London re-enchanted. From the heart of the old city to the distant edgelands, London Clay is a wonderfully multi-layered meander through a landscape at once familiar and strange. A portrait of a haunted, mysterious city and a moving work of personal memoir.”

If you have any interest in what lies below our capital city, this is definitely worth a read. Even if you have no interest in what lies below our capital city, this is still worth a read – Chivers’ clever blending of disparate elements and crafting of language is a pleasure to read. The relationship between underlying geology, the shreds of the natural to be found at the margins of the city's structures and the human community and its detritus are core to the book even if that relationship is never formally laid out for analysis. Seeing how popular liminal spaces have become online, was the idea of liminality somehow important to the book? Of course Chivers presents a lot of tangible facts and expresses feelings (about his family past and present) but there is something else lurking behind all this, an amalgam of 'Sorge' (an appropriate German word), sadnss, love and anxiety. Maybe a dash of fatalism not helped by COVID. Macfarlane's book (though good) sometimes lost its way in the standard issue preachiness of the liberal intellectual. Macfarlane's poetic element can become almost a parody of itself at times, the tone portentous. Chivers has less ambition but achieves it more authentically.

One person who knows is Tom Chivers. Years ago, Chivers spread a street map over his bedroom floor and started colouring in the different strata — the silts, clays and gravels that underly our city. You often mention banks and the influence of finance in London. Would you say that the book is partly a commentary on the role of money in London’s history? This book arrived at a perfect moment for me; I was listening to Laura Maiklem’s excellent ‘Mudlarking’ and in the zone for thinking about the layers of history sitting under London. I am a huge fan of London and fascinated by its long history, so launched myself into this book with enthusiasm. The book weaves the incidents of the life of a thirty-something catholic family man into walks through the debris that is London and with the geology, archaeology and history involved in tracing eight of the (mostly) more neglected underground (mostly) rivers and streams of the capital. I seem to have a fascination for the abandoned parts of our towns and cities – just this week I’ve been watching Secrets of the London Underground on Yesterday – so London Clay is right in my wheelhouse.

I don’t write poetry anymore. I started in my teens, and I see that as training. Training in language and training in sound. There are leaps of imagination I’m asking the reader to follow me on in the book, which probably come from that training as a poet. I think the surprise of that I would see as a poetic technique that I’ve taken into long form. An absorbing and poetic psycho-geology of London [...] an immersive deep trawl among the city's many layers, unearthing medieval Essex rebels, contemporary mudlarks of the lower Thames, lost rivers of silt and sewage, the Shard as Sauron's Dark Tower, and the existential angst of living in the Anthropocene epoch [...] Fascinating."The prose is an interesting balance between experience and lyrical description. The combination results in a visual journey as you walk along beside him, feel his energy - as if you are the silent observer. The voyeur of time, travel, space and presence. Time and time again, consciously or not, Chivers shows us streets, wastelands, rivers clogged with waste and pollution and 'nature' present but struggling to survive and break through despite the best efforts of its guardians and its underlying geographical reality. London Clay is a very original book, it’s a collection of essays about parts of London beneath the surface. These are the bits you don’t see in guidebooks and on postcards. It’s very real; it includes the graffiti and the dog turds as well as the more attractive and magical parts. There’s a great mix of factual/social and personal history, with the author sharing the city’s history as well as his own reflections. This makes the book very interesting and it will appeal to a broad audience. It’s not just a factual textbook or a personal memoir but a mixture of both. It’s also written in a very poetic style, I love this line about looking out at London from a high vantage point: Harriet Hawkins is Professor of GeoHumanities, and the founding Co-Director of the Centre for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The idea of secret rivers, enclosed in the sewer system across London, exerting their influence on the city unbeknownst to the residents above has a sense of the mystical about it – helped, no doubt, by my reading Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series! The only complaint is that the maps are pretty and schematic but it is not always easy to follow the travels unless you have a street finder at hand. There are also times when the precise course of the journey appears a little unclear and does not seem to match the cast of the map. More than a century and a half after the stream disappeared, most Londoners are unlikely to have heard of it, or to know that, where it joined the Thames, the Fleet was once almost 100 metres wide. Residents might also be surprised to learn that Westminster Abbey, where monarchs and other worthies are interred, was built on what in the 13th century was an island. The city is littered with such transformations and unexpected tales. Tom Chiversis a writer, publisher and arts producer. He was born in 1983 in south London. He has released two pamphlets and two collections of poetry, the latest being Dark Islands (Test Centre, 2015). His poems have been anthologized in Dear World & Everything In It and London: A History in Verse. He was shortlisted for the Michael Marks and Edwin Morgan Poetry Awards and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2011.

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Westminster is now the centre of our government and establishment, but it used to be a river delta in its past. He heads down into a sewer to see the River Fleet and has to shower a long time after that experience. If you know where and how to look there are still echoes of the roads that the Romans first used, Watling Street, Stane Street as well as hints of more recent London, as he searches for the lost island of Bermondsey and sees if the Olympic Park has eradicated the ancient causeway that crossed the marshes. At the very start of the book, Tom leads us on one of his walking tours through London, and that’s what the whole book has the feel of – that you’re heading off on a walk with a guide who knows what they’re talking about and whose love of the city shines through. It makes is a very comfortable read, with a real sense of familiarity, after all, we probably know the surface of a lot of these places, even if it’s just from TV, and delving deeper into the ground and the history is really fascinating. Chivers is not gloomy - in fact, he rarely wears his non-family feelings on his sleeve and the general air is one of nostalgia and love for his city - but you sense his own awareness that things are not quite right without his ever actually putting his finger openly on what is wrong. Will open readers' eyes to what is around and below them [...] Its delight in exploration is matched by a thoughtful meditation on grief."

Tom Chivers, with the forensic eye of an investigator, the soul of a poet, is an engaging presence; a guide we would do well to follow.' Iain Sinclair It may, of course, be a bit cheeky of a thirty-something to offer us a memoir of a rather ordinary life but that is where the charm of the book lies. The ordinary life, the humanity of Chivers, being a Londoner, a sense of place and a sense of the past combine to give a feel for London today. Tom Chivers brings a poet's sensibility to this book about the hidden parts of the capital, mixing the past with the present, the known with the unknown and his personal story with social history and geology.' Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other This book is an interesting animal, as it is not a memoir, it is not a text book or a book of poetry – it is very much all of these things and has elements of social and personal history within it. I'm interested in the history of places, what stood before, what happened when and this book has this and more. The title I think is a little misleading, making it sound more like a staid geology book than the absolute joy it is.

His non-fiction debut London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City will be published by Transworld/Doubleday in September 2021. He is represented by Sophie Scard at United Agents.