There is a city inside of London, not above ground but deep below. It is what London used to be, centuries of relics and forgotten streets carefully arranged into a labyrinthine amalgamation of remnants. It is everything that London wants you to forget.
Take the Circle Line from Bayswater at 4.36AM on the third Tuesday of August. There will be an announcement for a stop that isn't on the maps, between Farringdon and Barbican, and nobody else will get off at that stop except you and three pigeons. Wherever there is the slightest chance of food, there will be pigeons. Do not follow them.
A small mercy of this stop is that, if you are wise and do not follow the pigeons, there is only one way to go. It leads you to the old High Street, now a musty row of shops that you shouldn't enter, no matter how inviting they may seem or whoever you hear calling to you from the inside. The residents of Old London crave company as intensely as only lost souls can.
If you choose to venture into the lesser inhabited areas of Old London, be prepared to see creatures that should be extinct, and by all biological surveys very much are. Flocks of reptilian birds merge with the pigeons, gathering around rotting piles of something unidentifiable, never stay to stare at them for too long. Don't let them notice you.
Further still from long dead creatures are the old fences, rows and rows and mazes of rows of nothing but dividing lines that beckon you in so innocently to wander through and see what's on the other side. The deeper into this particular maze you get, the more people you will find until you end up in a queue behind three young women who you saw on the news the other week, having been killed in a car crash.
New London forgets them but Old London treasures them all.
Take the Circle Line from Bayswater at 4.36AM on the third Tuesday of August. There will be an announcement for a stop that isn't on the maps, between Farringdon and Barbican, and nobody else will get off at that stop except you and three pigeons. Wherever there is the slightest chance of food, there will be pigeons. Do not follow them.
A small mercy of this stop is that, if you are wise and do not follow the pigeons, there is only one way to go. It leads you to the old High Street, now a musty row of shops that you shouldn't enter, no matter how inviting they may seem or whoever you hear calling to you from the inside. The residents of Old London crave company as intensely as only lost souls can.
If you choose to venture into the lesser inhabited areas of Old London, be prepared to see creatures that should be extinct, and by all biological surveys very much are. Flocks of reptilian birds merge with the pigeons, gathering around rotting piles of something unidentifiable, never stay to stare at them for too long. Don't let them notice you.
Further still from long dead creatures are the old fences, rows and rows and mazes of rows of nothing but dividing lines that beckon you in so innocently to wander through and see what's on the other side. The deeper into this particular maze you get, the more people you will find until you end up in a queue behind three young women who you saw on the news the other week, having been killed in a car crash.
New London forgets them but Old London treasures them all.
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