Abstract
The parallel between the prison and the city is almost as old as the penal institution itself. In the English literary tradition it is represented namely by London and its places of confinement - it goes back to the seventeenth century and has been rendered vivid and topical in numerous literary works ever since.
Peter Ackroyd, one of the foremost contemporary British London writers, has always been interested in the unofficial history of the city, in its dark, obscure and otherwise irrational sides. One of these is the city's criminality and violence which, naturally, involves the theme of punishment.
The aim of this article is to demonstrate the various ways in which Ackroyd makes use of the city-as-prison parallel both as a setting and a metaphor in his selected London novels. Drawing on Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Ackroyd's non-fictions London: The Biography and Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, it offers a theoretical concept of the metaphor as well as outlines its position and role in the development of London literary imagination.