Discover the secret history of life above the Elizabeth line

The Tunnel Through Time

The doyenne of London history travels over and under our great capital to reveal the layers of human existence underlying the Crossrail route as the new line through the heart of London takes shape

Newly opened by Queen Elizabeth II herself, discover the history and secret stories of the people who've lived above London's newest trainline. 
 
Crossrail, or the 'Elizabeth' line, is just the latest way of traversing the very old east-west route through the former countryside, into the capital, and out again. Throughout The Tunnel Through Time, renowned historian Gillian Tindall uncovers the lives of those who walked this ancient path. 
 
These people spoke the names of ancient farms, manors and slums that now belong to our squares and tube stations. Visiting Stepney, Liverpool Street, Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, Tindall traces the course of many of these historical journeys across time as well as space. 
 
'Enchanting' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Deftly weaves together archaeology, social history, politics, myth, religion and philosophy' The Times 
 
'Fully of lively vignettes' Spectator

Tindall has an eye for a good line. Her sources are eclectic and illuminating...The Tunnel Through Time is a book to savour. It is subtle, considered and powerfully evocative of London's "changeful" landscape.

Tindall is a sure-footed, even revelatory guide to the treasures of London that Crossrail has unintentionally brought to our notice.

In this engaging book Gillian Tindall ... a veteran historian with an eye for the macabre, the quirky and the absurd ... deftly weaves together archaeology, social history, politics, myth, religion and philosophy

Ms Tindall skilfully blends ancient histories, archaeological findings and contemporary context

These underground stories remind us that buried spaces are places of protection as well as of the fearfully unknown, of hope and of political resistance, of science as well as of persistently chthonic mythology. There’s always a quirky and sometimes a grisly journey to be had beneath our streets

[Gillian Tindall] has long been interested in resurrecting the lives of some of the hosts of the London dead who, as she says, lie "under our busy, careless feet". By following Crossrail's route, both below and over ground ... she has found a new and rewarding way of doing so

Tindall delivers a fine, concise account of the early history of the Tube… In its research, its anecdotes and its historical imagination, The Tunnel Through Time is a readable journey across a two millennium-old route.

[The Tunnel Through Time is] absorbing.

The hidden tales she recounts are the distilled results of knowledge acquired over decades by a veteran historian with an eye for the macabre, the quirky and the absurd…she deftly weaves together archaeology, social history, politics, myth, religion and philosophy…expect to be constantly surprised, even if you think you know London well.

Meticulously researched and full of lively vignettes.

What differentiates Tindall…is the sheer scale of her enterprise and the breadth of her knowledge.

These underground stories remind us that buried spaces are places of protection as well as of the fearfully unknown, of hope and of political resistance, of science as well as of persistently chthonic mythology. There’s always a quirky and sometimes a grisly journey to be had beneath our streets.

The book is at its best when Tindall is concerned with the city’s guts, the workings, when she lets herself witness this great transformation of our own time. Transport aficionados will appreciate her attention to detail while general readers will be heartened to be introduced to this mysterious world.

[Tindall] has written an absorbing account… This is a work of love and scholarship.

A thoughtful and engaging interpretation of London’s history through metaphors of tunneling and excavation.

Fascinating… One of her strengths is to discover historical first-person narratives, and this, plus her extensive research, make her book an entertaining and informative read

Engaging… It’s an entertaining book. Crossrail should stock copies on its trains, ready for the inevitable day when signal failure traps thousands of us between Bedlam and a plague pit.

Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London's Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.

Crossrail, the ‘Elizabeth’ line, is simply the latest way of traversing a very old east–west route through what was once countryside to the city and out again. Visiting Stepney, Liverpool Street, Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, Gillian Tindall traces the course of many of these historical journeys across time as well as space. 
 
The Tunnel Through Time uncovers the lives of those who walked where many of our streets still run. These people spoke the names of ancient farms, manors and slums that now belong to our squares and tube stations. They endured the cycle of the seasons as we do; they ate, drank, worked and laughed in what are essentially the same spaces we occupy today. As Tindall expertly shows, destruction and renewal are a constant rhythm in London’s story.

Three Houses, Many Lives

The story of three houses, which represent the changing face of England over four centuries, told through the lives of the people who lived in them.

With a detective’s forensic patience and the narrative ear of a novelist, Tindall unpicks the histories of these houses

Gillian Tindall is a tapestry maker. She finds patterns in history – woven from close research into people and places – that no one else would have the persistence and insight to pursue. In this unique and often joyful chronicle, she interweaves the stories of three houses which marked crucial stages in her own life

A gentle, yet rigorous examination of the story of three historic buildings...each chapter is an engaging meditation on English history. Thanks to Ms Tindall the stories of all three are better understood than at any point in their history, and all have their place in a perfectly crafted book

Tindall is a forensic researcher [and] has an imaginative historical sensibility and her way of revisiting the past – as if approaching it through the back door – has both subtlety and poignancy. The names of Tindall’s inhabitants may sometimes pass in a blur but together they form a roll-call of the predecessors of modern Britain. There are of course thousands of other houses like the three in this touching book...whose stories will never be told

Gillian Tindall is gifted with an archeological imagination. [She] circles around these houses, bringing out their light, colour and preciousness by employing a method that crosses genres. This book is an education in many things

A triumph over time and death, proof that the past is all around us

Her excavation of the histories of the ordinary people who lived in each place is fascinating and she vividly brings the past to life via domestic minutiae

Subtle, delicate and slightly dotty. Tindall is attracted to the idea of lives overlooked and deeds mislaid…this intriguing, imaginative book is very much my cup of tea

Three houses - a Cotswold vicarage, a one-time girls' boarding school and a Jacobean house. Gillian Tindall explores the lives of those who once lived there, and through her research she is able to reveal four centuries of English history. Tindall has sensitivity to the past like few others; her approach to history is delicate, detailed and revealing. For my money, this is one of the history leads of the year

The big surprise of this book is the fascinating thread of memories which holds the narrative together

She is a writer with a quiet genius for local history and empathetic understanding of ordinary people

It’s a worthy project, but in the most fascinating way

Tindall transforms bricks and mortar into fascinating social history

Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London's Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. Her latest book, The Tunnel through Time, traced the history of the Crossrail route, the forthcoming ‘Elizabeth’ line. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.

‘A major achievement' Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield 
 
A Cotswold vicarage. 
 
A former girls' boarding school in Surrey. 
 
A Jacobean house now buried in inner London. 
 
Three Houses, Many Lives tells the stories not only of the houses themselves but of the lives of the many people who lived in them. From Eugenia Stanhope who sold Lord Chesterfield's scandalous letters, to the autocratic vicar who held the same parish from age 28 to 82, from the just-literate wife of a parish clerk who wrote riddles in his registers, to the cow-keeper who farmed 226 acres in Hornsey till he sold them profitably when the railways came through. Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, making a particular place, person or situation stand for a much larger picture.

A Few Streets, A Few Lives

Footprints in Paris

A unique book about the Left Bank and five generations of a family - all of whom left their footprints in the same narrow streets, and all of whom found refuge and rejuvenation in Paris.

Tindall writes of a lost Paris with a quiet eloquence that is all her own, combining scrupulous honesty with a compassionate imagination and an eye for memorable detail

It's a fascinating walking tour of old Paris, studded with humour and sympathetic glimpses into several lives that have resisted the microscope of history

The book's true strength lies in its writer's abiding, for-better-for-worse attachment to her city of the heart

Tindall's alertness to detail and brimming intelligence are consistently engaging

delightful book invites reflection, speculation, argument, and almost every page also summons memories

Tindall... can create vivid portraits out of a few misty pixels

An enterprise of formidable research and enviable lightness of touch

Charming disinterment of a lost 19th - and 20th -century Paris...An antidote to the history of great men and events

The Guardian Saturday Review, SUMMER READS

This book is a personal memoir, a history of the left bank of Paris and an endlessly compelling tale of a family who lived in and out of Paris through two centuries of war, conflict and great politics...Nostalgia is of course a key trope in Parisian history and this book, richly textured and beautifully written, is a wonderful addition to that canon

Gillian Tindall is well known for her ability to breathe a passionate life into the generations of those who have walked the earth before us. Here, using a handful of lives, she evokes the texture and atmosphere of a hidden Paris which has survived against all the odds of time and chance. Her study shows how Paris has drawn into its magnetic field people who have variously found there education or enlightenment, a refuge or a secret garden, even a different identity. 
 
Five individuals, all related in some way, reveal a web of human feeling and experiences across two centuries. There is the young doctor who walked from Edinburgh to Paris at the time of Napoleon's downfall; the self-made Victorian businessman who traded with the brash capital of the Second Empire; his reserved son who found in the old stones of Paris a refuge from his fraught childhood; Maud, the archetypal English spinster, who somehow managed to construct an alternatative experience in Paris; and Julia , young and desperate, who found her own unlikely salvation there in a very different era. 
 
Gillian Tindall brings Paris alive - whether it's the network of streets that form the Left Bank, the resonance of 'Bohemia' and its garrets, cafes and artists, 'Gay Paree' with its music halls and courtesans or the past chroniclers of the city such as Zola, George du Maurier and Orwell. But featured far more than the famous, are the unsung citizens for whom Gillian Tindall has such empathy.

And The People Who Lived There

The House By The Thames

A masterpiece of miniaturist, social history. By closely examining the history of one house, Gillian Tindall tells the story of Southwark and the south bank, the river Thames and indeed of London itself.

Mesmeric... This book is not just for London enthusiasts. Tindall has demonstrated a genius for a certain kind of social history that, in shining a light on one small place, illuminated a huge amount around... A rare instance of a history book that, in its optimism about the indomitable spirit of the place, raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

Fascinating... Gillian Tindall brilliantly deploys contemporary observations to bring the centuries alive.

Delightful... Tindall's story is truthful and unexaggerated, combining elegantly elegiac prose with imaginative empathy and descriptive power.

Just across the River Thames from St Paul’s Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. Over the course of almost 450 years the dwelling on this site has witnessed many changes. From its windows, people have watched the ferrymen carry Londoners to and from Shakespeare’s Globe; they have gazed on the Great Fire; they have seen the countrified lanes of London’s marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements – and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air. 
 
Rich with anecdote and colour, this fascinating book breathes life into the forgotten inhabitants of the house – the prosperous traders; an early film star; even some of London’s numberless poor. In so doing it makes them stand for legions of others and for a whole world that we have lost through hundreds of years of London’s history.

The Man Who Drew London

A feat of historical reconstruction by a master of the genre, this is a vivid and insightful account of the life of Wenceslaus Hollar, the celebrated illustrator of 17th-century London.

Her intention is that fact and fiction should complement each other. They do perfectly

With clarity of purpose and clarity of style, she has written a book that is both elegant and thoughtful

Gillian Tindall is a tapestry maker. She finds patterns in history - woven from close research into people and places - that no one else would have the persistence and insight to pursue

The seventeenth-century London Wenceslaus Hollar knew is now largely destroyed or buried. Yet its populous river, its timbered streets, fashionable ladies, old St Paul's, the devestation of the Fire, the palace of Whitehall and the meadows of Islington live on for us in his etchings. 
 
Drawing on numerous sources, Gillian Tindall creates a montage of Hollar's life and times and of the illustrious lives that touched his. It is a carefully researched factual account, but she has also employed her novelist's skill to form an intricate whole - a life's texture which is also an absorbing and occasionally tragic story.

Celestine

It is Gillian Tindall's gift, in her quietly remarkable book, to remind us how much of the past still lives in the present.

[A] modest little book, well on its way to becoming a modern classic.

A wonderful book... [Her] history is acutely visual... The book is a masterpiece of miniaturist history

This is history at its most interesting and compelling

No other living foreign writer has gone deeper into the psyche of rural France

A wonderfully evocative book... This is social history at its best

When Gillian Tindall discovered a cache of tightly folded letters in a deserted house in central France, recently emptied of 150 years of a family's possessions, she uncovered the obscure and moving life of one woman, Celestine Chaumette. This is Tindall's brilliantly original recreation of the vanished world of a French village.

Gillian Tindall

Elegaic... Her books are carefully wrought acts of restoration... In The Pulse Glass, Tindall, reflects on a lifetime's interest in historical recovery

Tindall writes with affecting precision... Reading this book feels like looking out of the window on a long train journey. One is lulled by the rhythms into deep reflection and inexplicable nostalgia for the lives and landscapes of others

An excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance... Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the “unconsidered trifles” of past lives but holding them to the light to glean the stories they might conceal

Tindall specialises in the overlooked, the underappreciated. She is very much a local historian, if you take that to mean that everything local can become universal; that the stories of ordinary people are as worth telling as the grand, the famous, the notorious... Tantalising... Tindall is a fine historian and writes with a wryness of everyday human foibles

Gillian Tindall has a richly furnished mind, as full of pigeonholes and secret drawers as an old-fashioned Victorian desk… Tapping at floorboards, exploring cellars, leafing through yellowing love letters…she unearths what she can about the worlds we have lost

And the beat of other hearts

*As read on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week* 
 
'A genius for a certain kind of social history that, in shining a light on one small place, illuminates a huge amount' Sunday Telegraph 
 
A toy train. A stack of letters. A tiny pulse glass, inherited from her great-great-grandfather, which was used to time a patient's heartbeat before pocket watches... Gillian Tindall, one of our most admired domestic history writers, examines seemingly humble objects to trace the personal and global memories stored within them, and re-animate the ghostly heartbeats of lost lives. 
 
'Elegiac... Tindall reflects on a lifetime's interest in historical recovery' The Telegraph 
 
'Tindall is a fine historian and writes with a wryness of everyday human foibles' The Times

Gillian Tindall

Praise for The Pulse Glass

Elegaic... Her books are carefully wrought acts of restoration... In The Pulse Glass, Tindall, reflects on a lifetime's interest in historical recovery

Tindall writes with affecting precision... Reading this book feels like looking out of the window on a long train journey. One is lulled by the rhythms into deep reflection and inexplicable nostalgia for the lives a ...

An excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance... Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the “unconsidered trifles” of past lives but holding them to the light to g ...

Elegaic... Her books are carefully wrought acts of restoration... In The Pulse Glass, Tindall, reflects on a lifetime's interest in historical recovery

Tindall writes with affecting precision... Reading this book feels like looking out of the window on a long train journey. One is lulled by the rhythms into deep reflection and inexplicable nostalgia for the lives a ...

An excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance... Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the “unconsidered trifles” of past lives but holding them to the light to g ...

Elegaic... Her books are carefully wrought acts of restoration... In The Pulse Glass, Tindall, reflects on a lifetime's interest in historical recovery

Tindall writes with affecting precision... Reading this book feels like looking out of the window on a long train journey. One is lulled by the rhythms into deep reflection and inexplicable nostalgia for the lives a ...

An excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance... Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the “unconsidered trifles” of past lives but holding them to the light to g ...

Books by Gillian Tindall

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