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).

07/03/17: Nick Papadimitriou – Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Barnet, Finchley & Hendon (2009)

"In order to 'frame' the zone within which the murders described in this book occurred I undertook a series of long walks crossing the borough in order to examine the site of each killing. It quickly became apparent that Barnet was not the featureless zone I had presumed it to be. On the contrary – a quiet yet brooding power lurks in our hilly region of serried rooftops and arterial roads."

Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in... is a multi-author, multi-region local-history series. All of these books have absolutely horrible cover designs. I've never previously wanted to read a "true crime" or "local history" book, but was delighted to learn that Nick Papadimitriou – author of the astonishing Scarp – had written the account of grisly misadventures relating to my local area. He states that "my aim in writing was to evoke a dark and destabilising resonance – echoes of events murmuring below the streets, roads and parks which form the backdrop to our everyday". It covers the period of c. 1500 to 1959 and becomes more compelling as it reaches the modern era. 

Unlike Scarp, it's a book of character portraits, but his fascination with "deep topography" still informs the writing. It's very much filled with a strong sense of place and it helps that I know many of the streets and exact locations he describes. The 1931 murder of the Edgware tramp "Pigsticker" appears in Scarp as well, so was clearly one that caught the author's imagination. 

This grim book makes for fascinating reading and reminds you that people haven't changed very much. The ordinary, matter-of-fact nature of the crimes – often committed in the name of love or as a result of sheer foolishness – makes them especially powerful to read about.

29/12/14: Roger Green – Destination Nowhere: A South Mimms Motorway Service Station Diary (2004)

"I have a fifty-year-old woman sitting facing me, a few tables away. She is tucking into a large dish of quiche and assorted salad. Must have cost a bomb. Sunglasses rest on top of her ginger hair, her black blouse is unbuttoned halfway down, her large cleavage is prominent. She sits in a tight red skirt, with black stockings up to her bum, a pair of high-heel black shoes dangle off her toes . . . A man walking past in light brown desert boots and an all-in-one matching pilot's suit complete with coloured epaulettes catches her eye. He has Arab features – Colonel Gaddafi meets Marlene Dietrich!" (p.197)

A book of observations of the humdrum daily activities at South Mimms Motorway Services. Parts of it are dreary indeed – details of what people are wearing, eating and so on (as above) – and the author's prose fails to infuse the mundane with any sense of the extraordinary. The book is heavy on detail (including far too much about the author's use of the toilet cubicles), but light on analysis – an intentional approach, no doubt, but not one that's especially engaging. A more poetic writer observing this seething mass of humanity could have explored universal truths about who we are and how we live. More interesting are the brief interviews with service-station staff and regulars, who provide glimpses into the local history and real insights into the long hours spent in these non-places between places. More of this "oral history" tactic would have worked better.

A few errors: the group is The Byrds, not The Birds (p.32), and it's Pete Townshend, not Pete Townsend (p.148). The song referred to is "I'm a Believer", not "I am a Believer" (p.56), and slang for a bloke is "geezer", rather than "geyser" (p.67). These points may seem minor and/or pedantic, but they have an undermining effect: when he writes of "a young William Haigh type" (p.70), it's unclear whether he means the former Conservative party leader William Hague or someone else entirely. Not quite the level of research you'd expect from someone described as "Director of the Centre for Community Research at the University of Hertfordshire".

Some of the observations left a sour taste: "What is it about couples, men and women, walking arms around each other's waists so early in the morning? Have they just emerged from the Days Inn Motel opposite where a night of pleasure has occurred? Or is it simply they are sad people?" (p.149) What's wrong with being in love? Why is showing affection "sad"?

On the plus side, the photos are nice and I would have liked more of them. There's an entertaining and insightful book to be written about service stations. This isn't it.