Product Description

This is a fascinating and useful reference to the history of the London Underground that reveals new insights into the history of the iconic transport system - the perfect gift for commuters, tourists and railway enthusiasts alike. For anyone who has lived, worked, visited or even passed through London, the tube is one of the iconic and defining characteristics of the city. "Amazing & Extraordinary London Underground Facts" takes you from the famous roundel symbol and standing on the right of the escalators, to the instantly recognisable and hugely influential route map. This title helps to discover the tales of the building of the first lines in the mid-nineteenth century and the steam trains that ran along them, the ever expanding network of routes, the abandoned ghost stations, the notorious incidents and colourful characters that have all played a part in the amazing and extraordinary history of the London Underground.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2436 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

Review
Prefixed 'Amazing and Extraordinary' this fun-packed and well-designed publication certainly lives up to the title. --Rail Express Magazine

About the Author
Stephen Halliday is an authority on the history of London, with a special interest in the great engineering works that created the modern city. He is the author of The Great Stink: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Sutton 1999) and Underground to Everywhere; London's Underground Railway in the Life of the Captial (Sutton 2001). He contributes articles and reviews to magazines such as Literary Review, Times Higher Education, BBC History and History Today.

Customer Reviews

UNDERGROUND, OVERGROUND
From Boston to Beijing, and from Rio de Janeiro to Stockholm via Lisbon and Glasgow, I have travelled on a good many cities' underground railways, and I don't think that I shall ever find one as interesting as the London tube. This little book is a miscellaneous collection of ooh-ah facts, not a systematic study or a work of reference. Such as it is, I thought it well planned and nicely presented, and I imagine it will have a certain amount of new information to impart to anyone who is less than an outright expert.

Stephen Halliday sticks to presenting facts, and he is probably right not to go in for quizzes. For example, which line goes furthest south? You got it in one - the Northern Line. Which line goes furthest from central London? Another no-brainer - the Central Line, or at least it used to before the stretch from Epping to Ongar was closed. There are any number of such little oddities, and happily the author recounts the early suggestion that the operators of the Circle Line, namely the Metropolitan and the District, should operate their services in opposite directions. Suspicions on the part of each that its partner would try to send passengers the long way round if it could get their fares by doing so were, I guess, accurately founded. The book's focus is mainly on the history of the network, including the big names such as Sir Edward Watkin, Frank Pick and the immortal Harry Beck, whose brilliant schematic map, its patent sold for a few £, has served with no more than essential updating as a clear guide to millions of London's visitors ever since. More recent developments are skated over to some extent, notably the scandal of the collapse of the company in charge of maintenance of the infrastructure. I also thought it rather odd that while the East London Line, a shabby poor relation of the Metropolitan, receives reasonable coverage, the splitting off of part of the Metropolitan to form the so-called Hammersmith and City Line is not even mentioned, nor is the North London Line, a déclassé `main' line which nowadays features on all recent tube maps.

There is probably not much point in nitpicking, although I really miss anything about the rural single-track extension from Epping to Ongar, with sylvan-sounding intermediate stops at North Weald and Blake Hall. There is no way of including everything, and Stephen Halliday has had more sense than to try. I like the book, and I'm pleased to add it to my railway collection.

Full of facts - fun too!!
This volume is a real find - as the cover says, it really is full of amazing facts, a great many of which will be new to even the most avid 'Underground' enthusiast. It has 10 chapters covering the link between the Underground and art, architecture, management, crime, history etc etc - the author has obviously researched extensively and come up with all sorts of fascinating facts. This book is an easy read of important information but can also provide significant historical data for the serious reader. The size is ideal - can be carried about in a pocket on a day out around the Underground Network. Having bought and read my own copy it'll be in the Christmas stocking for many friends!

Mind the facts


I thought the title of this book perhaps should have been 'Historical London Underground Facts' because it seems more concerned with the past than the present. Comparing the index with the one in Halliday's previous 2001 book 'Underground to everywhere' it seems this latest title is just a cut down version.

Overall I found it interesting but missing some 'amazing and extraordinary' facts about todays Underground, in particular technical details about power and rolling stock. Whenever I've travel on the system I'm always intrigued by all the capital initials on the outside and inside of the carriages, the glass fronted control booths in the larger stations (just what do all these people do?) the Oyster card payment system (is it fraud proof?) or something about the platform electronic information signs.

Other reviewers have commented on the rather scrappy design of the pages, I agree, especially the crudely drawn route maps for the nine lines. All the pages could have looked better with a bit more thought regarding the type and graphics.