Monthly arts column

Peter Ackroyd, stomping tie-less and overcoated round London, doesn't look like a great writer - and he certainly doesn't look like a TV presenter as he declaims his eloquent, resonant script. Yet one quickly falls under the spell of his BBC series 'London'. Both writer and presenter, he sounds much less stilted off-camera. But here he is celebrating his lifetime passion, and the heightened speech seems no less than appropriate.

The series was based on Ackroyd's 800-page 'London: the Biography', where his approach is by topic rather than chronology: London is for him a living organism. Shakespeare and his theatres, for example, get only passing attention, but there's a whole chapter on 'London as theatre'. Always, past and present co-exist - the TV series juxtaposed chilling TV recreations of the Gordon Riots with modern demonstrations in Trafalgar Square.

London's colour

A sumptuous coffee-table book, 'Illustrated London', accompanied the TV series. Its text is drawn from the larger biography and over 200 illustrations show you London through Ackroyd's eyes. There are four sections: 'In the Beginning', 'Red', 'Motley' and 'Black' - each an idiosyncratic way into Peter Ackroyd's concept. He tells us for example that red has always been London's colour, from its great city fires and vanished red sandstone city wall, to the familiar post-boxes and buses.

The series used a range of TV techniques, from occasionally unconvincing actors playing historical figures to the stunningly effective projection of ancient images on to modern walls - for example, peopling modern Whitechapel with the shades of the Ripper's victims.

Counterpoint

Peter Ackroyd's 'London' shares themes with all his writings, including poetry, biography and criticism, but most of all his remarkable novels, which in many ways resemble those of C.S. Lewis's friend Charles Williams. They possess an unerringly accurate sense of the past - both in their recreation of sights and sounds, and also in the meticulous recreation of the speech and writing of various periods. Milton, for example, in the speculative 'Milton in America'; the old East End in 'Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem'; early 18th-century diction perfectly caught in 'Hawksmoor'. Perhaps it's appropriate that one of his most brilliantly crafted recreations, 'Chatterton', revolves around the theme of forgery.

Ackroyd doesn't do historical novels. Past and present exist in a pro-vocative counterpoint that often sits loose to historical fact but is always plausible. 'Hawksmoor', for example, is two parallel narratives, one concerning Dyer, an 18th-century architect building seven churches in London, and the other the story of a 20th-century detective, Hawksmoor, investigating apparent ritual murders of children and tramps on the sites of Dyer's churches. Dyer's church-building involves esoteric, occult and murderous practices; Hawks-moor's investigations soon begin to resonate with the covert activities of Dyer. The fact that the historical architect who did build six of the fictional Dyer's churches was called Hawksmoor, and that London Bridge is just one of many ancient London buildings historically believed to have been built on the ritually-slaughtered bodies of children, only deepens the mystery and adds to the questions that the novel provokes.

Many of his books explore the theme of an ancient London beneath the present one. In his finest novel, 'The House of Doctor Dee', a man inherits a house that once belonged to the Elizabethan magician Dr. Dee. As he explores it he realises that it once fronted the Fleet River, and that in the cellar wall was a door once opening on to an older London: 'This old house is descending into the ground'.

The intimate interconnection between past and present is central to Ackroyd, and is a large element of his non-fiction. Walking London he is as interested in a patch of bare ground where a Wren church once stood, as in the great surviving structures of the past. The columns of the Bank of England remind him of the Roman edifice that once stood on the site - whose gods, he speculates, still defend London at time of trial.

Yet his work is not elegiac. I read 'Illustrated London' not long after reading Neil Hanson's 'The Dreadful Judgement', an unbearably sad roll-call of the mediaeval London that vanished in the Great Fire. But for Ackroyd, fires are part of what London is. London grows by change. Alone among great European cities, it possesses none of its Roman buildings. The loss of ancient buildings is the opportunity for today's London to be shaped. This view of history welcomes destruction, as part of growth.

Puritans

Such a view of history could have much to interest evangelicals; we are perhaps too often a people with a great future behind us, whose giants no longer walk the earth. Ackroyd's vision of history, welcoming change as part of the dynamic of life and acknowledging that past and present are inevitably intertwined, is in fact close to the perceptions of people like the early Puritans, who saw history as always liable to be invaded by God.

Peter Ackroyd, 'Illustrated London' (Chatto and Windus, 2004), hb. £25; 'London: The Biography' (Chatto and Windus, 2000), hb. £25, pb. £12.99 (look for cheaper deals on both books from e.g. book clubs and the internet).

An illustrated passion: Peter Ackroyd on London

London's colour

Counterpoint

Puritans

David Porter

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