Mind the Gap

With a foreword by Michael Palin, Mind the Gap is a warm, nostalgic, eccentric book about London’s tube lines, and particularly the ends of the lines – exotic destinations such as West Ruislip, Uxbridge, Upminster and Cockfosters.


Photographer and writer Simon James has visited every last one of these quasi-mythical places, capturing on film London’s suburban hinterland, that no-man’s-land that is not quite city nor countryside, but a utopian combination of both – with their overgrown railway cuttings, litter-free stations, time-warp parades of shops, indistinguishable Acacia Avenues, pipe-and-slippers ’30s architecture, and occasional, bizarre, even menacing incongruities – such as James’ photograph of the `Secret Nuclear Bunker’ near Chipping Ongar… Combined with numerous tube facts, figures and fantasies accumulated by the author on his travels, Mind the Gap is the book of the great unknown, the great adventure that awaits all Londoners.


Michael Palin has kindly agreed to write a foreword to Mind the Gap, and has authorised his name to be printed on its front. He is the perfect person to endorse the book, not just because its photographs are as amiable, quirky and English as he is, but also due to his status as a traveller of renown – not just on the obvious globe-trotting level, but also in his capacity as chairman of the pressure group Transport 2000.