Some critics, however, distrust Ackroyd's writings, fiction and nonfiction alike, for the liberties they take with history. They have also faulted his "unscholarly" obsession with the "hidden" London that stands solidly at the center of each novel.
Peter Ackroyd was born in Paddington Hospital on 5 October 1949, the only son of Graham Ackroyd and Audrey Whiteside. His parents separated a short time after his birth, and he settled with his mother in East Acton, where he lived in a council house near Wormwood Scrubs jail until the age of seventeen. Nothing is known about Graham Ackroyd. Audrey Whiteside worked as a personnel officer for a firm that made metal boxes. Their son was educated by Benedictine monks at Saint Benedict's School in the Borough of Ealing, on the western edge of Greater London, at the end of the District Line on the London underground railway system. His interest in the geography of London began at an early age. As he told Francis Gilbert in 1999, "My grandmother would often take me into the City and show me things like the Old Curiosity Shop in Portsmouth Street, Holborn-which isn't actually the original shop that Dickens based his novel upon.
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