London Underground Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

2025

Through interrelating the Acoustic Communication concepts of soundscape with contemporary collective memory studies, this research project explores the relationship between commuters and the London Underground (LU) soundscape in order to create an interactive sonic environment on the Internet. The methodology combines fieldwork and artistic work, focusing on commuters' perceptions of time and space, and on their sonic memories, as elements through which to interpret the space. The objective of the fieldwork is to investigate commuters' aural memories of the LU soundscape, including the feelings and sensations that it stimulates. The artistic objective is to facilitate the interaction between the soundscape and its users through an interface that allows a creative combination of sounds to assemble aural memories into a sound-driven multimedia experience. Twenty-four commuters participated in the ethnographic study during the three phases of the research; they followed the researcher's model, which combines the processes of listening and remembering. The researcher thus developed an interactive sonic environment where commuters can experience a non-linear virtual journey through the soundscape of LU, then apply this as a means of reflecting on the original commuting experience. The interactive nature of the process makes it possible for individual memories to be linked in a creative shared experience; it fosters the development of on-line sound-driven narratives.

2025

the article describes the formation of the image of the building of the crematorium as an object combining not only the functions of infrastructure, but also buildings of worship. Existing examples of crematorium buildings, their... more

2025, Critic|all IV International Conference on Architectural Design and Criticism

30 square meters of soil fertilizer: is that our very final destination?
Compost – from the Latin com-positus, “to place together” – or decayed organic material, commonly prepared by decomposing plant, food waste, recycling organic materials and manure used as a fertilizer for growing plants – has a weird, both etymological and semiotic, resonance with an inclusive idea of home, which goes far beyond the domestication of Nature. As a metaphor, compost has recently become a broad concept encompassing a revised relationship between humankind and the environment, aiming at overcoming the modern dualistic approach in favor of a hybrid and “ecologized thought”.
According to Donna Haraway, “living is composting”. Biologically, this means that a multi-species living is a dynamic mess of diverse bodies. Cognitively, the notion of compost enhances the “making oddkin” extending familial ties beyond blood relations, ultimately making communities out of compost.
Beside this metaphorical representation, compost is acquiring another odd meaning. As an environment-friendly alternative to burial or cremation, both carrying pretty high environmental costs, especially in dense urban areas, human bodies can be turned into soil after death, similarly to what happened to our ancestors, and their livestock, for tens of thousands of years. This practice, which places a corpse directly into a natural burial ground or in a reusable “vessel” made of biodegradable materials that foster its transformation into nutrient-dense soil in about a month, is the epitome of the circular economy, and the end of the very idea of humans as supernatural beings. The predicted carnage that will affect a large number of human beings in the near future – the chronological end of the boomers generation – poses the question in terms of a paradoxical nemesis. The generation that is most responsible for intensifying man’s negative impact on natural resources could literally repay the damage with the “sacrifice” of its members’ own bodies.
Yet, beyond the ecological foundation of the natural organic reduction of human remains, not universally supported by the scientific community, such “green death” questions the whole approach to death in Western cultures. After all, the time has come to invent not only a new way of living in the “damaged earth”, but perhaps, and primarily, a new way of dying.
In this regard, “terramation” implies a rethinking of the very notion of memory and thus of architecture as construction of memory devices.
This broad concept of compost will lead to a reflection on the consequences that secularization, as well as the presumed and possible desecularization of culture, has on ritual practices and farewell spaces.

2024

2024, Letteratura e Letterature

The London Tube plays a prominent role as a physical and imaginative location in many accounts and creative endeavours of post-war migrants to Britain and their descendants. After the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, Clapham South station was used as temporary accommodation for homeless migrants from the West Indies, many of whom took work in transport. Their displacement underneath the streets of London produced a vertical urban aesthetic, a city made of descending staircases and rickety lifts, which mirrored the downward trajectory of the early years of the Windrush generation in London. The city is personified and transmogrified into a ravenous urban monster: in its bowels, i.e. the Tube, migrants are chewed, digested, and discharged as cultural wastage. Moreover, the vertical framework of London recalls the vertical cosmos of Christianity: on the one hand, the Tube is rewritten as a vestibule of Hell or Limbo, a site of estrangement and vagrancy reminiscent of the psychological hell of the Modernists or the claustrophobic spaces of war artists; on the other hand, the Tube is scripted as the infernal home of the wretched of the Earth, at once a place of suffering and torment and a postcolonial site of creative kinesis, where old narratives are appropriated and rewritten.

2023, International Journal of Engineering

The development of Kupang City can be observed from the increase of activity or movement of society, so that city needs the existence of a system of transportation service and satisfied traffic. One of the facilities of urban transportation is a station that serves as a node point, can be considered as a tool to process loading and discharge passengers. Station has the complexity of the problem and affects the movement of public transport. The lack of public transportation operating at Oebobo Station is one of the phenomena in Kupang City. This research was conducted to examine the performance of the station to the movement pattern by reviewed at the location effectiveness, operational service, and transportation movement towards the pattern of public transportation movement in Kupang City. The purpose of research to see the effect of station performance on the pattern of movement and the influence of spatial structure on movement patterns by using quantitative approach. The data ob...

2023, Handbook of the Anthropocene

This essay explores aspects of landscapes relevant to the study of the Anthropocene. Anthropogenic landscapes, it suggests, are more than just palimpsests of marks, traces, and residues of human activity. Whatever happens to land - through the entangled actions of human and non-human forces - is inextricably interconnected with what happens to the whole Earth system.

2023, A Special Study for the degree of Master of Science

Stations are one of the most significant parts of transport networks. The structure and the service of stations have a direct effect on the well being of managers, operators and passengers. A well designed station is a necessity of creating a successful railway system. Railway stations vary enormously in regard to complexity depending on the type of railway, the location and the service. Underground stations are unique type of stations in various types of railway stations and there are many specific concerns of these stations such as capacity, accessibility, evacuation and emergency actions, safety, security, ventilation etc.. This project will focus on the capacity and accessibility problems of Tottenham Court Road Station which is one of the central located stations of London Underground network. Firstly the station will be presented with its major elements. Some numerical calculations about the capacity of certain elements will be held to show which parts need priority in renovation. Moreover the observed conditions of the station will try to make us realise the problems of the station. Finally, the results will be questioned and some temporary and permanent engineering solutions will be presented that can help to ease the congested service of Tottenham Court Road Station. I wish this study leads to further studies and it can be an example for the future MSc projects with its structure and content. I apologise from the readers for any kind of literature and printing mistakes on this paper.

2023, Position paper, ExUrban Noir workshop, …

Research on the design of future technologies has been recently directed toward the identification of what space and place mean in relation to people and ubiquitous technologies. However, mostly the workplace and the domestic sphere have been well defined and studied so far [1, 2] with a smaller number of projects focusing on social spaces [3, 4]. We believe these categories only address a narrow range of people's daily experience. More specifically, the transition from one place to another has not been much considered, yet it is these transitions which structure people's daily life as a continuous flow rather than a series of discrete moments. We are using the concept of in-betweenness to explore these passages between meaningful places and events. In-between spaces such as public transport, lobbies, shopping plazas and underpasses are typically overlooked and relegated to the background; only by virtue of their unimportance are they considered to be related. Rather than classing them as the void between more 'meaningful' places, we are considering them in their own right. THE CHALLENGE OF DESIGNING FOR IN-BETWEEN-NESS With this paper we would like to start a discussion on how the concept of in-between-ness could be addressed when considering the design of future technologies. Despite their perceived insignificance in-between spaces often contain a disproportionate amount of technology. This is due, in part, to the transitional role of many in-between spaces which requires them to display large amounts of public information, and partly to the activities which take place in such spaces; here we can identify waiting as a typical in-between 'activity'. This proliferation of technology makes in-between spaces breeding grounds for the urban noir and we believe it is important for designers to begin to understand these types of 'non-places'.

2023

You can see it in the leg of the uppercase R, the curves of the uppercase S, the tail of the uppercase Q, the stem of the early numeral 7, the neck of the numeral 2, the squiggle of the question mark ? and the rounded forms of the numeral 3; Gill Sans is the wider, more curvaceous and sinuous of the two very British types. You can see it in the leg of the uppercase R, the hooked shapes of the uppercase S, the stubby crossbar of the uppercase Q, the straight legged cap of the numeral 3, and the rounded forms of SRA2 artwork VBT.indd 1 17/02/2017 15:01 colophon: produced in conjunction with Johnston & Gill: very british types, a public talk and exhibition at the leicester print workshop in association with mark ovenden, cultural exchanges 2017, de montfort university & monotype, from an idea by ben archer & david weight. text & letterpress photograph ben archer

2023

This paper focuses on a subway user, one of the main characters of mundane mobility in big cities. It is based on the field research conducted by the author in two Russian cities (Moscow and Kazan) in 2013-2014. The subway is considered not only as public transportation, but more broadly as a regulation tool that is used by homo mobilis to construct a wide network of relationships: with a city, with time, with one's daily activities. The notion of "affect management"-the urbanite's ability to manage their own emotional states and experiences-is suggested to describe the role of the subway in everyday life planning.

2023, Brumal. Revista de investigación sobre lo Fantástico

Under the streets of London there's a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen... more

2023, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice

The many varied views on resilience indicate that it is an important concept which has significance in many disciplines, from ecology to psychology to risk/disaster management. Therefore, it is important to be able to quantifiably measure the resilience of systems, and thus be able to make decisions on how the resilience of the system can be improved. In this paper we will work with the definition, due to Pimm (1991), that resilience is ''how fast a variable that has been displaced from equilibrium returns to it.'' We will think of a system as being more or less resilient depending on the speed with which a system recovers from disruptive events or shocks. Here we consider systems which revert to an equilibrium state from shocks, and introduce a measure of resilience by providing a quantification of the rapidity of these systems' recovery from shocks. We use a mean-reverting stochastic model to study the diffusive effects of shocks and we apply this model to the case of the London Underground. As a shock diffuses through the network, the human-flow in the network recovers from the shock. The speed with which the passenger counts return to normal is an indicator of how quickly the line is able to recover from the shock and thereafter resume normal operations.

2023, Engineering Geology

This paper deals with the analysis and verification of the most frequently occurring triggering mechanisms for sinkholes in urban areas over mine caves. The study analyzes the phenomena observed in the hinterland of Naples (Italy), where intense historical mining activity has left several shallow underground man-made caves and tunnels. Collapse generally occurs due to the presence of an underground void, with or without involving the failure of the cave roof. The triggering is mainly due to the increase in water content in the soil due to anthropogenic causes such as leakages from aqueducts and sewerage systems. In this study, the stability condition of underground man-made caves was assessed through a parametric analysis based on a database of the geometry of the caves. The mechanical parameters assumed in the analyses were obtained from several stratigraphic logs, in-situ tests and laboratory investigations. The findings permitted a case study to be identified for 2D numerical analysis. Two triggering mechanisms (scenarios) were investigated in order to back-analyze field observations. The results reproduce the width and depth of observed phenomena and suggest that sinkhole risk mitigation in urban areas can be obtained first and foremost with enhanced knowledge of cave and tunnel networks, and also with proper maintenance of buried pipelines.

2023, Geoforum

This paper problematises public artopia, in other words the collection of claims in academic literature concerning the allegedly physical-aesthetic, economic, social, and cultural-symbolic roles of art in urban public space. On the basis of interviews with public-art producers (artists, public officials, investors, and participating residents) in a flagship and a community-art project in Amsterdam, we analyse the situatedness of their public-art claims according to actors' roles, geographical context, and time. The research suggests that public-art theory and policy suffer from three deficiencies. Theoretical claims about publicart and policy discourse feature, first, a failure to recognise different actors' perspectives: claims fail to locate situated knowledges that are intrinsically (re)constituted by actors' roles articulating with one another in time and space. Second is the lack of geographical contextuality: claims do not elaborate appropriately on distinct discourses about art projects' spatial settings. Third is the lack of temporal perspective. Claims neglect the practice of public-art realisation: that is, the evolution of claims and claim coalitions over the time horizon of the art projects: preparation, implementation, and evaluation.

2023, Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art

2023

1 ABSTRACT Panta rhei means 'everything in perpetual motion'. This may be true for the cosmos but on planet earth movement of people cohabits with staying put. Even nomads-historic and contemporary-alternative between movement and temporary station. Movement in cities is interdependent with arriving, staying put, or moving from one travel mode or one place to another. Normally, movements of people have a purpose of arriving. There exists therefore interdependence between flows and nodes to use Manuel Castells concepts. All types of movements of people on planet earth require man made infrastructure for the flows as well as for the nodes, regardless of mode of movement. The paper concentrates on urban dynamics related to railway infrastructure and selected railway stations in London. It argues that railway privatisation shifted the emphasis from flows to nodes, as privatised railway land and stations had greater development potential than still quasi publically owned and run ...

2023, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright Author's personal copy Mind the map! The impact of transit maps on path choice in public transit

2023

2022, PLAKAT (Pelayanan Kepada Masyarakat)

Covid19 adalah suatu penyakit menular yang disebabkan oleh jenis virus corona yang muncul awal 2020 di Indonesia. Pandemi Covid 19 telah berdampak luas pada semua sektor kehidupan tanpa terkecuali pada dunia pendidikan. Menurut informasi dari media online Republika.com disimpulkan bahwa belajar daring (dalam jaringan) menimbulkan masalah baru terutama bagi orangtua. Orangtua mengeluhkan belajar daring di rumah menambah kesibukan mereka. Wali murid merasa stres mengawasi kegiatan belajar anak di rumah karena sekolah memberikan sejumlah tugas pada siswa dan setiap hari tugas-tugas tersebut dikirimkan kepada gurunya melalui email (surat elektronik). Orangtua juga mengeluhkan anak mereka belajar terlalu santai (kurang serius), anak memegang HP (gawai) sambil bermain game online. Oleh karena itu diperlukan suatu program intervensi psikologi berupa psikoedukasi online dalam mendampingi anak belajar daring dirumah. Tujuan psikoedukasi online ini adalah memberikan pengetahuan, pemahaman dan...

2022, Design Issues

The article examines curatorial practices in regard to graphic design and posters—a subject only sparsely covered by poster research. It investigates how urban, environmental structures can work as guidelines for curating posters and ephemerals in museums. By applying an ecological view to design, it stresses the reciprocal relationship of humans with their built and product-designed environments and suggests this approach to be viable for curatorial work. It further demonstrates the point in regard to a recent event, the exhibition Spot on! British Posters from the Interwar Years, which was exhibited at the Danish Poster Museum in 2015–2016 and initiated by author and graphic designer Michael Jensen.

2022

Como homenaje al gran cineasta y amigo Jorge Denti, recién fallecido, recupero esta retrospectiva que hicimos en 2009 en el marco del Festival de Cine de Derechos Humanos de Buenos Aires. Es decir, años antes de su notable película "La... more

2022, Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of five underground strikes on journey times in London's transport network during 2009 and 2010. The main data source for this study was automatic number plate recognition cameras, which were installed on the entrances and exits of 670 travel links that covered the vast majority of the network and were equivalent to a total length of 1,740 km. The determination of spatio-temporal differences of strike effects between the first and the remaining strike days, the identification of changes in departure and arrival times, and the estimation of travel time delays within central, inner, and outer London, as well as between inbound and outbound traffic, were the main objectives of the study. The total travel time within the examined areas, the excess delay, and the corresponding percentage difference in journey times were the main performance measurements used. The most significant results showed that the second day of strikes result...

2022, PLAKAT : Jurnal Pelayanan Kepada Masyarakat

Usia dini merupakan periode yang sangat krusial bagi seorang anak. Khususnya pada perkembangan anak karena sangat berpengaruh terhadap perkembangan pada periode berikutnya hingga masa dewasanya. Perilaku bullying pada anak usia dini sering sekali diabaikan oleh orang tua bahkan guru, dengan anggapan bahwa anak usia dini belum memahami benar mana yang baik dan mana yang buruk, sehingga wajar dilakukan anak usia dini. Padahal perilaku bullying ini memiliki dampak yang sangat besar terutama bagi korban, seperti depresi, rendahnya kepercayaan diri atau minder, pemalu dan penyendiri, merosotnya prestasi akademik, merasa terisolasi dalam pergaulan, terpikir atau bahkan mencoba untuk bunuh diri apabila terjadi secara terus menerus, selain itu bullying juga memiliki dampak negatif pada perkembangan karakter anak, baik bagi si korban maupun pelaku. Pengabdian masyarakat ini berupa penyuluhan kepada orangtua yang memiliki anak usia dini mengenai perilaku bullying dan dampaknya pada anak usia ...

2022

This paper investigates the impact of schematic transit maps on passengers’ travel decisions. It does two things: First, it proposes an analysis framework that defines four types of information conferred from a transit map: distortion, restoration, codification, and cognition, and their potential impact on three types of travel decisions: location, mode, and path choices. Second, it conducts an empirical analysis to explore the impact of the famous London tube map on passengers’ path choice in the London Underground (LUL). Using data collected by LUL from 1998 to 2005, the paper develops a path choice model and compares the influence between the distorted tube map (map distance) and reality (travel time) on passengers’ path choice behavior. Results suggest that passengers often trust the tube map more than their own travel experience on deciding the “best” travel path. This is true even for the most experienced passengers to the system. The codification of transfer connections on th...

2022, Press Release

Ny udstilling i Dansk Plakatmuseum i Den Gamle By Åbner lørdag 3.oktober Kendt er London Undergrounds røde logo og nutidens reklameplakater på perroner og stationer i den britiske hovedstad. Mindre kendt er historien om den britiske designbevaegelse, der efter 1. Verdenskrig gjorde plakaten til sin tids mest populaere reklameform, et folkekaert samlerobjekt og det sted i kunsten, hvor engelsk modernisme fandt sit skarpeste udtryk. Den historie fortaelles nu i en udstilling på Dansk Plakatmuseum i Den Gamle By. Spot on! Engelske plakater fra mellemkrigsårene viser plakater, der banede vej for et kunstnerisk nybrud i britisk grafisk design og europaeisk designtaenkning, en hyldest til den engelske plakat i sine heydays. Den nye modernistiske reklameplakat satte funktion og effekt højest. Samtidigt gjorde den plakaten til scene for kunstnerisk opfindsomhed, gennemført håndvaerk og en ny målrettet professionalisme.

2022, DesignIssues

Background: A Matter of Context Since the end of the nineteenth century, the poster has been a collected object displayed in museums; thus, a significant and creative museological course runs parallel to the cultural, commercial, and political functions earned by the media in the urban environment. This article explores the subject by applying to design an ecological view, which stresses the reciprocal relations of humans and their built and product-designed environments. 1 It demonstrates how this approach inspired an event at the Danish Poster Museum in 2015-2016: an exhibition titled Spot On! British Posters from the Interwar Years. Initiated by the author and co-curated with graphic designer Michael Jensen, Spot On! marks an example of how poster contexts gave an impetus to a curatorial project. Still, the museological share of poster history is proportionally underexplored, and the subject has often been studied from more conventional perspectives: Studies of poster design too often fall into predictable patterns, determining graphic Authorship [sic], political agendas, and patterns of influence, as well as tracing the development of technical practices. 2

2022

Masa Pandemi Covid-19 memberikan banyak dampak dan perubahan kepada masyarakat. Salah satu dampak yang timbul terjadi pada bidang pendidikan. Pemerintah harus memikirkan cara bagaimana cara mengurangi penyebaran virus covid-19 kepada anak-anak pelajar, dengan mengeluarkan kebijakan sistem pembelajaran jarak jauh yang dapat dilakukan secara online dengan menggunakan aplikasi yang mendukung. Namun dalam pelaksanaan pembelajaran jarak jauh tersebut menimbulkan kendala dan dampak bagi anak-anak pelajar. Kendala dan dampak yang timbul berupa kejenuhan belajar pada anak. Dalam kondisi seperti ini, peran orang tua sangat penting dalam membantu anak mengatasi kejenuhan belajar pada anak selama sistem pembelajaran jarak jauh selama masa pandemi covid-19. Berdasarkan fenomena di atas, penulis memberikan penyuluhan kepada orang tua wali murid mengenai cara mengatasi kejenuhan belajar pada anak di masa pandemi covid-19. Metode yang digunakan dalam penyuluhan ini berupa pemberian materi berupa v...

2022, City

This paper discusses an unrealized urban plan from the 1960s that proposed to build a network of tunnel motorways and monorails underneath central London. By reframing this plan as a work of fiction, I want to underscore how literary geography perpetuates a limited tradition that merely focuses on fiction produced in or about the city, and not literature produced by or for the city. In the process of re-reading and, to an extent, reclaiming these plans from the National Archives, I argue that these abandoned visions provide an interesting text for literary geographers to access a genre of literature that bisects the built environment and fiction. The scope for this tactic is potentially vast, but a renewed look at unbuilt, unrealized or abandoned architectural texts and similar unconventional forms, would allow for literary scholars to perform a greater, more active role than before: from connecting their analysis directly to the built environment and the contemporary moment in urban space, to discovering new unbuilt works that disrupt established cultural narratives.

2022, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice

This paper investigates the impact of schematic transit maps on passengers' travel decisions. It does two things: First, it proposes an analysis framework that defines four types of information delivered from a transit map: distortion, restoration, codification, and cognition. It then considers the potential impact of this information on three types of travel decisions: location, mode, and path choices. 1 Second, it conducts an empirical analysis to explore the impact of the famous London tube map on passengers' path choice in the London Underground (LUL). Using data collected by LUL from 1998 to 2005, the paper develops a path choice model and compares the influence between the distorted tube map (map distance) and reality (travel time) on passengers' path choice behavior. Results show that the elasticity of the map distance is twice that of the travel time, which suggests that passengers often trust the tube map more than their own travel experience on deciding the ''best'' travel path. This is true even for the most experienced passengers using the system. The codification of transfer connections on the tube map, either as a simple dot or as an extended link, could affect passengers' transfer decisions. The implications to transit operation and planning, such as trip assignments, overcrowding mitigation, and the deployment of Advanced Transit Information System (ATIS), are also discussed.

2022, Annals of Operations Research

We present a general modeling approach to crew rostering and its application to computerassisted generation of rotation-based rosters (or rotas) at the London Underground. Our goals were flexibility, speed, and optimality, and our approach is unique in that it achieves all three. Flexibility was important because requirements at the Underground are evolving and because specialized approaches in the literature did not meet our flexibility-implied need to use standard solvers. We decompose crew rostering into stages that can each be solved with a standard commercial MILP solver. Using a 167 MHz Sun UltraSparc 1 and CPLEX 4.0 MILP solver, we obtained high-quality rosters in runtimes ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes within 2% of optimality. Input data were takes from different depots with crew sizes ranging from 30-150 drivers, i.e., with number of duties ranging from about 200-1000. Using an argument based on decomposition and aggregation, we prove the optimality of our approach for the overall crew rostering problem.

2022

Image is important to a city when trying to promote itself and compete with the other ones and reach a higher status in the networks of global economy. Meanwhile, architecture is one of the key elements for building the city image, which truly needs some visual and concrete factors to catch people’s attentions and make them believe. Among the architectural elements, the urban infrastructure, by being built as architectural attracting objects in the city, can play a significant role for urban architecture and shape the city form as the spatial framework for urban landscape. This paper aims to investigate how these major urban infrastructure projects work for the building of the city image in the age of globalisation. For making the concepts and argument more evident, the Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) project in London will be adopted as the case. The argument starts form a phenomenon that architecture plays an essential role for the city image making. Among the architectural elements,...

2022, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms

The Anthropocene is proposed as a new interval of geological time in which human influence on Earth and its geological record dominates over natural processes. A major challenge in demarcating the Anthropocene is that the balance between human-influenced and natural processes varies over spatial and temporal scales owing to the inherent variability of both human activities (as associated with culture and modes of development) and natural drivers (e.g. tectonic activity and sea level variation). Against this backdrop, we consider how geomorphology might contribute towards the Anthropocene debate focussing on human impact on aeolian, fluvial, cryospheric and coastal process domains, and how evidence of this impact is preserved in landforms and sedimentary records. We also consider the evidence for an explicitly anthropogenic geomorphology that includes artificial slopes and other human-created landforms. This provides the basis for discussing the theoretical and practical contributions that geomorphology can make to defining an Anthropocene stratigraphy. It is clear that the relevance of the Anthropocene concept varies considerably amongst different branches of geomorphology, depending on the history of human actions in different process domains. For example, evidence of human dominance is more widespread in fluvial and coastal records than in aeolian and cryospheric records, so geomorphologically the Anthropocene would inevitably comprise a highly diachronous lower boundary. Even to identify this lower boundary, research would need to focus on the disambiguation of human effects on geomorphological and sedimentological signatures. This would require robust data, derived from a combination of modelling and new empirical work rather than an arbitrary 'war of possible boundaries' associated with convenient, but disputed, `golden spikes'. Rather than being drawn into stratigraphical debates, the primary concern of geomorphology should be with the investigation of

2021, Mortality

Designs on Death: the Architecture of Scottish Crematoria.
By Hilary J. Grainger

2021, Brief Encounters

Many people have noted a suggestive parallel between the abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian and the design of metro maps such as Henry Beck’s map of the London Underground. Is this just a superficial similarity or is there some more substantive point of connection? This article speculates that the ‘dynamic equilibrium’, which gave Mondrian’s mature pictures their inimitable psychological force, could also be at work in the most iconic metro maps, such as those of Henry Beck and George Salomon. If so, then the automatic generation of metro maps to an acceptable quality may entail the daunting task of operationalising this dynamic balance and encoding it in computer software.

2021

The London Underground Diagram made history as the first underground transport diagram to abandon geographic accuracy in favour of legibility, but it has also become the stuff of cultural history, inviting references and comparisons to... more

2021, Indiana Magazine of History

2021, International Rail Journal

This paper on Metro Overheating
➢ considers the extent of the problem, and how it affects passengers;
➢ sets out the circumstances that led me to this very different theory;
➢ identifies the probable causes of the over-heating, based on my direct experiences, observations and temperature measurements;
➢ discovers how another underground network, conceptually similar, albeit with some subtle differences, fared with overheating; and
➢ suggests possible solutions specifically for the configuration of London Underground’s infrastructure.

2021, Rail Analysis

This technical article aims to encourage a wider discussion around our hypothesis as to the root cause(s) of
overheating in certain metro systems, using London Underground’s ‘Tube’ Network as an example.

2021, Thanatos Journal

In a letter, written on Saturday, February 22, 1913, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw described to his actress friend Stella Campbell the eventful day of his mother's funeral and cremation at Golders Green Crematorium in London. From Shaw's recollection, two intertwined aspects of his experience emerge. One is internal-intellectual and emotional-and the other is external, informed by the environment in which this funerary experience took place. By retracing Shaw's steps, this article questions the extent to which his recollections of the spatial qualities of the crematorium, London's emerging metro system, and the newly planned suburb were signs of a new urban experience. I discuss the changing space of the city in the early twentieth century by drawing on urban history, death culture, and architecture. The intention is to highlight how these elements-transport, crematorium, and suburb-all embodied the notions of order and efficiency, which promised a new idea of urban living in early twentieth-century London.

2020, The Blue Notebook

The article describes letterpress and screen-printed advertisements which were installed on the London Underground.

2020

Unearthing the unintended inhabitation of the London Underground and the effects of past occupancy on the perceptions of underground space, this paper focusses upon the ways in which sub-surface space has been defined and inhabited over time. Understanding the methods by which people sheltered in London's Underground during the blitz sheds light on our current perceptions of the same space, with the inhabitation of such a 'non-place' by London's homeless population unintentionally informed by a culmination of historic inhabitation.

2019

There are few in-depth examinations of folk horror in urban environments. This is understandable; the characteristics that usually define folk horror-snappily described by Mark Gatiss as an "obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions"-require a connection to the earth and to our esoteric, pre-Christian past that are less apparent in towns and cities than they are in the countryside. Folk horror also thrives on the isolation, remoteness and secrecy afforded by the rural landscape, again difficult to come across in the busy modernity and technological connectedness of civilisation. There have been some explorations into the urban wyrd that have identified characteristics analogous to those in rural folk horror. Peter Hutchings' 2004 paper Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television discusses denuded landscapes that have been abandoned because of their association with the urban space. Adam Scovell, in his 2017 book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, devotes a chapter to hauntology and the urban wyrd, in which he focuses on the folk horror elements in Nigel Kneale's urban based works. This paper will hopefully add to these initial forays into the urban folk horror space, and will do so by examining Gary Sherman's Death Line from 1972, which is set primarily in one discrete and specific urban environment: the London Underground. In my opinion the Underground shares a number of similarities with the countryside of traditional rural folk horror: its antiquity as the world's oldest subterranean transit system, marks it out as the modern, technological equivalent to the pagan sites of rural folk horror. Like those pagan sites, it is a place of hidden and esoteric histories, and like the tilled fields and ancient forests of folk horror it has a close association with the substance of the earth. For those of you unfamiliar Death Line, it concerns the last cannibal descendants of an abandoned group of trapped Victorian labourers, living in and venturing out from the hidden and disused tunnels and stations of the Tube to hunt. When director Piers Haggard used the term 'folk horror' to describe his approach to making his 1971 film Blood on Satan's Claw, he did so to deliberately contrast his film to what he considered to be the

2019

On November 8th 1971, the English rock band Led Zeppelin released their fourth, untitled, album. Having 22 million copies sold, its success was seen by the record label Atlantic Records as a professional suicide. On this album, the tracks are referring to the 60s rock’s cultural form, when London’s underground offered possibilities of producing musical experiments. However, the album also has transformations, typical of the beginning of the 70s, when rock music was tied to subgenres, in order to be assimilated by marketing strategies and sold in each one of the segmented markets. This situation was due to a London underground scene crisis and this research aims to investigate how much of this crisis can be heard in Led Zeppelin IV and how the band reacted to the new subgenres.