The range and quality of the photographs in this 176 page glossy book has to be seen to be believed. In particular the section on Station Art and Architecture is outstanding. It starts with some black and white images of Wittenbergplatz Station on the Berlin U-bahn from the turn of the 19/20 Century, through to the Moscow Metro of the mid-1930s, via some more mundane examples to the eye catching Stockholm and Prague metros and almost ends with the Sheppard Subway, Toronto which opened in 2002. There the use of apparently randomly placed coloured tiles at Sheppard-Yonge Station has, when viewed from afar, produced a panoramic landscape which is likely to turn-on even the greatest of philistines.

Indeed any set of politicians or administrators contemplating a new metro or extensions to an existing one would do well to peruse this book and see what has been done to brighten the lives of metro passengers. They might note too the apparent anomaly that communist Russia was prepared to put more resources into the Moscow Metro in the 1930s than their capitalist/democratic counterparts were willing to expend on their public transport systems. It is good that matters have looked up since then; but throwing money at the problems may not always work given the rather garish appearance of Hollywood Highland Station in Los Angeles.

It is, therefore, disappointing at the very least to have to say that the accompanying text is not in the same league. The TBMs used on the British side of the Channel Tunnel (p25) are described as “open face bentonite tunnelling machines,” which is not correct. Neither are the statements that “the engineers of the U-bahn pioneered the science of groundwater lowering” in Berlin (p52) and that “Dutch engineers devised a unique tunnelling method – Immersed Tube Construction” for the Rotterdam metro (p60) in the 1960’s*. There is the curious comment too that building technology was primitive in New York 100 years ago because excavation for the subway was carried out by hand (p57) when the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the recent BBC Engineering Wonders of the World programme had been built some years previously! There are also some annoying glitches. For example on p17 the sound clay layer can hardly have been 315m thick and, on p23, 2d is 0.83 pence not 2 pence. The metros in Buffalo and Liverpool and perhaps some others are also missing from the gazatteer.

All in all this is a great coffee table book, which could easily have been even better!

Myles O’Reilly