Nor has Fiona Rule’s London’s Labyrinth, published in 2012, been particularly well received, particularly when compared with her truly excellent earlier works on London, The Worst Street In London and London’s Docklands. Similarly Alan Brooke’s little 48-page book Under London, published in 2012, and Stephen Smith’s lightweight, vague and journalistic Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets of 2005, have met with generally negative reviews from both the press and the general reading public. Of the others, Peter Ackroyd’s London Under, launched in 2012 with so much anticipation and acclaim, has been variously described by the critics as thin, uninspiring, dumbed-down and ‘written in a hurry with little enthusiasm’. Anthony Clayton’s Subterranean City (2010) was perhaps the best of the bunch, but focusses too much on the reasons why the capital’s underground infrastructure was created and is rather light on descriptions (or illustrations) of the city’s varied underground architecture. In more recent years a number of other books have been published on the same subject but, sadly, most have been thoroughly disappointing. Garrett.For the last thirty years Trench & Hillman’s London Under London has remained the unsurpassed authority on subterranean London but today it seems distinctly dated and, in many instances, factually incorrect. Worth reading for those aficionados of London, but there are better books out there on this subject, in particular London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets by Peter Ackroyd and for a photographic record, Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital by Bradley L.

Rule has done a reasonable job on the book, and coming at it from a more historical slant helps, but it could have really done with some more photos. It is not a bad book, but it does suffer from being one of many books on this fascinating subject. She brings it up to date with an account of the 7/7 atrocities. She also covers a fair amount on the of the underground during the war, and the bunkers that were constructed and almost never used, as well as other disasters that has befallen the service. There is the tube of course, but there are rivers that have not seen the light of day for decades, a Post Office railway, unused tunnels under the river, and the ghost stations that are no longer used on the underground. In this Rule looks at the most common things that you would find if you were to remove the tarmac. But the streets of London hide many secrets. When they consider what is below, almost everybody knows the tube, that arterial network that brings people right into the centre of London. When most people think of London, they know all the famous sights, the Tower, Parliament, the palaces and the new skyscrapers that thrust into the sky.

London's Labyrinth by Fiona Rule