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|title=Underground Overground: A Passenger's History of the Tube

|author=Andrew Martin

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=9781846684777

|pages=304

|publisher=Profile

|date=April 2012

|summary=A very readable yet thoroughly researched history of the London Underground, the oldest, most characterful and downright illogical metropolitan transport system in the world, which carries over one billion passengers every year.

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Although he was born in Yorkshire, Andrew Martin has long been enthralled by the London Underground. His father worked on British Rail, and Andrew himself therefore had free travel on the system as well as a Privilege Pass which entitled him to free first-class train travel on the national rail network. Having lived in London for twenty-five years, commuting to various newspaper offices in his employment as a journalist, a job which has included writing a regular magazine column, Tube Talk, he is well qualified to write this entertaining and enlightening social history of the world's most famous underground railway.

This is a very informative history of the sprawling system which has long been part of every resident's or visitor's experience. Martin writes with commendable humour, while not brushing aside tragic aspects such as the Moorgate disaster referred to above, and likewise the even more shocking wartime tragedy in March 1943 at Bethnal Green when 173 people were killed, largely as a result of panic when people crowded into the station for shelter at the sound of anti-aircraft guns. Like it or loathe it, it is surely impossible to imagine London without the Underground, and anybody who was ever travelled on a train through those often dark and overcrowded tunnels will surely approach this book with fascination as I did, unable to resist the opportunity to learn more about how the mighty oak grew from a small acorn in mid-Victorian Britain.

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[[Category:Travel]]