London Crawling

[Erik T. Burns]

foax:
excellent story from the Telegraph about London's sewers by Sukhdev Sandhu.
no alligators, nor even rumors thereof (it's hairballs these "flushers" are
worried about) but nevertheless a pynchonesque trip into the bowels.
etb

snippets:

The sewers are often imagined as an unpatrolled wilderness. They are
imagined - and correspondingly desired - as the mephitic opposite of tamed
civil society. They are meant to cancel it out. In truth, they mirror rather
than reverse what goes on above ground.

...

I never did find the giant hairballs I was looking for. Apparently they
don't exist. I shouldn't have been surprised: the sewers of London
accumulate myths as much as they do fat. They are built out of a sediment of
gossip, whisper, untruth, longing. Subterranea is alluring because it is
thought, by autodidact dreamers and unstable visionaries, to contain the
solution to the city, to store its hidden wiring.

...

The sewers are more than negation or black absence. They are rich in fragile
beauty. The brickwork, some of it more than 200 years old, amazes all who
work below ground.

full article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/07/08/ftsewers08.x
ml&page=1