The London Underground is methadone for people with nerd habits. Were it not for its twisty, multi-coloured map, its place in the capital’s history, its tendency to throw up facts such as ‘the QE2 would fit inside North Greenwich station’, we’d be on the hard stuff. The smack of nerd-dom. We’d be on the platform at Crewe with notebooks, taking down numbers, ruining our marriages.
As it is we maintain social respectability by obsessing about the Tube. The Tube is sexy in a way that mainline trains aren’t. Even young people, proper trendy young people who know the names of bands, get excited by the Tube. Behold someone who fails to smile at St John’s Wood being the only station whose name shares no letters with the word ‘mackerel’, and you behold a bore.
Andrew Martin has provided an excellent ‘passenger’s history’ of the network, meaning both that the book is aimed at Tube users (however infrequent) and also written by one.
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