During the 1990s he was ‘Tube Talk’ columnist for the Evening Standard. The day is led by Andrew Martin, journalist, novelist, historian and author of Underground Overground: a Passenger’s History of the Tube (2012). Now, after decades of relative neglect, investment and improvement are on an unprecedented scale. The ‘deep level’ tube lines were pushed through by a maverick American, while the suburban extensions between the wars fulfilled the utopian ideals of a dour Yorkshireman who came bitterly to regret the urban sprawl they spawned. The first ‘cut and cover’ lines, in trenches under existing roads, were vigorously promoted by a socialistic solicitor. Motivation and management has been various: commercial and philanthropic, entrepreneurial and Keynesian, expansionist and defeatist. Modern London was shaped by the Tube rather than vice versa. ![]() ![]() ![]() It is also by far the most complicated, having started messily as several independent and often competing enterprises contrary to sensible practice, strategic planning by unitary municipal government came towards the end of the process, not in advance. Shanghai has more track, Paris and New York have more stations, but London has by a clear margin the oldest urban underground railway in the world: 2013 was its 150th anniversary.
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