For Londoners and visitors alike, the London Underground has long held a fascination far beyond its role as a transport system. In this volume, Ashford gives us a theoretically informed yet very readable account of the cultural impact of the London Underground throughout its history. In doing so, Ashford sets a possible template for future cultural studies of the impact of organizations upon their users and those that work within them. Conceptually, Ashford draws upon the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies, exploring the blurring boundaries between the physical and metaphorical, and demonstrates how depictions of the underground in art, literature, music and film often themselves influenced the fabric of the space itself. Ashford is heavily influenced by Henri Lefebvre's 1974 text The Production of Space, as well as the work of the Lefebreian Marc Augé's Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995). Ashford argues that the London Underground is one of Augé's non-lieux, or non-places – a space mediated by text, in which users of the space rely upon text to mediate their relationship with the landscape. Ashford argues that the Underground, with its sparkling white corridors and dark featureless tunnels, was one of the first such non-places to be used by consumers, who today are more used to these spaces in the form of supermarkets, airports and motorways.

In the first chapter, Ashford guides us through the reaction of the users of the system to this new paradigm. Ashford shows how the early sub-surface lines, operated on mainline principles with class-divided trains, by two different companies, started to create confusion for users at the same time as extending the existing phenomenon of the alienation of the railway compartment. This inspired a slew of psychopathological fiction inspired by the lack of interaction between passengers, such as Baroness Orczy's The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway (1901), in which a murder takes place on a train while no one pays attention. Not surprisingly, tedium was seen to set in among working-class passengers on the daily commute, and Ashford points, via the work of George Gissing's New Grub Street, to the creation of the tabloid press and penny novels to ‘feed’ these consumers. At the same time, Certeau-style guerilla consumption was seen to emerge among leisure and female passengers travelling at off-peak times, often completing full trips round the circle line for fun.

In the second chapter, the book moves on to look at the emergence of the tube proper, built by American capital in the first decades of the twentieth century, examined through the lens of Theodore Dreiser's The Stoic (1947), a thinly veiled satire on Charles Tyson Yerkes. Ashford shows how the fully electrified tube became a symbol of British discomfort with the advances made by the Americans in the second industrial revolution, seemingly overtaking British industrialists still stuck in the age of steam. The new lines also broke up the class system, having only one class of carriage, and putting passengers on parallel rather than perpendicular seating. The tube thus became a symbol of invasion from below. Yet, here an opportunity seems to be missed to consider the specifically British character that the deep tube network has subsequently, and ironically, taken on; its unique loading gauge and unmistakable train design making it very distinct from other metros in the world.

Perhaps the strongest chapter is Chapter 3, in which the influence of the underground on Vortiscist artists and architects is considered. Harry Beck's tube map, which formed the basis for the network map still used today, formed the culmination of an avant-garde movement inspired by the sense of speed and modernity embodied by the underground system. In the 1910s, Vorticists broke away from the futurist movement, seeking to re-order the metropolis to reduce the dehumanizing effect of consumption. Yet, ironically, the movement received patronage from the underground executive Frank Pick, who introduced the famous corporate identity of the system, commissioning its famous typeface from the typographer Eric Gill. Vorticists such as E. McKnight Kauffer designed famous posters such as Winter Sales Are Best Reached by Underground and thus ended up consolidating the grip of the non-place on the modern world, rather than humanizing it. Although more images could be shown in the book, Ashford tells this story in a rich and approachable fashion, and a keen idea emerges of the artistic impact of the underground far beyond the London area.

Chapter 4 heads out up the Metropolitan Line to consider the impact of the concept of Metroland. This chapter follows nicely from Chapter 3, in that the artistic development of the concept is followed. Chapter 5, which focuses on the myth of tube shelterers during the Blitz through photography, is perhaps the least successful. Although Ashford picks up on the factual reality as being different from the fantasy (not least that adult male shelterers appeared to outnumber children), an apparent mistake in copy and picture editing impairs the reader's enjoyment of his examination of the pictures taken by Bill Brandt and M. McNeill, which appear to be both captioned and described the wrong way round. This error makes the chapter incredibly confusing for the reader and unfortunately leads to annoyance, which is a great shame as the book is such a joy overall.

Chapters 6 and 7 bring us up to the recent past. Chapter 7 examines the role of the underground in inspiring counter cultures since 1950, again as part of the modern consumerist machine. British pop music took inspiration from the underground but the need to rebel against ‘the system’ culminated most visibly in the graffiti wars running from the late 1970s into the early 1990s, when artists attacked the network seeking to reclaim it for artistic freedom. The final chapter culminates with a look at Psychogeography inspired by the London underground, looking at recent fiction inspired by the dark places of the underground, such as the BBC's low-budget series Neverwhere (1996), filmed on abandoned tube station platforms and the old Post Office Railway. The book then somewhat strangely peters out, lacking a conclusion chapter, missing the opportunity to have a final concluding discussion about the significance of the underground as both a symbol of modernity and non-place throughout its history, and the ongoing attempts by cultural actors to reclaim it from this status. In general, however, Ashford gives us a very enjoyable account of the cultural history of the London Underground and this book should inspire management historians to think about the cultural side of organizations more, while bringing cultural history close to an interest in the cultural side of economic life.