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London’s Underworld takes us on the nightmarish last journeys of condemned criminals to the gallows at Tyburn. We enter death-trap eighteenth century prisons, one of which the novelist Henry Fielding described as a ‘prototype of hell’. We walk the crowded streets of Victorian London with its swarms of prostitutes and follow the ingenious villains who carried out the first great train robbery in 1854. We see the rise and fall of the interwar racecourse gangs and the bloody battle for control of the Wes End. This fascinating book illustrates how crime in the capital has evolved from the extreme violence of the early eighteenth century to the vastly more complex and lucrative, but no less brutal, gangland of today.
A thrilling exposé and a considered anthropological review of London's seedy underbelly.
True Crime.
In this vividly descriptive short study, Peter Ackroyd tunnels down through the geological layers of London, meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness and excavating the lore and mythology beneath the surface. There is a Bronze Age trackway below the Isle of Dogs, Anglo-Saxon graves rest under St. Pauls, and the monastery of Whitefriars lies beneath Fleet Street. To go under London is to penetrate history, and Ackroyd's book is filled with the stories unique to this underworld: the hydraulic device used to lower bodies into the catacombs in Kensal Green cemetery; the door in the plinth of the statue of Boadicea on Westminster Bridge that leads to a huge tunnel packed with cables for gas, water, and telephone; the sulphurous fumes on the Underground's Metropolitan Line. Highly imaginative and delightfully entertaining, London Under is Ackroyd at his best.
'Lifts the lid on London gangs of the last two centuries' THE WEEKLY NEWS 'Lays bare the truth behind the capital's underworld far before the Krays and the Richardsons became well known' THE WHARF 'Incredible real-life tales' SOUTHWARK NEWS Long before the Kray twins, London was plagued by gang warfare as vicious as anything that was to come. From the 19th century onwards, violent mobs fought pitched battles for territory and local pride. The Bethnal Green Boys hunted Hackney's Broadway Boys, Clerkenwell took on Somers Town, the Red Hands prowled Deptford and the Silver Hatchets terrorised Islington, while the police and judiciary seemed powerless to stop them. The first-ever history of these intriguing street mobs traces them from Jonathan Wild, the archetype for Dickens' Fagin, to sprawling super-gangs like the Titanic and the Elephant Boys. It tells the bloody story of the racecourse wars, when Darby Sabini and Billy Kimber slugged it out for control of gambling pitches, and of such big hitters as George Sage, the guv'nor of Camden Town, Dodger Mullins and the McDonald brothers. Eventually these local 'firms' spawned notorious gangsters such as Jack Spot, Billy Hill and Johnny Carter, who carved out organised crime rackets across the capital. Gangs of London is a riveting journey through the dark underbelly of one of the world's great cities.
From Roman burial rites to the horrors of the plague, from the founding of the great Victorian cemeteries to the development of cremation and the current approach of metropolitan society towards death and bereavement -- including more recent trends to displays of collective grief and the cult of mourning, such as that surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales -- NECROPOLIS: LONDON AND ITS DEAD offers a vivid historical narrative of this great city's attitude to going the way of all flesh. As layer upon layer of London soil reveals burials from pre-historic and medieval times, the city is revealed as one giant grave, filled with the remains of previous eras -- pagan, Roman, medieval, Victorian. This fascinating blend of archaeology, architecture and anecdote includes such phenomena as the rise of the undertaking trade and the pageantry of state funerals; public executions and bodysnatching. Ghoulishly entertaining and full of fascinating nuggets of information, Necropolis leaves no headstone unturned in its exploration of our changing attitudes to the deceased among us. Both anecdotal history and cultural commentary, Necropolis will take its place alongside classics of the city such as Peter Ackroyd's LONDON.
This book surveys the lives and experiences of hundreds of thousands of eighteenth-century non-elite Londoners in the evolution of the modern world.
This book offers an original and exciting analysis of the concept of the criminal underworld. Print culture, policing and law enforcement, criminal networks, space and territory are explored here through a series of case studies taken from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.