Mostly a good summary history of the underground. The most obvious flaw is that after WW2 it suddenly goes at a galloping pace until the PPP fiasco of the 2000s, which does get a good bit of attention. The Victoria line is skipped over in a couple of pages, the Fare's Fair issue which brought down the GLC gets talked about but not really explained and the rest is just "there wasn't enough investment". The original Jubilee line gets mentioned only in passing. It's weird and I'm not sure why he approached it in that way. Otherwise the only mildly annoying issue is that he tends to mention plans and places without maps and you'll have to look them up online to understand the geography of a few bits even if you know the system well.

Otherwise it's enjoyable on the subject and even as someone who knew the basics there's a good amount of interesting details and stories. Does make you weep for what could have been if London had had consistent planning and investment of infrastructure and development though. ( )

Very interesting subject. To anyone who lives in London the underground is an unavoidable aspect of life. It was both a revolutionary development technologically and in terms of its impact on London's development and life. An interesting story, well told. ( )

The subtitle should be "A Business History of the Underground". Business history is fine if you like it, but doesn't appeal to me. I was looking for a mixture of social history and engineering history. Very little of either here. ( )

I was looking for a book about the London Underground, which would give me a broad overview of its history and development. This book fitted the bill.

Wolmar does a good job of describing the early years of the Underground, carefully charting how it developed and the history behind it. It succeeds in conjuring up a strong sense of what it would have been like in those days and the obstacles the developers had to overcome in order to get the system built.

Unfortunately all of the last sixty years, the post-war period, is condensed into the last chapter. The author makes the point that not a huge amount happened in this period, but it definitely feels that the author had had enough and just wanted to get the book finished. There's a lot of history to fit in, in just over 300 pages, but I think a little bit more could have been spent on the more recent period.

It struck me that an e-book form of this book would really benefit from an animated, or maybe even interactive, map of how the Tube network developed over time. It seems like the sort of thing that should be possible, and any future e-book about the Tube that neglect to include this is missing a trick.

If you're looking for a readable introduction to the history of the London Underground, then I'm sure you could do much worse than this book. ( )

Another book with one of those irritating "...: How X changed the world" subtitles, written by a man who's established himself as something of a rentaquote on railway matters in the media. Surprisingly, given these factors to prejudice the reader against it from the start, it's not all that bad. There are better, more thoroughly researched, books about the Underground, but if you aren't technically inclined and just want a painless overview, you might find this worthwhile.

Wolmar has a lively, readable style, managing to be reasonably entertaining without dumbing down the subject matter too much. As he says himself, there are plenty of histories of the Underground around that focus on the engineering aspects, so he is aiming firmly at the non-technical reader, bringing in technical details only where they are really essential. The weakness of this book is that the better technical histories already say quite a lot about the social aspects of the Underground and its effects on the development of London, so that Wolmar doesn't really have very many new insights to share with us.

In fact, especially in the later chapters, the book is more a political and business history of the system than a social one. It doesn't live up to its claim to show how the Underground changed London at all. There is no serious attempt to consider what would have happened to the development of the city if there had been no underground network: would trams, buses and the "main line" railways have supported expansion of housing into the suburbs, or would London have remained a more compact city until the motor car came along? The only detailed examination of suburban development focuses on the Metropolitan Railway, which in its outer reaches wasn't really an underground line at all. If Wolmar really wanted to say something about the effect of the Underground on development, it would perhaps have been more interesting to compare London with other large cities that did not build underground networks, or got them much later: Paris, Berlin, and Istanbul, for instance. There must surely be plenty of published research on that sort of thing that Wolmar could have drawn on.

Like Fire and Steam, this also suffers from the fact that the author had previously written another book (Down the Tube) about the recent history of the system. Wolmar takes 290 pages to get from the 1860s to 1945, then rushes through the last sixty years in a mere 20 pages. This last section deals exclusively with political history, i.e. the effect of London (or rather Westminster) on the system, and tells us nothing at all about urban development. It would have been much more honest to his readers to stop in 1945 and say: "see my other book for the rest".

The book is also spoilt by the paucity of maps. There are no maps in the text, and only a small selection of publicity maps reproduced in the colour plate section. Unless you already have a fair working knowledge of the historical geography of the Underground system (in which case you don't need this book anyway), you will need to resort to other histories to make sense of the development of the various lines over time. ( )