London Uncanny

From Kensington to the East End, under candle light, gas lamp and then Neon signs, London is both a bustling physical metropolis and a stirring psychic encounter. The most depraved depictions of the city in fiction, film, poetry, television and theatre have irrevocably merged with the reality of its dark history, creating a phantasmagoria defined by murder, vice and the unnatural. In this panoptic look at England's capital at its most eerie and macabre, Clive Bloom takes a tour of Gothic London's uncanny literature, arcane events and its infamous and imagined geographies.

From Jack the Ripper, Thomas de Quincey, Aleister Crowley, the prophetess Joanna Southcott, and Johnny 'Rotten' Lydon to Sweeney Todd, Count Dracula, and the characters of Neil Gaiman's London Below, these are the figures that populate a city lost in fog and blind alleys, where the dead can be raised, the living sacrificed and the clandestine allowed to thrive. Suturing together fact and fantasy, London Uncanny presents the urban landscape of the capital as a space of wonder and madness, haunted by its past and haunting the present. Stalking through disease and degeneracy, death and murder, spiritualism, lunacy and the occult, Bloom crafts a singular, integrated concept of a London where dreams and nightmares meet.