London’s lost rivers continue to evoke fascination. This sawn-off paperback, full of small colour photographs and explanatory text, focuses on what can still be seen above ground. The capital’s tertiary waterways have been covered more with human filth than with glory. Paul Talling eschews self-indulgent digressions into psychogeograpahy and presents the fascinating reality with pictures of upended supermarket trolleys and damp brooks funnelled between areas of human habitation. One photograph captioned “The source of the Effra?” depicts a square drain cover embedded in a grassy verge. Elsewhere a shoal of tadpoles are caught ignoring a No Swimming sign submerged in the shallow Moselle, whose waters Talling describes as “unpleasant-smelling green sludge.” Chroniclers of London’s rivers tend to lean heavily on historical documents. Talling has done the legwork and produced a contemporary account of the network of streams that flow unnoticed through the city.