London Underground

In London Underground, David Ashford sets out to chart one of the strangest—as well as most familiar—spaces in London: its famed underground rail system. Providing an account of the evolution of this archetypal modern environment, he sees the underground as the first space to complete the slow process of our estrangement from natural landscape. For Ashford, it is, as Marc Augé has called it, a nonplace, a way to traverse an invisible landscape through the medium of signs and maps. Surveying an impressive diversity of materials, from the Victorian triple-decker novel to modernist art, pop music, and graffiti, Ashford combines cultural history with spatial theory to tell a story of how people have attempted to make a home in the sometimes bizarre spaces of the modern world.