Peter Ackroyd, stomping tie-less and overcoated round London, doesn't look like a great writer - and he certainly doesn't look like a TV presenter as he declaims his eloquent, resonant script. Yet one quickly falls under the spell of his BBC series 'London'. Both writer and presenter, he sounds much less stilted off-camera. But here he is celebrating his lifetime passion, and the heightened speech seems no less than appropriate.
The series was based on Ackroyd's 800-page 'London: the Biography', where his approach is by topic rather than chronology: London is for him a living organism. Shakespeare and his theatres, for example, get only passing attention, but there's a whole chapter on 'London as theatre'. Always, past and present co-exist - the TV series juxtaposed chilling TV recreations of the Gordon Riots with modern demonstrations in Trafalgar Square.
London's colour
A sumptuous coffee-table book, 'Illustrated London', accompanied the TV series. Its text is drawn from the larger biography and over 200 illustrations show you London through Ackroyd's eyes. There are four sections: 'In the Beginning', 'Red', 'Motley' and 'Black' - each an idiosyncratic way into Peter Ackroyd's concept. He tells us for example that red has always been London's colour, from its great city fires and vanished red sandstone city wall, to the familiar post-boxes and buses.
