The Best of Connie Willis

Afterword for “The Winds of Marble Arch”

My favorite place in London is of course St. Paul’s, but my second favorite is not a place, exactly. It’s the whole vast network of the London Underground. It has these wonderful wooden-slatted escalators that go all the way down to the center of the earth, and ceramic-tiled platforms, and on every available post and pillar and wall is posted the tube map, the best map ever drawn.

And just as the Tube isn’t exactly a place, the tube map’s not exactly a map, either. It’s more like a circuit diagram (or a scar on Professor Dumbledore’s knee), and it was designed, believe it or not, by an Underground employee, Harry Beck, in his spare time. It’s a work of genius. It’s ridiculously easy to read and understand, and it’s beautiful in its own right, with all those lovely blue and purple and green lines. It should be hanging in the Tate Gallery, and the Underground should be on the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest. I mean, Charing Cross Station stands on the site of the blacking factory where Charles Dickens worked as a kid. Petula Clark got her start singing in the Tube during the Blitz. Actors like Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness and Dame Edith Evans gave impromptu performances in Leicester Square Station as the bombs fell, and hundreds of the British Museum’s treasures were stored in the blocked-off tunnels of Chancery Lane. Two men were assigned to guard them, and they lived, cooked, and slept there surrounded by wooden crates full of Pharaohs, Caesars, and Grecian urns.

I discovered the delights of the Underground on my very first trip to London and have adored it ever since, so much so that I was delighted that my novel Blackout / All Clear and “The Winds of Marble Arch” made it necessary for me to spend hours in the Tube taking notes, and I’m ridiculously happy whenever I see it in a movie or on an episode of Dr. Who or the new Sherlock. The TV series Primeval used the old deserted tunnels under the Aldwych, complete with bunks from the Blitz days, in one of its episodes (it was infested with giant bugs from the Carboniferous Era), and the Underground is in lots of great movies, from Hanover Street to Love Actually to Billy Elliott.

My favorite, though, has to be Sliding Doors, in which catching a train—or missing it—takes on cosmic significance.

Just as it should. This is, after all, the Underground.