The Photography Book London Officials Never Wanted You to See

At first glance, it could be easy to assume that Subterranean London is a coffee table book for ruin porn enthusiasts. The cover image shows a man in silhouette, with a light adorning his forehead like a ruby Cyclops eye. Shrouded in darkness, he looks like the not-so-benevolent guardian of the dreary transit tunnel in which he's standing. But hey, you know what they say about assuming.

Crack open the spine of this book and those expectations collapse pretty quickly. In fewer than 200 pages, Bradley Garrett, a geography researcher with the University of Oxford (whom you might remember from that time he climbed the Shard), deftly leads the reader through a tour of London's literal underbelly. From Joseph Bazalgette's sewer system to the modern construction sites of the Crossrail, the photographs that Garrett has compiled from a dozen different urban explorers show a little-seen, but nevertheless vital side of the U.K. capital.