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And of course Hugo explores the subterranean. In The Intestine of Leviathan (Volume 2 Part 5 Book 2 Sections 1-6 p. 856…it's that kind of book) we have the sewers of Paris:

"Tortuous, fissured, unpaved, cracking, interrupted by quagmires….such was, seen retrospectively, the ancient sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings of trenches, goosetracks, stars as if in mines, caecums, cul de sacs, arches covered with saltpetre…the digestive apparatus of Babylon."

This is of course the old sewer. It is interesting that it is through the new, modernised sewer that our hero was pursued; Hugo is remarkably keen to describe the modernity and cleanliness of this system. It is this very sewer down which I boated as a child, in 1959. (My father was a thorough tourist).

London too, at the same time, became alert to the viscera that lay beneath the city, proud of Bazalgette and his sewage systems. Peter Ackroyd quotes the mid nineteenth century Charles Knight:

"Imagine that this great capital of capitals should ever be what Babylon is—its very site forgotten—one could almost envy the delight with which the antiquaries of the future time would hear of a …London below the soil…(an inexplicable labyrinth…vast systems laid before them"

(At a bus stop outside Lambeth Town Hall I watch a man in a helmet heave up a metal plate and drop nonchalently underground.)

In the nineteenth century we learned to perceive the city as a tri-level entity. We also learned to keep up with the growing rapidity of change, of demolition and new construction. To say nothing of perceptual changes. Visual shock followed shock. A century or so earlier the great riverside eyesore, in the view of some, was the raw and repetitive new Houses of Parliament, (with the still to be finished stump of what was –wrongly- to become known as Big Ben) baldly lining the Thames; even today from Westminster Bridge it is indeed disconcertingly long and stark, the gothic detail only just sufficient to make it visually digestible.

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