Engaging with the rich catalogue of cultural material relating to the London Underground, this cultural geography sets out to explore one of the strangest spaces of the modern world. The first to complete that slow process of estrangement from the natural topography initiated by the Industrial Revolution, London Underground is shown to be what French anthropologist Marc Augé has called non-lieu: non-places, like the motorway, supermarket or airport lounge, compelled to interpret their relation to the invisible landscapes they traverse through the media of signs and maps. The tube-network is re ... More

Engaging with the rich catalogue of cultural material relating to the London Underground, this cultural geography sets out to explore one of the strangest spaces of the modern world. The first to complete that slow process of estrangement from the natural topography initiated by the Industrial Revolution, London Underground is shown to be what French anthropologist Marc Augé has called non-lieu: non-places, like the motorway, supermarket or airport lounge, compelled to interpret their relation to the invisible landscapes they traverse through the media of signs and maps. The tube-network is revealed to be a transitional form, linking spaces of alienation in Victorian England, such as the railway, and the fully virtual spaces of our contemporary consumer-capitalism. This history of alienation, and of the bold struggle to overcome it, recounted in London Underground: a cultural geography, is nothing less than the history of how people have attempted to make a home in the psychopathological spaces of the modern world. London Underground: a cultural geography taps the current enthusiasm for cultural history, for psychogeography, for books on modern urban space, and for all things relating to London, providing an account of the system's representation and reshaping in fiction, film, art, music, graffiti, connecting the long history of the tube-network to wider theoretical concerns relating to the Victorian City, Cultural Geography, Modernism, Post-modernism and Situationist Theory.