Stephen Smith (1) (1961–)

p. 31 "...But shipping still preferred to steer clear and the river continued to fill with waste. As London has grown, so the Fleet has disappeared. It has been landscaped out of sight. This trend, affecting not only the Fleet but other lost rivers too, has had very little to do with sanitation and everything to do with the demand for land in central London. Broadly speaking, the covering of the Fleet has proceeded in the opposite direction to the flow of the river, beginning close to the point where it discharges into the Thames and retracing its route back towards its source."

p. 32 "...As London expanded, so did the demands on its sewers. In 1846, the pressure of trapped gases became too much for the Fleet and a section of it spectacularly blew up. Traffic couldn't move for effluent at King's Cross, three poorhouses in Clerkenwell were swept away in a tidal stream of sewage, and a Thames steamboat rammed into Blackfriars Bridge on a bow wave of crap.

If you've been leafing through this book in the hope that subterranean London will be a respite from the vulgarity of the world above, I'm afraid I can only apologise. Dear reader, it gets worse."

p. 51 "...A landlord called Jimmy Shaw claimed to buy 26,000 rats a year, at 3d each, from farm labourers in Enfield and Essex. Never likely to attract the Marquess of Queensberry's seal of approval, these bouts were bloodbaths involving dogs and scores of rats at a time."

p. 77 "...I had vivid childhood memories of visiting the Guildhall. ...School outings were always to one or other of London's celebrated institutions: St. Paul's, the Monument, the Stock Exchange. These excursions were referred to as city visits and they always culminated in the ritual of tea with the Lord Mayor in Guildhall crypt."

p. 85 "...In a few minutes, one of their peers, by tradition the smallest boy among them, would be dangled upside down over the river from a barge linked to no less a London personage than the Lord Mayor. The child would be lowered so that his head was within a foot or two of the water. From this precarious and tortuous position, he would then batter the river with a bamboo pole. This spectacle was a curtain-raiser to the annual rite of beating the bounds, the marking out of parish boundaries on Ascension Day."

p. 197-198 "...They recalled a previous job, in which they had been engaged to lift bodies from beneath the car park of Guy's Hospital near London Bridge. 'We found loads of arms and legs,' Mark told me.
'By themselves?'
'By themselves. People used to get paid to donate their limbs. The doctors would practice amputations on them and then get rid of them.'

p. 248-249 "...If the embalming was not carried out correctly, Kevin continued, watching our faces, there was a risk that the coffin could explode. There were gasps and giggles. Kevin went on quickly that the blasts were caused by a build-up of waste gasses in the caskets. Exploding coffins! We were all thinking the same thing. What noise would it make? What would it look like?...
...Kevin said that old fashioned clay pipes were used to forestall detonations...
...'Down here we only really make use of the pipe stems,' said Kevin. These were thin enough but also sufficiently hardy and discreet to be slotted into apertures in the caskets. Tin plates were slid aside like peepholes, and the clay pipes were put into the narrow punctures behind them. The decomposition gases were burnt off. I imagined Kensal Green flaring at night like an oilfield."

p. 296 "...Mount Pleasant was where I had paused in my walk along the route of the buried Fleet [river] and learned from Jane the guide that the locale had been named ironically, after a high-smelling rubbish dump."