20/10/18: Mark Mason – Walk the Lines: The London Underground, Overground (2011)

Mark Mason sets out to walk every tube line overground, passing all 269 stations from Acton Town to Woodside Park. It’s a good idea for a book and one that works some of the time. I read this while commuting on the tube and several times found myself at or near the station he was passing. He varies things a little by walking one line at night (Jubilee) and one in heavy snow (Metropolitan). He walks part of the Northern Line with Geoff Nicholson (author of The Lost Art of Walking) and part of the Metropolitan Line with Bill Drummond. Like Will Self, he also walks to Heathrow Airport – but unlike Self, he doesn’t then catch a plane and walk into New York.

If there’s a criticism, it’s that Mason writes too little about the physical and psychological experiences of walking. I want to hear about the conceptualisation, the effort, the feats of endurance, the blisters, the mental fatigue, the moments of joy and despair and what it means to him to walk so far. Instead, while he touches on these things briefly, it often reads like a collection of facts and trivia stitched together around the ‘tube walking’ device – not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but not quite the book it could have been. Even when he walks the Circle Line as a pub crawl with a friend, stopping for a drink at a pub corresponding to every station, he doesn't address the questions you might expect to have been answered. How drunk was he? How did he feel the next day? Did he really fall out with his companion on the walk (as is hinted)? And how much did all those drinks cost? 

Ultimately, it’s great for facts. I learned that the longest line is the Central (46 miles), which includes the longest journey with no change (West Ruislip to Epping) and the least-used station on the network (Roding Valley). The District Line has most stations, with 60. The most vowels used in a station name (five) is shared by Mansion House and South Ealing. The longest tunnel is on the Northern Line: Morden to East Finchley, Bank branch), at 17.3 miles. The deepest station is Hampstead (192 feet) and the highest point above ground is the Dollis Brook viaduct near Mill Hill East (58 feet).  The only line that connects with all the others is the Jubilee, which also is the line that crosses the Thames the most times (four).