London is my city, the one I was born in and where I grew up. So as a geologist, I was thrilled at the opportunity to read and review London Clay.

No city can survive without water, and lots of it. Today we take the stuff for granted: turn a tap and it gushes out. But it wasn't always so. For centuries London, one of the largest and richest cities in the world, struggled to supply its citizens with reliable, clean water. The Mercenary River tells the story of that struggle from the middle ages to the present day. 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. 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. It's entertaining, enlightening and deeply moving. You will learn something about London and a good deal about life." 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!Some things from the past are uncovered - a trove of Roman skulls, the basic outline of an Elizabethan theatre - but others will never be found or will be found, studied and then returned to the ground to be lost again. There are fascinating geological anomalies still imperfectly understood. Based on new research, it tells a tale of remarkable technological, scientific and organisational breakthroughs; but also a story of greed and complacency, high finance and low politics. Among the breakthroughs was the picturesque New River, neither new nor a river but a state of the art aqueduct completed in 1613 and still part of London's water supply: the company that built it was one of the very first modern business corporations, and also one of the most profitable. London water companies were early adopters of steam power for their pumps. And Chelsea Waterworks was the first in the world to filter the water it supplied its customers: the same technique is still used to purify two-thirds of London's drinking water. But for much of London's history water had to be rationed, and the book also chronicles our changing relationship with water and the way we use it. 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. 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. 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:

The Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie (meaning over the river) which has witnessed over 1000 years of London history,stands at the oldest crossing-point of the River Thames, at what was for many centuries the only entrance to the City of London. A lyrical meditation on landscapes and cities, vivid reportage and a memoir. And also a beautifully realised and moving read.' Financial Times Part way through the book I find out that the author is indeed a poet and this shines through in the writing style of the book. This is social history commentary of significant importance for both now and the future. One minute you are reading about Chaucer and the next minute recent history, with the London bombings of 7/7 and even the current pandemic. 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. Exactly what is more or less permanent or transitory is unclear. The course of ancient rivers become shifted into sewers while more recent waste threatens to degrade imperfectly and become lodged in the geology.

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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."