Going Underground

While the act itself is surely an old one, the practice of exploring (mostly abandoned) man-made structures has only evolved into ‘Urbexing’ recently. Fuelled by the potential of blogs and message boards, ‘Urban Explorers’ worldwide document their adventures online, sharing accounts of trips down catacombs or into long-closed sanatoria. Their text posts are almost always accompanied by photographs. Many of the Urbexers make the metaphorical underground aspect of their craft literal, and seek out structures below the surface; indeed Silent UK, an Urbex collective posting since 2001, divides its website into adventures ‘Above’ and ‘Below’.¹ Among the latter category are visits to several closed London Underground stations – ‘ghost’ stations – which the team has infiltrated. Silent UK’s photographs of Brompton Road Underground, closed in 1934 and recently put up for sale by the Ministry of Defence, feature uncannily empty passages which, but for the dirt and soot, could easily be mistaken for other (open) stations on the network.² The images show still-present handrails, and the original station tiling; occasionally they are disrupted by bricked-up tunnels, so that one wall simply reads ‘BROMPT’.³

Although the motivations of Urban Explorers vary, at least one views the London Underground as a central influence on his practice. Bradley L Garrett is a researcher at the University of Oxford who completed his doctorate on Urbexing in 2012.⁴ In a March 2011 blog post entitled ‘Hacking the London Underground’, Garrett writes that ‘the purpose of urban exploration [was always] to reconfigure geographical imaginations by visibly reconfiguring and crushing boundaries’. Accompanied by photographs whose descriptions – ‘Thirdspace’ and ‘Uncovered’ – point to the liminal nature of the Tube’s empty spaces, he explains that ‘it was the London Underground, not the sewers, that made us an infiltration crew’.⁵ Garrett suggests that it is the possibility of completing the network, exploring every abandoned section, that makes the Tube enticing – but viewing the photograph of a defunct signpost which lists stops still used by today’s commuters (Holborn, King’s Cross, Uxbridge, Hammersmith) one senses that the relationship between the running and closed sections of track is also particularly exciting.

As Garrett is surely well aware, today’s Urbexer is part of a long and broad tradition of boundary-crushing in the tunnels below London. David Ashford’s London Underground is the first full-length study of the London Underground’s cultural history, and questions of authority and possibility recur throughout. Ashford approaches the Tube as a ‘non-place’ according to Marc Augé’s definition: a space ‘formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure)’ and simultaneously mediating ‘a whole mass of relations…which are only indirectly connected with their purposes’. ⁶ The London Underground fits the definition closely. Passengers’ experiences are not in relation to the landscape above, but instead to textual information below. Humanity, Ashford suggests, has long ‘haunted’ this non-place; which, as a textual environment, is open to rewritings. Spanning 150 years of human engagement with the Tube – which, we are reminded, colloquially refers to both the true deep-running ‘Tube’ tunnels and the subsurface railways (p. xi) – Ashford demonstrates not only the uneasiness and alienation of the Underground passenger, but also the more positive possibility that ‘the dispossessed’ are able to rewrite the space. Progressing chronologically, each chapter takes as its subject one historical period and attendant culture (or counter-culture), from the ‘psychopathology’ of the Victorian imagination to the ‘Conceptual History of Metroland’, ending with the psychogeographical writing of the 2000s.

This chronological approach is specifically designed to counter one of the four ‘conceptual problems’ of cultural geography that London Underground addresses. Taking his cue from Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s 2009 Geographies of Modernism,⁷ Ashford notes the recent ‘spatial turn’ (p. 4) in cultural studies as a backdrop of his work, and structures his volume to evade the critical problems of the field identified by Thacker. Thus London Underground is careful to stress the material nature of the spaces...