London Clay: journeys in the deep city

London Clay is an impressionistic survey of London and its history, filtered through the prism of the underlying geological strata. It is at once personal and overarching, meandering from pre-Roman to Victorian, south London to north, via what Chivers (a poet by trade) calls ‘eight documentary essays’. Each essay tackles a locality, often focusing on the course of a ‘forgotten’ river and its attendant mixture of alluvium, gravel, and clay. For instance, Chapter 3 traces the environs of the Walbrook: from an artificial mound in Shoreditch (created from rubble during the building of the Boundary Estate at the beginning of the 20th century), past a Roman cemetery at Finsbury Circus (