyd would go into long discourses on the history of development of a particular street, for instance. I often found the last paragraph of a chapter to be forced and a bit windy as he would try to segue from the topic of that chapter to the topic of the next. For the most part, however, his writing was lovely, painting strong pictures of London in all its facets.

My sense was that Ackroyd wrote this book for Londoners themselves, and he assumes a body of local knowledge and vocabulary that as an American reader I didn't have. I would have appreciated a glossary in the American printing. I wish I'd read this book years ago, though--I learned so much that I can directly apply to the fiction I read.

[billiecat_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As far as I am concerned, you can have Paris in the springtime. Give me London in the rain.

Ackroyd's book shares many characteristics with its namesake - it is crowded, organic, chaotic, and full of life. It also shares many of the City's faults - it's hard sometimes to find what you are looking for, and you can look in vain for any reason behind the juxtapositions of different cultural artifacts. Nevertheless, anyone who has spent more than the obligatory few days in the obligatory tourist sites will recognize the city from Ackroyd's prose.

One may complain that Ackroyd lingers too much on London's history of crime, social unrest, and dirt. Well, what do you expect of a city that boasts having had the "Great Stink" of 1858? Casual travelers, people who are looking for a simplistic history to read while in line for Madame Tussaud's, and anyone who desires a Disney-fied, Mary Poppins fantasy will be unhappy with this book.

But if you want to know what London _feels_ like, this book comes closer than anything else I have read to making me feel like I do when I am there. There is no city better for aimless wandering, stumbling through alleys, exploring the Underground, and observing the small details. It is a world-city grown pell-mell by greed, lust and need, with beauty in unexpected places and quiet rarer than gold, and more precious. In short, it is life. And, as Samuel Johnson famously said, "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

[j5v5d5a5 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A disappointing history of a fabulous city, in my opinion. Much of the book was a real slog to get through and frankly I couldn't wait until I reached the end.

[piefuchs · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A thematic history of a great city. The amount of material is amazing, however, the structure leads each chapter being a book within a book and hence a disjointed read.

[shipw_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's taken me two years to read this book. I received it as a gift after visiting London and exploring the city on foot. As I started to read I would come across an interesting tidbit, and head online to find out more. This book is crammed with such tidbits and I found it hard to read more than a chapter at a time without being distracted by the possibilities of finding out more. I really enjoyed the book and soon adjusted to Ackroyd's style. At the end I felt I had learned more than from most other books I've read, and I'm looking forward to returning to London with a new critical eye.

[john257hopper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A rambling, roller coaster of a book, which in some cases might be a minus point, but in this case seems to go with the sprawling nature and long history of the city. A great thought provoking read.

[mathew_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I Love London, I Love this Book. All kinds of things to learn about one of the most fascinating cities in the world.

[rachelh_883405 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Exhaustive and massively entertaining study of one of the world's great cities. Covers a thousand years of history and countless stories in between. I can't believe that any more comprehensive tome on the city of London exists.