Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same London dinner? Or that Harrods dropped the apostrophe from its name in 1921, a full 19 years before Selfridges followed suit? My guess is that you probably didn’t — which is where Walk the Lines comes in.
In 2010, Mark Mason walked overground along the entire route of the Tube: all 403 miles and 269 stations of it — although, as he explains in a characteristically scrupulous footnote, the number of stations is a matter of some controversy. (His own firmly held view is that the two Edgware Roads and Hammersmiths should be counted separately, but not the two Paddingtons.) In most books like this, the answer to the obvious question — why? — would be pretty obvious too: because the author had flogged the idea to his publishers. Mason, though, isn’t so easy to write off as a literary chancer.
Four years ago, he wrote The Importance of Being Trivial, which was equally stuffed with facts great and small — but which also begged the question whether their appeal to the male mind meant that men often tend to the mildly autistic. Walk the Lines feels less like an exploration of the same theme and more like a practical demonstration.
Take Mason’s evident satisfaction in applying ‘good old-fashioned male thoroughness’— as he only semi-comically calls it — to solving the logistical problems posed by the bigger lines, with their many loops and branches. Or his clear displeasure that the Square Mile is no longer a square mile: in the 1990s some minor boundary changes increased the City of London to ‘an annoyingly inexact 1.16 square miles’.
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