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Neverwhere
BBC Video, £19.99
also a novel by Neil Gaiman (not an adaptation)
BBC Books trade paperback £9.99
also available as a limited edition hardback and as a regular paperback.
2011: DVD and Author’s Preferred Text now available (and worth having)
Review by David Alexander (1996)

Labyrinthine London, subterranean London, a city of crypts, forgotten air ducts, abandoned tube tunnels, Victorian sewers, and underground rivers; an occult network of spaces, territories, ‘manors’, ‘patches’, interzones. A city of secrets, hidden places, buried histories, alternate geographies. A heterotopia, in other words, an impossible world, constructed from fragments, traces, false memories and bad faith.

In the mapping of such a city we are irresistibly drawn to the twilight figure of the flaneur the loner, the walker, the drifter; to the idea of the derive, a ‘passional journey out of the ordinary’, an exploration of a previously unknown, perhaps even uncanny city; and to the construction of a psychogeography, a reimagined or reconceptualised city, figured as a composition, a collage, a patchwork of juxtapositions and superimpositions, a complex and tortuous network of spaces at once real and unreal.

The flaneur, the walker, the nomad, drifts the streets, the subways, the back alleys, the wastelots; stumbles across bomb sites, along towpaths, down walkways; happens on unexpected short cuts, burnt out churches, empty warehouses, lost docks; finds new approaches to old rivers, original perspectives on familiar landmarks; and finds himself, shockingly, in another world . . .

Thomas De Quincey reported on just such a trip:
Some of these rambles led me to great distances . . . And sometimes, in my attempts to steer homewards upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys without soundings, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without obvious outlets or thoroughfares as must baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney coachmen, I could almost have believed, at times that I must be the discoverer of some of these terra incognita and doubted that they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.

It falls to the flaneur, then, to discover (or uncover) this decentred, post-Kantian city, where categories are bent and distorted, and history becomes geography and geography history. In moving through this world, the flaneur seems to be continually crossing borders, transgressing territories, pushing back limits; and in doing so, he opens up not simply space but time, not just the physical but the metaphysical. Here be dragons.

The Neil Gaiman-scripted Neverwhere is just such a journey . . . note, for a start, the spatial-temporal confusion of the title. Its protagonist, young businessman Richard Mayhew, is a flaneur of sorts . . . and, through his surname, an echo of another Mayhew who explored, in his turn, an ‘other’ Victorian London a hundred years ago. Stumbling across the injured Door, he enters another space, another time; London Below, a world that isn’t simply under London, in its sewers, closed tube stations, interred rivers, but above London, around London, somehow wrapped up in the very fabric of the city itself. It’s a set of impossible and dizzying spaces juxtaposed with and superimposed upon the more familiar city of tourists and red buses and suited businessmen and fast food emporia.

Neverwhere is structured and organised as a derive, albeit one with a definitive purpose or set of purposes in mind. The first episode is Door, the second Knightsbridge, and the third Earls Court to Islington. The narrative itself, overtly a quest story, maps London Below, delineates a set of overlapping spaces and territories . . . we learn early on that politically London Below is a set of baronies and fiefdoms, ruled over by families, of discrete but connected territories that can only be entered by mutual agreement between parties.

As Mayhew explores these areas he experiences a whole set of spatial dislocations. In episode one, guided by the Marquis de Carabas, Mayhew climbs a shaft from the sewers to find himself, unexpectedly and bafflingly, on a rooftop opposite the Old Bailey. Shortly afterward, following a trip across the rooftops and down along more subterranean passageways, he and the Marquis emerge from a broom cupboard to arrive at the front door of Mayhew’s flat. Later, in episode three, and now a part of a group of explorers and questers, Mayhew and the others are on their way to Earl’s Court; the group waits on the platform of a Central Line tube station, Mayhew protesting that ‘Earl’s Court isn’t on the Central Line.’ Actually, the Earl’s Court refers to an eponymous baron whose court just happens to reside in a tube car. Mayhew learns that Earl’s Court is a node point for a set of short cuts to the Angel Islington . . . again, London’s physical geography and topography is confounded and subverted. This compression and expansion, warping and wefting of space, is a recurring theme throughout the series. The house on Down Street (episode four) contains streets, a bottomless pit or two, one of which is descended via an iron stairway, and a labyrinth, the ‘oldest part of London’, where a beast lurks.

Neverwhere, then, is not just another fantasy series. It’s an alternative (psycho-)geography, an attempt to map a heterotopian London, a phantastic and ‘other’ city, both a part of and apart from the ‘real’ London. The least we might say is that geography has never been quite so interesting. •

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