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  • Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945
  • David Ashford
Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945. David L. Pike . Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii + 350. Price $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Eric Hobsbawm once made the provocative observation that the single successful example of modern British art between the wars was Harry Beck's Tube Map. Rumored to have been adapted from the electrical wiring diagrams that Beck spent much of his time drafting for signalling circuits, the Tube Map is an orderly abstraction, bearing little resemblance to the tangle of sub-surface, tube, and suburban railways that make up the London Underground. In his brilliant contribution to Pamela Gilbert's Imagined Londons, David L. Pike triumphantly expanded upon Hobsbawm's claim: the Tube Map was shown to be an abstract, controlled, and rationally organized space, superimposed upon an irrational product of Victorian laissez-faire economics, a cramped and rundown infrastructure, with characteristics proper to an "organic underground."1

This thesis seems to have provided Pike with the starting-point for his epic journey through the world beneath Paris and London in Subterranean Cities. Pike charts the development of the complex drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults that transformed the way in which we experience and conceptualize the city—which became a vertical space, offering vantage points from above and below. The view from above is exemplified by the metonymic abstraction of the Tube Map; the view from below, by the literal descent into the bas-fonds, the lower depths of the city. Building upon Rosalind Williams's observation in Notes on the Underground that in the nineteenth century technological undergrounds superseded caverns and mines as the primary location of actual subterranean spaces, Pike relates our contemporary obsession with all things underground to the vision of this "Vertical City," as developed in Paris and London from 1800 to 1945—thereby connecting recent critical interest in the underworld to the rich field of urban studies.

As might be expected, these two nineteenth-century capitals of technological novelty are shown to produce very different representational forms. [End Page 755]

As powerhouse of the industrial revolution and the most populous city in the West, London provided images of modernity as a literally subterranean phenomenon. Paris, by contrast, provided images of a more fantastic and ambivalent modernity: on the one hand, an otherworldly cornucopia of commodities; on the other, an infernal stronghold of revolution, the desire to appropriate that technology in unforeseen ways.

But Pike refuses any simple polarity: "these two images in fact constituted complementary expressions of a single, highly contradictory attitude toward the experience of the modern city" (2).

He begins by setting subway maps beside one another. While the Tube Map is shown to bear little relation to London, the map of the Métro is said to be "inconceivable" without superimposition on to the map of the city above (a point powerfully conveyed by the juxtaposition of a map of the Paris Métro with a map of the successive walls of Paris). For the controlled and rationally organized space that remains purely representational in London has in fact been repeatedly inscribed upon Paris itself, most memorably by Napoleon III, who is said to have marked new routes upon a model of Paris in lines of blue, red, yellow, and green (27–30). The Paris Métro could therefore afford a more playful attitude to the traditional relationship between above and below; "far from the utilitarian modernity aspired to by the Underground design of the same years, Guimard's édicules [or entranceways] were wilfully atavistic" (25). But, in his interpretation of early responses to the two subways, Pike does not overplay these differences. What emerges from his account is the story of a common struggle to carve out a modern conception of subterranean space—a space that always threatened to revert to its polar opposite, to be subsumed in traditional images of the world below. Pike connects this struggle to the subterranean utopias that were central to Rosalind Williams's study, and thereby throws much fresh light on works by Gabriel Tarde, H. G...

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