Location : NWS - CI/SfB : 11 / UDC : 725.314(42.1) // YOR

Like getting stuck in a lift for 2 hours with a high-end estate agent. ( )

This book was, at first, as written by the female character in Pulp's song "Common People": a person who lives in wealth and "submerges" into poverty (meaning riding on the London subway for the first time as an adult) and liking it.

Halfway into the book, York writes of wealth in the posh part of London, near to the Piccadilly line.

All in all: quite bland. Nondescript. Says very little to my life. I don't care if a writer is writing from a completely different part of life that does not correspond to my own - and speaking of money I really enjoyed Martin Amis' "Money" and also Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho" - but this reads, at its worst, like a stock financial report. At its best, it's funny and makes fun of posh people. ( )

The Blue Riband is the second of the books I’ve read in the Penguin Lines series. This book is about the Piccadilly Line, which has stops close to the posher parts of London including Savile Row and Jermyn Street. It looks at the buildings and places near the Tube stops rather than the Tube itself which is a novel way of approaching the project. Although I must admit to uttering a ‘what?!’ when reading the first sentence of the book which tells the reader that the author hadn’t been on the Tube for more than 25 years!

Lucky for the Tube-o-philes that not everyone has access to a taxi account then. Mr York then does get on a Tube and explore the Piccadilly line somewhat, focusing on the centre of town big name stations and the big-name areas around them (think Knightsbridge, although I now know that’s a place for what Aussies call ‘cashed up bogans’ and Mayfair). If you want to know where the uber rich hang out and do their business, this is a great book. Where to reminisce over great tailors and clothing stores, sure. The more distant stations (and poorer I’m guessing) don’t really get a look in, nor does the link to Heathrow which is rather important to those of us not from the UK. And the terrorist attack in 2005? Not mentioned.

Once I adjusted to the focus not being on the Tube, but the areas around it, the book was okay. A couple of things really annoyed me though. The very liberal use of italics to make things more dramatic only caused me to be more dramatically irritated. Yes, lovely that you know this area well and its social history, but I don’t think that is the overall point, right? I wasn’t drawn to this book to read about the author’s flats and near-miss flats in salubrious areas, I can just read the real estate section in the newspaper for that. It’s great that you’re so rich and connected, but trees were cut down for this! I also found the author’s casually racist style grating (‘Frogs’, ‘non-specific brown people’).

I expected more of the grand Piccadilly line, but I suppose I can say that I read it at the hairdresser’s in line with the style theme of the book.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com ( )

Peter York's contribution to the Penguin series of short books about the London Underground lines is enchanting.

He doesn't attempt to describe or even comment upon every stop on the line (there are more than fifty of them, after all) but he does offer some startling insights into the different focal points of the line. I would have liked to have know more about him because many of his observations seem based upon his attempts to buy properties in many of the areas that he described. He has also garnered intriguing insights into London's financial world, in particular the private hedge funds centred around Mayfair and St James's.

As a line the Piccadilly certainly covers some varied territory - high spots include Knightsbridge, South Kensington, Green Park and Russell Square, and Peter York has an ample stock of anecdotes about them all. One had the feeling that this small pocket-friendly book could quite easily have been expanded into a full-sized work without risk of depleting York's fund of stories.

This little book pulled off the difficult trick of being both informative and entertaining. ( )