The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey

New
Hardcover
2016
$19.11

Crossrail, the `Elizabeth' line, with its spacious, light-filled stations, is simply the latest way of traversing a very old east-west route through what was once countryside to the old City core and out again. Visiting Stepney, Liverpool Street, Farringdon, Tottenham Court Road (alias St Giles-in-the-Fields) and the route along Oxford Street (alias the Way to Oxford and also Tyburn) this richly descriptive book traces the course of many of these historical journeys across time as well as space. Archaeology disinters layers of actual matter; one may also disinter the lives that walked where many of our streets, however altered in appearance, still run today. These people spoke the names of ancient farms, manors and slums that now belong to our squares and tube stations. They endured the cycle of the seasons as we do; they ate, drank, laughed, worked, prayed, despaired and hoped in what are essentially the same spaces we occupy today. As The Tunnel Through Time expertly shows, destruction and renewal are a constant rhythm in the city's story. `A forensic researcher... an imaginative historical sensibility and way of revisiting the past - as if approaching it through the back door - that has both subtlety and poignancy' Financial Times

Synopsis

Crossrail, the `Elizabeth' line, with its spacious, light-filled stations, is simply the latest way of traversing a very old east-west route through what was once countryside to the old City core and out again. Visiting Stepney, Liverpool Street, Farringdon, Tottenham Court Road (alias St Giles-in-the-Fields) and the route along Oxford Street (alias the Way to Oxford and also Tyburn) this richly descriptive book traces the course of many of these historical journeys across time as well as space. Archaeology disinters layers of actual matter; one may also disinter the lives that walked where many of our streets, however altered in appearance, still run today. These people spoke the names of ancient farms, manors and slums that now belong to our squares and tube stations. They endured the cycle of the seasons as we do; they ate, drank, laughed, worked, prayed, despaired and hoped in what are essentially the same spaces we occupy today. As The Tunnel Through Time expertly shows, destruction and renewal are a constant rhythm in the city's story. `A forensic researcher... an imaginative historical sensibility and way of revisiting the past - as if approaching it through the back door - that has both subtlety and poignancy' Financial Times

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Published: 01 Sep 2016
ISBN 10: 0701188650
ISBN 13: 9780701188658
Book Overview: The doyenne of London history travels over and under our great capital to reveal the layers of human existence underlying the Crossrail route as the new line through the heart of London takes shape

Media Reviews

Tindall has an eye for a good line. Her sources are eclectic and illuminating...The Tunnel Through Time is a book to savour. It is subtle, considered and powerfully evocative of London's changeful landscape. * Daily Telegraph *
Tindall is a sure-footed, even revelatory guide to the treasures of London that Crossrail has unintentionally brought to our notice. -- Jerry White * Guardian *
In this engaging book Gillian Tindall ... a veteran historian with an eye for the macabre, the quirky and the absurd ... deftly weaves together archaeology, social history, politics, myth, religion and philosophy -- Richard Morrison * The Times *
Ms Tindall skilfully blends ancient histories, archaeological findings and contemporary context * The Economist *
These underground stories remind us that buried spaces are places of protection as well as of the fearfully unknown, of hope and of political resistance, of science as well as of persistently chthonic mythology. There's always a quirky and sometimes a grisly journey to be had beneath our streets * Evening Standard *

Author Bio

Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London's Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.