Penguin Underground Lines – review

You don’t have to live in London to be faintly obsessed by the Tube, but it probably helps. At this point I should state my bona fides: born in Great Ormond Street Hospital (nearest station: Russell Square), babyhood in Marylebone (Bakerloo line, originally to be called ‘Lisson Grove’), grew up in Hampstead (deepest station on the network with 320 steps down to the platform), and now live on the scabby side of Highgate, yards away from the disused overground line that once went to Finsbury Park. I am not a train-spotter as such, or even at all, but I do know to sit in the final carriage if I am getting out at Warren Street (that’s where the exit is) and that ‘Pimlico’ is the only station name that contains no letters from the word ‘badger’. You don’t want to be inside my head. I’m not sure I want to be.

Nonetheless, this may make me the ideal reader for Penguin’s 12 little books (priced at £4.99 each) about the London Underground, recently published under the general title ‘Penguin Lines’. Each is by a different author about a different line, most are between 70 and 90 pages long, and only Camila Batmanghelidh’s exceeds 128 pages. If you took one of these books for a long journey on the Central line, it might be worth taking another, just in case.

The excuse for publication is the 150th birthday of the Underground, which will be celebrated later this year, probably with a one-day strike by the RMT. But who needs an excuse? I’m not sure any of the writers did, such is the Tube-crazed gusto with which they have embraced their tasks. Whether some of them should have been chosen in the first place is another matter, but we’ll come to that.

The first thing to be said about these books is that they are beautiful, in a uniform design that makes you yearn to put them all on the same shelf next to each other.