London Underground

b e g i n n i n g i n sixteenth-century England, a distinct criminal culture of rogues, vagabonds, gypsies, beggars, cony-catchers, cutpurses, and prostitutes emerged and Xourished. This community was self-deWned by the criminal conduct and dissident thought promoted by its members, and oYcially deWned by and against the dominant preconceptions of English cultural normality. In this book I argue that this amalgamated criminal culture, consisting of a diverse population with much racial, ethnic, and etiological ambiguity, was united by its own aesthetic, ideology, language, and lifestyle. In eVect, this criminal culture constituted a subnation that illegitimately occupied material and conceptual space within the English nation. With its own laws and customs, it was both independent of and dependent on England's oYcial (mainstream) culture. It was selfgoverning but needed the law-abiding populace for food and shelter and as a social entity against which to deWne itself. I also argue that the enduring presence of this criminal culture markedly aVected the oYcial culture's aesthetic sensibilities, systems of belief, and socioeconomic organization. It was both conducted by and a conductor for what I call "transversal power." 1 Before describing my "transversal theory" that explains "transversal power" and accounts for the terms, methods, and arguments that drive this study, I want to consider, as a point of entrance, the remarkable resemblance between discussions of the sociohistorical actuality, representation, and inXuence of early modern England's organized crime and that c h a p t e r o n e

On November 8th 1971, the English rock band Led Zeppelin released their fourth, untitled, album. Having 22 million copies sold, its success was seen by the record label Atlantic Records as a professional suicide. On this album, the tracks are referring to the 60s rock’s cultural form, when London’s underground offered possibilities of producing musical experiments. However, the album also has transformations, typical of the beginning of the 70s, when rock music was tied to subgenres, in order to be assimilated by marketing strategies and sold in each one of the segmented markets. This situation was due to a London underground scene crisis and this research aims to investigate how much of this crisis can be heard in Led Zeppelin IV and how the band reacted to the new subgenres.

En el presente trabajo se pretende abordar los sucesos ocurridos durante la década de 1960 en lo referente a la influencia de la contracultura o cultura underground británica en Estados Unidos y viceversa. Para ello, nos centramos en el desarrollo, no solo en la estética, sino principalmente en la cultura musical de la década. Este es el motivo por el cual, debemos primero mencionar las primeras influencias durante los años cincuenta y entendiendo la evolución cultural de ambos países de forma genérica y, además, su evolución llegados incluso a la década de los setenta.

The London Underground Diagram made history as the first underground transport diagram to abandon geographic accuracy in favour of legibility, but it has also become the stuff of cultural history, inviting references and comparisons to contemporaneous diagrams and works of art over the course of its evolution.

Resumen:
Consultado Peter Sloterdijk acerca de ¿qué obras recomendaría?, responde: En primer lugar, El nacimiento de la tragedia, de Nietzsche, una teoría del arte. En segundo lugar, a Andy Warhol, con su libro: The philosophy of Andy Warhol. From A to B and back again (‘Mi Filosofía de A a B y de B a A’). Este originalísimo libro constituye no sólo una crónica de la vanguardia artística de New York y su particular fauna, sino a través de un repertorio de frases y agudas observaciones Warhol nos ofrece lo que es fundamentalmente una crónica del american way of life, de su glamour y decadencia. Entre sus frases memorables no se puede dejar de citar entre otras: «Shopping is much more american than thinking» (‘comprar es mucho más americano que pensar’). O «Nunca me molesto en arreglarme o en tratar de ser atractivo porque simplemente no quiero que nadie se comprometa conmigo; descuido mis buenos atributos y destaco los malos, de modo que tengo un aspecto espantoso y llevo los pantalones equivocados y los zapatos equivocados y llego en el momento equivocado con amigos equivocados y hablo con la gente equivocada, y si aún así, alguien se interesa por mí huyo y me pregunto. ¿En qué me equivoqué?… El asunto es que conocer a una persona más me resulta simplemente demasiado difícil, porque cada nueva persona ocupa más tiempo y espacio…»

so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into fururiry. -H. G.'\Xl'ells, TheTime Machine d\r:Tr.:, historian Eric Hobsbawm recently characterized Harry t f Beckt schematic map of the London l-Jnderground as "the mosr L original work of avanr-garde art in Britain berween the wars" (3g-39) (see "i). It certainly represenrs a perfect marriage of abstract desþ and practical utility' By simplif ing the complex .erwork of urban raüway ünìs into a visually pleasing and easily legibte map bearing little or no relation to either the experiential or the physical metropolis of London, Beck codified a parac_ ulrrþ modernist conceprion of space. unchanged in its basic design since ûrst sketched in 1,93L, the rube map is argaably the predomin*t rrrriorry i*.g.

This dissertation assesses how Art on the Underground, a contemporary art programme responding to the context and environment of London Underground, contributes to the urban development of London. Regarded as a sub-specialism of public art practice, existing literature on art within underground transport networks is often written from an institutional perspective and lacks external analysis. Furthermore there is limited text on the relationship between the urban environment and these institutional public art programmes. As the regional authority responsible for both transport and economic development in London, Greater London Authority policies place emphasis on the integration of different modes of transport and the urban realm. This is exemplified by developments such as the multi-billon pound modernisation programme for London Underground and the construction of new ‘Super Hub’ transport interchanges. This dissertation proposes that the Art on the Underground programme has a significant part to play in the formation of these new urban developments in London.

Research was conducted through two main methods. Firstly through a study of secondary literature on public art practice, spatial and urban theory and the history of art and design on underground transport networks. Secondly through conducting interviews with key staff who manage contemporary art programmes on underground transport networks on Merseyside and Tyne and Wear, and with curatorial staff at London Transport Museum.

This study concludes that Art on the Underground primarily contributes to the urban development of London through the creation of autonomous, high quality artworks that are vital in forging a distinctive identity within these new integrated transport developments. It argues that in continuing the long-standing strategy of using art to create a distinctive cultural identity for the Underground, Art on the Underground can significantly contribute to these homogenised, capitalist developments. Furthermore it also strengthens London’s claim to be the world’s most culturally significant city by enhancing the public space of the Underground through a unique programme of art.

Keywords: Art on the Underground; London Underground; urban development; capitalism; space; public art.

The London Underground Diagram made history as the first underground transport diagram to abandon geographic accuracy in favour of legibility, but it has also become the stuff of cultural history, inviting references and comparisons to contemporaneous diagrams and works of art over the course of its evolution.

In fantasy and science fiction more than any other genres of fiction, mapping is an essential supplement, and often a precursor to, the standard creative process of character development and plotting. This chapter examines a particular kind of mapping, the particular kinds of spaces it maps, and the peculiar imaginary surrounding it: the urban transport system and its relationship to the contemporary sub-genre of urban fantasy with which it has emerged. The chapter considers a range of texts by writers including China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Laurence Leonard, Michael de Larrabeiti, Neal Shusterman, Suzanne Collins, and Lauren Beuke. It concludes with a brief analysis Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988) and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006).

The extent of urban areas is rapidly expanding across the globe, both horizontally and vertically. While natural and social scientists have examined the impacts of this urbanisation on earth system and social processes, to date researchers have largely overlooked how in turn earth system processes can act on this urban fabric to produce hybrid landforms. Unique pseudokarst landforms are found within the urban fabric, including urban stalactites and urban sinkholes. Additionally, both the chronic and acute degradation of urban buildings can form rubble and dust that, if left in situ, will be shaped by fluvial and aeolian processes. For many of these urban geomorphological processes, the neglect or abandonment of parts of the urban network will facilitate or accelerate their influence. If there are economic, climatic or social reasons for abandonment or neglect, these processes are likely to reshape parts of the urban fabric into unique landforms at a range of scales. We contend that researchers need to explicitly consider the urban fabric as an Anthropocene landform and that by doing so important insights can be gained into urban hazards and geomorphological processes. Shelley's Ozymandias, in which the eponymous king failed to account for the effects of earth system processes acting on 'mighty' urban structures over time, serves as an important reminder of the impermanence of our urban works and the need to recognise and understand the processes acting on them.

A pesquisa tem como foco analisar um movimento que realiza expedicoes urbanas. Considerada um hobby, essas expedicoes designam uma pratica contemporânea denominada urban exploration, atividade que envolve percursos atraves de lugares abandonados, de subterrâneos, ate os pontos mais altos da cidade. A pratica revela um modo de ressignificacao do individuo em sua relacao com a cidade, no intuito de observa-la e registra-la por diversos ângulos. O objetivo da pesquisa consiste em demonstrar uma relacao do urban exploration com a teoria da arte, literatura e filosofia. Uma relacao do sujeito com a cidade, abordando o caminhar, os monumentos, a relacao afetiva com a metropole atraves da imaginacao, entre outras questoes que serao tratadas para compreender o percurso que pode ser pensado pela heranca do flâneur, pelas caminhadas surrealistas, pela compreensao do projeto das Passagens, de Walter Benjamin, e com a postura revolucionaria e critica dos Situacionistas, com Guy Debord. A disser...

Spanish intoduction essay by Fernando Marcos Ibanez for  the Martino Chiti's photobook SUSPENDED CITIES (Portraits from the underground)
Edited by Crowdbooks

“The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than when in lone bedrooms (where there are mirrors). People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.” Walker Evans

Portraits, 35mm colour slides, from 12 different underground networks worldwide,(Paris, Rome, London, Napoli, Oslo, Madrid, New York, Mexico DF, Santiago de Chile, Tunis, Delhi and Tokyo).
This work is reflected in and transcends the images shot by Walker Evans in the New York subways in the 40’s. It doesn’t make reference to any specific place but to distant and different cities which appear here as if closed in one single space. The faces, which express the suspension and the naked rest of the passengers that use this means of transport every day, become metaphors as much of human essence as its modern dimension. Like many “flaneur” the people transit, linger, wait and leave. Behind the reality of constant movement is the veil of constant suspension.

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”  Italo Calvino,  Invisible cities

Martino Chiti was born in Livorno, 1976. He realized documentaries and photo reportages, as well as working with video and new media during festivals of art and entertainment related to music and visual arts. Photographer, filmmaker and video artist, he's always looking for new experimentations.

Abstract: This article examines the role played by workmen’s trains in allowing working-class families to move out into London’s suburbs between 1860 and 1914. While previous scholarship has argued that these trains effectively only benefited skilled artisans or a working class elite, it is argued here that from the 1880s onwards they were increasingly used by unskilled workers in irregular employment. Furthermore, they were also used by women and children earning low wages in subsidiary employment. Ultimately, it is demonstrated that a much broader spectrum of the working class were living in the suburbs and commuting than has been previously supposed.

This is the author’s copy. This article has been accepted for forthcoming publication in Urban History, published by Cambridge University Press, where it will appear in a revised form. It is available in its revised and corrected form online from Cambridge University Press at
https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9336627&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0963926814000479
Copyright Cambridge University Press.

This project aspired to explicate and define London Underground's brand vision, mission and operational implications through historical research and brand communications recommendations realised through an innovative print and digital media publication.

In a letter, written on Saturday, February 22, 1913, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw described to his actress friend Stella Campbell the eventful day of his mother's funeral and cremation at Golders Green Crematorium in London. From Shaw's recollection, two intertwined aspects of his experience emerge. One is internal-intellectual and emotional-and the other is external, informed by the environment in which this funerary experience took place. By retracing Shaw's steps, this article questions the extent to which his recollections of the spatial qualities of the crematorium, London's emerging metro system, and the newly planned suburb were signs of a new urban experience. I discuss the changing space of the city in the early twentieth century by drawing on urban history, death culture, and architecture. The intention is to highlight how these elements-transport, crematorium, and suburb-all embodied the notions of order and efficiency, which promised a new idea of urban living in early twentieth-century London.

Unearthing the unintended inhabitation of the London Underground and the effects of past occupancy on the perceptions of underground space, this paper focusses upon the ways in which sub-surface space has been defined and inhabited over time. Understanding the methods by which people sheltered in London's Underground during the blitz sheds light on our current perceptions of the same space, with the inhabitation of such a 'non-place' by London's homeless population unintentionally informed by a culmination of historic inhabitation.

Last month we dealt with how the Underground became a smoker’s paradise. This month, we look at how it all fell apart. By 1926 around eighty per cent of carriages on the tube were smoking cars, and smokers had free reign to smoke in any part of the stations. But by 1959 there concerns from London Transport. Maybe, it was suggested, there was too much smoking accommodation... [Follow link for full post on Wordpress]

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"Many companies and organisations these days have what is called a ‘corporate identity’. In practice this means that they make use of certain elements to unify their visual representation in various situations and media. A good example is the air carrier KLM that uses the same emblem, color and typefaces on signage, stationary, tickets, brochures and airplanes.

The history of this phenomenom so central to the world of design and commerce nowadays, seems not to have received proper attention in historiography. When pioneers of corporate identity are mentioned one usually refers to firms like AEG, London Underground, Olivetti or IBM. I believe this is a misconception originating from confusion regarding the use of the term ‘corporate identity’ in a historical context.

In this paper I will describe the development of the concepts of corporate identity and its predecessors in America and England till roughly 1960. It is clear that by then a more or less standard approach had been developed by organisations for conveying a controlled and visual unequivocal impression of themselves to a wider audience."

There are few in-depth examinations of folk horror in urban environments. This is understandable; the characteristics that usually define folk horror-snappily described by Mark Gatiss as an "obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions"-require a connection to the earth and to our esoteric, pre-Christian past that are less apparent in towns and cities than they are in the countryside. Folk horror also thrives on the isolation, remoteness and secrecy afforded by the rural landscape, again difficult to come across in the busy modernity and technological connectedness of civilisation. There have been some explorations into the urban wyrd that have identified characteristics analogous to those in rural folk horror. Peter Hutchings' 2004 paper Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television discusses denuded landscapes that have been abandoned because of their association with the urban space. Adam Scovell, in his 2017 book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, devotes a chapter to hauntology and the urban wyrd, in which he focuses on the folk horror elements in Nigel Kneale's urban based works. This paper will hopefully add to these initial forays into the urban folk horror space, and will do so by examining Gary Sherman's Death Line from 1972, which is set primarily in one discrete and specific urban environment: the London Underground. In my opinion the Underground shares a number of similarities with the countryside of traditional rural folk horror: its antiquity as the world's oldest subterranean transit system, marks it out as the modern, technological equivalent to the pagan sites of rural folk horror. Like those pagan sites, it is a place of hidden and esoteric histories, and like the tilled fields and ancient forests of folk horror it has a close association with the substance of the earth. For those of you unfamiliar Death Line, it concerns the last cannibal descendants of an abandoned group of trapped Victorian labourers, living in and venturing out from the hidden and disused tunnels and stations of the Tube to hunt. When director Piers Haggard used the term 'folk horror' to describe his approach to making his 1971 film Blood on Satan's Claw, he did so to deliberately contrast his film to what he considered to be the

An enduring symbol of London and a milestone of graphic design, the tube map cannot simply be called an emblem of the city, or a very useful source of information for tube travelers. Designed by an Underground engineering draughtsman named Harry C. Beck during a period of layoff in 1931, it has come to be the prototype of virtually any other map of rapid transit across the world.

Beck’s map invented a form of writing the urban experience through a syntax of lines and dots that well encapsulated the understanding of the city as a place of encounters and possibilities, before the advent of psychogeography, hypertexts and digital information.

The London Underground is the oldest Underground railway in the world. Some of its stations are now over a century old, and many others have important historical associations. A great number of the early stations were tiled in distinctive schemes, leaving London Underground with an enormous amount of tiling heritage to care for in a transport network that has to continue offering a customer focussed service on a daily basis. This paper discusses the difficulties this presents to London Underground in its efforts to conserve its heritage tiling, and the approaches they have taken. Both London Underground’s and the heritage community’s attitudes to large scale architectural conservation have changed over time, so from an initial approach of retention of all viable original material, they have moved on to a more considered aim of holistic station conservation, focusing on the architect’s intent and the “feel” of a station. It is not only London Underground who have been involved in the work affecting heritage tiling, and the impact of other parties is also discussed.

Nowhere in the urban landscape is folk horror's encroachment into the civilised space more pronounced than in the subterranean realms of our underground transit systems. These are familiar and everyday spaces, critical to the functions of urban space. They represent the ingenuity of civilisation, violently and intrusively reshaping inaccessible and hostile terrain for our use. However, despite their centrality to our lives, they remain uncanny and untrustworthy spaces. They are analogous to that other great liminal space – the countryside – in that they illustrate the limitations and vulnerabilities of contemporary, urban society, and suggest this society is built upon ancient landscapes stained by folkloric heritage in which the past is malignant and lurking just out of sight. The London Underground is, in particular, characterised as "a space which is past and future, contemporary and archaic" , a gateway between the modern and urban, and the ancient and folkloric. E...

Scholarly focus on Daniel Craig’s tenure as 007 has tended to spotlight the expanding role played by London as a patriotic (and nostalgic) symbol of ideological work that reasserts notions of Empire and British national identity. Whether positioned as the residual presence of the euphoria surrounding the London 2012 Olympics (Brittany 2015), a response to the crisis of Britain inaugurated by the Scottish referendum (McMillan 2015), or as reflective of a post-9/11 geopolitical climate (Dodds 2014), London’s increasingly magnified role across contemporary Bond cinema has been made the locus for growing critical enquiry. Responding to a particularly visceral portrayal of the capital city that has emerged in millennial Hollywood action cinema, however, this paper gives further shape and definition to the type of London unfolding in these recent Craig-era films as one of disintegration and chaos. The spectacular ravaging of London in Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012) and SPECTRE (Sam Mendes, 2015)—from the collapse of the underground tube network to the destruction waged upon the architectural stability of MI6—occupies the same ruined terrain inhabited by recent effects-laden films in which London has been likewise reconfigured and articulated as a “fallen” city. Updating what Ian Conrich (2001) has termed the “trashing London” monster movies of the 1950s, this paper coins the “London has fallen” cycle of digitally-enhanced Hollywood cinema that has accelerated over the last decade and includes examples from Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Tim Story, 2007) and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009) to Thor: The Dark World (Alan Taylor, 2013) and the upcoming London Has Fallen (Babk Najafi, 2016). Assisted by shifts in filmmaking legislation, greater tax incentives, but also the rise of national tourism (VisitBritain) and Film London that have promoted London as a filmmaking hub for the creative industries, these often big-budget Hollywood productions explode the capital’s rich geography by renegotiating its landmarks as the site for Blockbuster activity. Yet by ‘collapsing’ Skyfall and SPECTRE into the visual spectacle of a levelled capital, this paper contends that the torn skylines of London in both Skyfall and SPECTRE are additionally rooted in a wider cinematic portrayal of the city that leans heavily on the iconography of the terror attacks that shaped the cityscape on July 7th 2005 (occurring only 3 months before Craig was announced as the new 007). Mirroring Craig’s performance as the damaged British spy who is no longer the “hyper-mobile” secret agent of his predecessors (Baker 2015), the London in Skyfall and SPECTRE is similarly presented as a territory in trauma, supported by a broken articulation of space that visualises its ascension to devastation. This paper therefore argues that 007’s connections to contemporary London via discourses of Britishness position Bond as the ideal character to mourn and work through the trauma of terrorist activity. Through its expression of a capital under destructive duress, Craig-era Bond films have ultimately rehabilitated post-7/7 London’s “fallen” identity and precarious position on terror alert through the actions of this enduring British spy.

Of all the items of clothing that humanity has invented for itself, perhaps none are as important as the humble hat. Some of film’s greatest scenes involve hats, whether they underline the murderous intentions of their wearer, or just demonstrate the fact they’ll risk life and limb to keep a hold of one. In 1897 on Christmas Eve one man demonstrated a similar fatalistic desire to retain his hat... [Full blog post at link below]

A brief overview of the paper given for the Institute of Historical Research, University of London conference: "Going Underground: Travel beneath the Metropolis 1863-2013 - A Conference to Mark the 150th Anniversary of the London Underground" 17-18 January 2013.

In the 21st Century London’s Underground is effectively “classless”. Builders and clerks, managers and secretaries, all travel in the same coaches and share the same free newspapers. But a century ago this mixing of classes was almost revolutionary, and an occurrence that incurred the wrath of the management of the early companies, fearful of the impact of working class passengers. In 1905 the Chairman of the Metropolitan District Railway decried the presence of ‘dusty’ and ‘filthy’ workmen sat alongside his middle class travellers. The Underground Group tried to abolish workmen’s fares, early morning concessions for the working classes, in the early 1920s. At each stage the companies faced the opposition of the London County Council (LCC), a champion of cheap travel for the working classes, and fierce political battles were often the result. This paper examines the relationship between the underground companies and the class of their passengers between the 1860s and the Second World War. It shows how before 1914 class was a key issue that the companies engaged with, how they often acted to restrict working class travellers, and how the LCC fought them on this. But it also shows how the Great War represents a watershed. The inter-war period saw class issues largely fade away due to the Underground Group’s drive for efficiency and expansion. In fact, one might consider the period as laying the foundation for the classless Underground we know today. This paper examines how and why this happened.

In a companion piece to her absorbing exploration of The Thames and the horror film, Lauren Jane Barnett essays how London and its underground system are deeply intertwined, in life and cinema, from Quatermass and the Pit to Death Line and beyond..

Sizing a vertical cut or peeling back the surface of London, the multi-layered and widely spread system of Underground London is revealed. Next to basement flats and wine cellars this sphere encompasses the arteries that sustain the urban body, like water supply ducts, sewers, electricity and communication cables, gas pipes, channelled rivers, streams and tributaries. Most prominently the stations and tunnels of the oldest Underground railway in the world spread through the city – the London Tube with its cross-passages, ventilation tunnels, escalators, lifts and stairways, exits and entrances. The three-dimensional labyrinth of the urban subterranean system moreover covers archaeological remains of Roman temples, crypts, plague pits, cemetery catacombs, as well as deep-level shelters and various caves (Pleßke 2009: 185–6; Pleßke 2014: 225; Trench/Hillman 1985: 7–22) . A replica of the metropolis above, the Underground mirrors the maze of London’s streets, alleys and lanes. But, owing to its enclosed and...

The increase in London's population is equivalent to absorbing a city the size of Cardiff every 3-4 years.  This is all being fitted into an existing urban area that is tightly constrained by a green belt putting intense pressure on services and infrastructure. 

What are the transport strategies being developed to accommodate this growth and given the differences in scale, are there any lessons that could be applied to the Cardiff city region?

Rush hour. For some it’s an 80’s classic by Jane Wiedlin featuring a bizarre array of dolphins for no apparent reason. For others it’s Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker belting their way through two fun action comedies. Also a third action comedy which we don’t speak of. Ever. For millions of people though rush hour is the sequence of events where you attempt, in a sort of live action version of Marioland, to fight your way from home to work in the morning. It’s also a problem that, in London especially, is getting worse. Though we’re probably better off than in Japan, where a team of half a dozen station officials lovingly shove you into a carriage... [Full blog post at link below]