Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (review)

David Pike's Subterranean Cities takes our understanding of the Victorian city as an imagined space underground, giving it new depth and dimension. It contrasts the different cultural responses to the new underworld that the improved technologies of the nineteenth century created in Paris and London. In doing so Pike transforms our conception not only of the Victorian city but of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century city too, adding a new means to investigate the cultural meaning of "space." For some time now, thanks to pioneers like Doreen Massey in her Space, Place and Gender (1993), "space" has been understood as a complex of social relations filled with "power, meaning and symbolism" (Massey 2). Despite this realization, our concept of Victorian city space has often been an impoverished one of, as the Italian Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia describes, "the city lying like a doormat at ground level" (qtd. in Pike 98).

In Pike's hands, nineteenth-century Paris and London become ever-developing, three-dimensional cities, not just in their physical form but in their social and imagined nature as well. In these subterranean spaces, the enclosed realm of the socially rejected and the dead contends with a new modern, clean, technologically-controlled world. Here Pike is clearly drawing on the long-established "Descent into Hell" literature from Dante's Inferno (ca. 1314) to Primo Levi's If This is a Man (1959); he is also drawing on Victorian narratives of the places of the poor, what John Hollingshead calls the "blind-alleys in coal-mines, the slimy passages of district sewers, anything that is dark and filthy" (John Hollingshead, Ragged London in 1861, ed. by Anthony S. Wohl [London: Dent, 1986] 11).

For Pike, what lies beneath these cities is not only shaped by the surface world, but metaphorically contains some of the darkly imagined fears of modern city society. This realm represents contemporary capitalism and its abuses, a factor revealed in visions of "verticalized (social) space," from John Leech's famous 1843 Punch illustration of opulent English gentry and bourgeoisie above the exploited working people confined below ground. This book is, in effect, a cultural archaeology of London and Paris during this key period of their subterranean development. Pike focuses on three locations where new forms of underground space first developed during the Victorian period: the underground railway, the modern necropolis, and the sewers. The changing representational meaning of each of these subterranean areas is analysed in three separate chapters of the book.

Starting with a consideration of the "New Life Underground," Pike charts how the London underground railway developed from being seen as "a descent into Hades" by one of its earliest passengers, to a middle-class, rational, sanitized space acting as a popularly-used conduit between the city and the suburban countryside. Familiar images of the underground feature in aspects of British life as diverse as Badger's underground home in The Wind in the Willows (1907), the famous pastoral Metroland advertising posters, and, my favourite, the radio panel game of Mornington Crescent, based on the names of London's many underground railway stations. In contrast Pike sees the Paris Metro as characterized by a "fantastic, ambivalent modernity" associated with the plebeian masses and death (55); the Metro was dubbed the "Necropolitain" after a series of accidents in 1903 and 1911.

In the following two chapters, Pike focuses on subterranean spaces that are "the flipside of the rational underground" portrayed in his vision of the London Tube (4). In the case of the necropolis and the sewer, the needs of modern city dwellers brought about a wave of improvement. Ancient churchyards and catacombs were replaced with large cemeteries, segregated by social class and religion. Filthy cess pits and contaminated rivers gave way to magnificently engineered sewers. And yet after all this, the imagined world of the dead retained mythic associations with Gothic nightmare, the troglodyte, and pastoral subterranean caverns of the...