Never mind the city guides: The topos of a city in urban fantasy (with interpretative emphasis on Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere)

The paper focuses on the phenomenon of urban fantasy with a particular interest in the topos of a city, which assumes great significance as a thematic and motivic element in the subgenre. The authors touch upon the relation between (sub)genre and topos/topoi in general, but also more specifically, between urban fantasy and the city, regarding the urban area as a distinct setting with a specific atmosphere, character or genius loci. Within this frame, the paper seeks to exemplify the aforementioned relations through an interpretative study of Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, which breathes life into the London underground scene. London Below comes to personify, literally, the vices of London Above via the use of anthropomorphic strategies. Moreover, the spatial peculiarities of the novel not only contribute to the creation of the fantastical atmosphere but they also function as a vehicle of social critique and a constitutive element of the protagonist’s transformation.

Train Dwell Time Efficiency Evaluation with Data Envelopment Analysis: Case Study of London Underground Victoria Line

Train dwell time is a complicated component and depends on many factors. One of the dominant factors is passenger volume. This study used actual train movement data and passenger demand data from London Underground, UK, to estimate the number of passengers and train dwell times at each station, and then evaluated train dwell times from a different perspective. Considering the various characteristics of stations, it is complicated to evaluate dwell time. Therefore, data envelopment analysis (DEA) was introduced to evaluate the dwell time at each station in relation to passenger volume at that station. The study investigated whether the dwell time spent at stations is efficient when considering the number of passengers that the stations can serve. The results showed that, in low-passenger-volume stations, the dwell time efficiency score is low and increases relative to the increase in passenger volume. For high-passenger-volume stations, interactions between passengers are more relevant and have a strong influence on dwell time. Passenger movement direction is a key factor to classify stations. This research proposes that stations should be classified according to their characteristics, and points out the challenge at any station with the same characteristics as Victoria station which has high passenger volume with bi-directional flow, and where trains arriving are crowded. This characteristic would result in high interactions between passengers, thus making a long dwell time. The station has to handle high passenger volume and also has to keep the dwell time within the threshold.

‘A great traffic was going on, as usual, in Whitehall’: Public Places and Secret Spaces in Sherlock Holmes’s London

Arthur Conan Doyle is rarely considered a master of spy fiction, but several Sherlock Holmes stories were highly influential in the development of this genre in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This paper examines three of these stories – ‘The Naval Treaty’, ‘The Second Stain’, and ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ – and shows how they use the topography of London to explore themes of secrecy, concealment, and political power. Holmes investigates place and space in two ways: he discovers what happens behind the closed doors of government buildings like the Foreign Office in Whitehall and the Woolwich Arsenal, and he reads public spaces (like the London Underground and the streets of Westminster) to detect relationships not apparent to those lacking his criminological skills. These stories inspired contemporary and later authors of espionage fiction as they exemplify some of the purposes and pleasures of the genre – the romanticisation of bureaucracy and insights into secret history.

Get Back: The New Galician Diaspora Goes on Stage

This article analyses Get Back (2016), a play written by Diego Ameixeiras and directed by Jorge Coira. The text will be considered an example of an early Brexit narrative, and it will serve to explore how the new Galician diaspora is represented through the arts. Issues related to migration, racism, and precariousness bloom naturally from a play that gathers four Galician migrants in London, together with a British-born character, inside one of the carriages of the Tube. Old and new waves of Galician migrants will be juxtaposed through different characters, illustrating the complexity of this recent migratory phenomenon. Several stereotypes will be exposed to increase how Ameixeiras constructs generational and gender gaps existing among Pepe, Luisa, Rafa and Iria, four immigrants who find themselves sharing a carriage on the London Underground sometime during the aftermath of Brexit. Thanks to the multiple dichotomies and arguments that create an ambivalent sense of Galician identity abroad, the play runs very smoothly. The different points of view found in the text will reflect on the subaltern status of the characters, who seem to struggle to find their place in their host country.

Place Making in Transit

Spaces of transit and transportation are often thought of as one-dimensional and as defined by their functionality and rationality, but recent literary texts challenge such preconceptions by representing those spaces as multidimensional and meaningful. In this article, we examine literature through the lens of place making, seeking to understand in what ways literary representations are involved in renegotiations of transit space. Addressing two generic spaces of transit—the underground and the airport—we analyze a body of texts generated through initiatives relating to the London Underground and Heathrow Airport respectively. Arguing that literature contributes to a processual understanding of place, we conclude that literary texts should be considered as instances of place making, and thus deserve serious consideration in research.

THE OLDEST UNDERGROUND RAILWAYS IN THE WORLD AND THEIR ANNIVERSARIES

The five oldest underground railways started to be operational in the 19th century. These were the metros in London, Athens, Istanbul, Budapest and Glasgow. Undoubtedly, world primacy of status in terms of age belongs to the London Underground. However, the age ranking of the others in continental Europe is more difficult to determine. Regardless of this criteria, the undergrounds of the 19th century became the basis of the world’s most widespread and rational means of public transport. The further development of these named oldest undergrounds is here documented.