Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter One The Kingdom of Shadows: the infernal underground of George Gissing
- Chapter Two The Utopian Underground of H. G. Wells
- Chapter Three ‘The Roar of the Underground Railway’: the making of the Tube in the interwar years
- Chapter Four The Kingdom of Individuals: safety and security on the Tube in the Second World War
- Conclusion From Beck's Tube map to Becks on the Tube
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion - From Beck's Tube map to Becks on the Tube
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter One The Kingdom of Shadows: the infernal underground of George Gissing
- Chapter Two The Utopian Underground of H. G. Wells
- Chapter Three ‘The Roar of the Underground Railway’: the making of the Tube in the interwar years
- Chapter Four The Kingdom of Individuals: safety and security on the Tube in the Second World War
- Conclusion From Beck's Tube map to Becks on the Tube
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
She would […] take the tube, with all its history, its crowds, its announcements, its delays, and erase its existence from the face of London.
Rachel in Keith Lowe's Tunnel VisionUnderground writing did not end in 1945. George Gissing's King's Cross has moved westwards and been altered by new Tube intersections. It has recently undergone redevelopment and is no longer the smoky underworld of steam engines that characterized his fiction, even if the horrors of the King's Cross fire in 1987 remain a watershed in the history of the whole underground system. If writers from Gissing to Woolf were the first to integrate the underground into fiction as a metaphor for modern urban life, then later writing has transformed this vocabulary into an entire language. The Tube is a pervasive cultural metaphor, seen by some as representing the postmodern condition through its identification as a place where peoples' lives intersect, relationships are formed and the urban world defined. It is also perceived as a place where everything is fragmented, evanescent and contingent. A national if not global brand, it is a permanent referent for London with the ubiquitous logo and Beck's map garnering instant recognition on the English cultural landscape. This cultural underground has been deliberately manufactured, its artefacts and products to be found in the London Transport Museum and throughout the capital's tourist outlets.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Underground WritingThe London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf, pp. 268 - 273Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010