Falling between the cracks

London is moving... literally

Alex Chinneck’s "Six Pins and Half a Dozen Needles" installation in Hammersmith in 2017.

If you were with us back in November of 2021, you might remember we published the first of our London book gift guides. In the non-fiction part of that guide we recommended Tom Chiver’s London Clay, a book which “uncovers the geological mysteries that burst up through the pavement and bubble to the surface of our streets.”

London book gift guide 2021

That book is, as you might expect, named after an actual geological formation (there’s also a Farrow & Ball colour called London Clay, but we’re almost certain the geological formation got there first).

London Clay is a “stiff and bluish” clay that’s found right across the London Basin, but it was the presence of this “soft yet stable” substance under the city itself that allowed for the Underground to stretch so quickly across north London (next time you hear someone moaning about the lack of Tube coverage south of the river you can push your glasses up your nose and tell them tha…