Title: London underground : a cultural geography /
Authors: Ashford, David,
Publisher: Liverpool University Press,
Year: 2013
Subjects: London Underground Limited.; Subways England London History.; Cultural geography England London.; Subways England London; London (England) Civilization.
Abstract: This book provides a theoretical account of the evolution of an archetypal modern environment. The first to complete that slow process of estrangement from the natural topography initiated by the Industrial Revolution, the London Underground is shown to be a non-place, like a motorway, supermarket or airport lounge, compelled to interpret its relationship to the invisible landscape it traverses through the medium of signs and maps. Surveying material, ranging from the Victorian triple-decker novel, to Modernist art and architecture, to pop music and graffiti, this cultural geography suggests that the Tube-network is a transitional form, linking the spaces of Victorian England to the virtual spaces of our contemporary consumer-capitalism.
Contents: The book of the machine : a user's guide -- Psychopathology of modern space : the underground railways of the inner circle in the Victorian imagination -- The lord of the dynamos : the American invasion of the tube-network in Theodore Dreiser's The stoic (1947) -- Blueprints for Babylon : modernist mapping of the London underground -- Making a home in modernity : the conceptual history of metroland -- Christmas in hell : tube-shelter children in images by Bill Brandt and Henry Moore -- Insurrection in alphabet-city : counterculture in the London underground -- The ghost in the machine : psychogeography in the London underground.