View source for The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey by Gillian Tindall

{{infobox1
|title= The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey
|sort=Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey
|author=Gillian Tindall
|reviewer=John Van der Kiste
|genre=History
|summary= There are many different ways of taking a journey around or through London in words. This book traces the course of historical journeys across the city in time and space, examining how the areas above the new Crossrail route, the largest building project currently under construction in Europe offering high speed links across London, have changed over the centuries. 
|rating=4.5
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=320
|publisher=Vintage
|date=September 2017
|isbn=978-0099587798
|cover=Tindall_Tunnel
|aznuk=0099587793
|aznus=0099587793
}}
 
There are many different ways of taking a journey around or through London in words. This book traces the course of historical journeys across the city in time and space, examining how the areas above the new Crossrail route, the largest building project currently under construction in Europe offering high speed links across London, have changed over the centuries.
 
Ms Tindall, who has already written and published extensively on the history of the capital, draws on her knowledge and research as she follows the path of the rail tracks and links together archaeological discoveries from excavations carried out at many of the relevant sites to their history from various other sources. She starts with a route from the centre to the East End and beyond, and then goes in a westerly direction. In the process she focuses particularly on the key stations of Stepney, Whitechapel, Liverpool Street, Farringdon, Tottenham Court Road, and the route along Oxford Street, as well as on the changes witnessed by several generations of Londoners, the buildings that stood on the route, the lives of those who occupied them, and their social structures.
 
The sweeping journey across London thus becomes a series of short trips through the two thousand years of history which is currently being displaced (or, might be say, under construction if not reconstruction). During many demolitions and rebuildings, from the Victorian age and earlier, there have not surprisingly been a large number of discoveries and excavations of Roman roads, coins, weapons and skulls. Details have been revealed about some of the criminals from a later era who were hanged, drawn and quartered, burnt and beheaded at Tyburn and elsewhere, and about plague pits along the route. One such discovery tells us that Liverpool Street Station is on top of a Roman road that crossed the river, with recent finds there including the Roman equivalent of horseshoes, strapped on rather than nailed to the hooves, and a collection of human skulls probably washed downstream during a flood from a Roman cemetery located north of Finsbury Circus.

St Giles-in-the-Fields, the western entry point into London proper and now known better as Tottenham Court Road, has a similarly fascinating story to tell. In the twelfth century it was the site of a leper colony, and in the eighteenth it was a notorious slum. Today it is home to one of the major underground stations and the Centre Point skyscraper, although in the process much of St Giles High Street has gone. There is also much to be said about the transformation of the East End, for centuries a largely rural little populated area that gradually became a densely packed working class area, until altered beyond recognition with a dense forest of tower blocks. In the process many historic sites and whole communities were swept aside. The author has much to say about such remorseless obliteration, by planners, builders of railway termini and other large construction projects, the displacement of thousands of Londoners by railway building, and town planners who transformed the City just after the Second World War. Likewise the musically-inclined among us will regret what seems to be the imminent and inevitable end of the seventeenth-century Denmark Street, off Charing Cross Road, London's beloved 'Tin Pan Alley'.
 
Large swathes of the city have regularly undergone partial destruction, whether thanks to the Great Plague and the fire of Charles II's reign in the seventeenth century, or to the Luftwaffe and then city planners three centuries later. Yet destruction and renewal are a constantly recurring process in the city's history. Two thousand years of history, from Roman times to the present, are undergoing transformation. A good case in point is that of the Walbrook, the most deeply hidden of London's many long-buried rivers.
 
In less than three hundred pages this provides us with a fascinating, compellingly readable exploration through the historical highways and byways of the metropolis under the feet of many a Londoner.
 
As we would expect, many other contemporary authors have recently written on similar aspects of the capital. You might also enjoy the work of another well-versed expert on its hidden aspects, [[London Under by Peter Ackroyd]]; the same author's [[London: The Concise Biography by Peter Ackroyd|London: The Concise Biography]], at around 600 pages a rather fuller read than the title might suggest; or one focusing particularly on a bygone era, [[London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750 by Robert O Bucholz and Joseph P Ward]].
 
{{amazontext|amazon=0099587793}}
{{amazonUStext|amazon=0099587793}}
 
{{commenthead}}