What can walking the London Underground network above-ground actually tell us about the capital city? To celebrate the release of Walk the Lines, Mark Mason’s new book on London as portrayed by the mapping of its tube lines, Stanfords had a few questions to ask…
1.Walk the Lines offers the reader a different perspective on London and it’s a refreshing addition to the shelves of travel literature on the capital. What inspired you to embark on such a venture?
I’d always loved walking round London – it’s the only way to really get to know a city. (One of the reasons Los Angeles, for instance, can never really be called a city – you have to drive everywhere.) I wanted a project that would ‘capture’ the city, let me examine its appeal – I wanted to cover all of it without having to walk every street, which would clearly be impossible. Looking at the Tube map one day I realised that was the answer – walk the whole network, overground. The book relates what happened – one line per chapter, reporting what I saw and felt, plus lots of history and trivia about the areas I passed through. Also the thoughts that occurred to me as I tried to understand why people love London so much.
2.Some of the lines are relatively short and can be done in a long day’s walk but some are around 40miles long. How did you choose the order in which you walked the lines and how long did the whole task take?
It took six months, doing a line roughly every other week (there are 11 in total). I tried to alternate the one-dayers and the longer walks. The longest was the Metropolitan, which I left until last – 71 miles in three days, in the middle of all that snow we had last December. So I saw London in winter and summer, during the week and at weekends – also at night, when I walked the Jubilee Line starting at 11pm. (Didn’t reach Stratford until 3pm the next day.) All in all I was actually walking for a total of 1 week, 6 hours and 50 minutes. As well as the walking, of course, there was lots of research to do, which I loved. Found out, for example, that there’s no pod 13 on the London Eye, because people might have thought it was unlucky. It goes from 12 to 14.
3.Having walked the London streets that the tube lines run beneath, you must have been through a wide range of districts and communities, not to mention eras of history and architecture. Was it the differences or the similarities between London’s regions that most struck you?
I wondered this myself before starting the project – the answer turned out to be that the regions don’t even make sense within themselves, let alone when you try to compare them with each other. There’s the odd exception (like Belgravia), but even ‘rich’ areas of London have less desirable parts, and vice versa. I really noticed this on the Hammersmith and City Line walk, going through Notting Hill. There were streets with multi-million pound houses on them, yet the pavements contained rubbish and abandoned TV sets.
Also one of London’s great strengths is that architecturally you never know what you’re going to get – the city’s always been suffering fires and bombings and God knows what else, so reconstruction has happened building by building. You’ll get a Wren church next to a 21st century chrome-and-glass office block next to a Victorian pub – it’s beautiful. One of my interviewees (I stopped off on some of the walks to talk to people) was Peter Rees, who’s in charge of planning in the Square Mile – he says that as a planner he thinks it’s great that London’s unplannable.
4.Whilst it is London and its criss-cross of tube lines that form the base map for Walk the Lines, the book struck us as being far more about the human topography of the city. So, having met with people from all four corners of the capital, is there such a thing as a Londoner?
Yes – the ones who aren’t from London. The people who love London the most are those who were born somewhere else. It’s really a city of outsiders, all looking for something that their original home couldn’t give them. It’s one of the reasons the place is so magical – there’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ Londoner. Just as you never know what you’re going to get with the buildings, you never know what sort of person you’re going to meet or see. This ended up being a big part of the book. Outside Buckingham Palace (on the Victoria Line walk) I saw a female pensioner astride a 1970s Suzuki motorbike waiting at the lights, cigarette hanging vertically from her bottom lip. As she pulled away I saw that the back of her denim jacket said ‘The Clash’. The things I overheard were great too – like the guy in Watford on his mobile: ‘we’ve been proactive – did you explain that to Gail?’
5.You came into Stanfords’ flagship store in Covent Garden to equip yourself when preparing for your trip (as featured in our article Walking the Underground…Overground). We trust the A-Z 9-Sheet Wall Maps London that you bought came in handy! Other than Walk the Lines, what literature or maps would you recommend to those who want to delve beneath the public face of the capital?
The maps were a huge part of the project, not just in planning routes but in marking them off afterwards. That felt like reliving each walk – maps are time-travel devices that let you go back to the place you visited. Seeing the maps gradually get covered in black magimarker gave a real sense of achievement. En route I used the A to Z, with photocopied bits of the big maps when I strayed outside (as in Essex, at the end of the Central Line). Our love of maps proved another theme of the book – on the Metropolitan Line I was joined by Bill Drummond (ex of the KLF, the man who burned a million pounds), who told me he thinks we love them because they give us a God’s-eye view of the world.
Other London literature – you have to start with HV Morton, whose pen portraits of the capital from the 1920s and 30s are fascinating even today. Also Geoff Nicholson (who walked a bit of the Northern Line with me) – his novel ‘Bleeding London’ has a character who walks the whole A to Z. The book has a lot to say about London obsession.
6.It struck us at Stanfords that the model you used for Walk the Lines is crying out to be used in other cities or for different modes of transport. Is this something you’re thinking of or do you have a completely new venture up your sleeve?
There are a couple of similar ideas I’m toying with at the moment, which for ridiculous reasons of superstition I won’t go into (I’m as bad as the London Eye) – but the whole experience was so much fun I certainly want to get back out on the road soon …
Mark can be followed on his twitter account; www.twitter.com/WalkTheLinesLDN
Interview by Sam Golding
Date: 06/07/2011