A rich study of the underground transport system, placing the network in its historical and cultural context.
TLS
A strength of Ashford’s study is his account of literary and artistic responses to the new experience of underground travel.
Times Higher Education
David Ashford's London Underground is the first full-length study of the London Underground's cultural history, ... Read moreand questions of authority and possibility recur throughout. ... London Underground makes a convincing argument for deliberate and aesthetic interventions in the early Tube environment.
The Cambridge Quarterly
Ashford gives us a very enjoyable account of the cultural history of the London Underground and this book should inspire management historians to think about the cultural side of organizations more, while bringing cultural history close to an interest in the cultural side of economic life.
The Journal of Urban History, Volume 41/4 2014
A brilliant work of cultural history, full of original insights conveyed with clarity and gusto. Michael Saler, University of California Davis In the opening chapter “The Book of the Machine: A User’s Guide”, the author promotes his concept of the Underground as a new type of space, with its own geography, dynamics and psychology, effectively forming an alternative universe tied ineffectually to the metropolis above with which it interacts only at certain point and at certain times. This is not an easy read: it is an academic treatise with the notes at the end of each chapter indicating intensive research. Ironically the first chapter where the author sets out his basic proposals is the most difficult. What follows is an account of how the two spaces interact at various points in history: The Inner Circle in the Victorian imagination, the American invasion of the network, cartography and modernist design, the conceptual history of Metroland, Christmas in Hell (images of wartime sheltering in the Tube), the new counterculture – op and graffiti, and finally the psychogeography of the London Underground which seems to question the future’s functionality and aesthetics without answers (“Uxbridge is entombed in a future remembered by all who were teenagers in the 1960s”). After the reader making the substantial initial effect involved, this is a fascinating and thought-provoking examination of how London and its Underground have interacted for 150 years. A specialist book, recommended for readers with imagination and interest in the wider picture. Richard Thorogood, Underground News, Number 625
Underground News, Number 625
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