London Underground (Amazing and Extraordinary Facts) by Stephen Halliday
| London Underground (Amazing and Extraordinary Facts) by Stephen Halliday | |
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| Category: Travel | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A great balance of travel detail and historical trivia; this book is deceptively compelling. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 144 | Date: October 2015 |
| Publisher: Rydon Publishing | |
| ISBN: 9781910821039 | |
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From initial worries about smutty, enclosed air with a pungent smell to decades of human hair and engine grease causing escalator fires; from just a few lines connecting London termini to major jaunts out into Metro-land for the suburbia-bound commuters; and from a few religious-minded if financially dodgy pioneer investment managers to Crossrail; the history of the world's most extensive underground system (even when a majority is actually above ground) is fascinating to many. This book is a repository of much that is entirely trivial, but is also pretty much thoroughly interesting.
After finding little favour with its sister book regarding above-ground trains, it's great to report this volume seemed much better. The two subjects are clearly linked – here are subterranean tracks that used street-level trains, line extensions that refused to leave steam behind until the 1960s, and the Isle of Wight running heritage narrow-gauge trains still using adapted Tube carriages built in the 1930s – and most punctually, what's more.
The book starts with the derivation of all the modern lines, and you'd probably have to have that Tube map alongside you when you read it and not the historical replicas included here. It may be down to budget (licencing the image of the map earns more profit than running the trains, apparently), and other problems arise – some facts are told us several times in consecutive pages, and with the welter of box-outs of different design peppering the pages some things are given us in inherently the wrong order. Still, with this being in a series extolling their use while in the porcelain museum, you may well be dipping in and out and browsing at random.
Some longer chapters make that a little awkward – you could be caught long, as it were. As I was – the pages here were so eminently turnable, and the details of a thoroughly decent quality, I was unable to ration my reading. Make your loo well-lit enough for the very small print, and navigate the errant box-outs at your leisure, and I think you too will consume this book too avidly. People both famous and infamous, the truths behind the wartime shelters (they were used more in WWI than WWII, by some reckonings), and events both from obscurity and the headlines – all combine here in nearly ideal fashion.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Underground Overground: A Passenger's History of the Tube by Andrew Martin is a more detailed and regular read through of similar material.
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You can read more book reviews or buy London Underground (Amazing and Extraordinary Facts) by Stephen Halliday at Amazon.com.
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