Amazon.co.uk Review
How many times have we heard the over-familiar words that give Simon James the title for his wonderful book of startling photographs?
Mind the Gap, Michael Palin reminds us in his foreword, is also testimony to what the French philosopher Derrida would probably call a trace, an admission of error written into the very being of the tube. "Mind the Gap" means the trains don't quite fit the stations. Londoners, and all London's visitors, know the tube is synonymous with travelling the capital but is it merely a utilitarian thing that gets us from A to B, from home to work and hopefully back again? Simon James thinks not. He has paid a visit to every one of the tube's multi-fold stops and produced a book of beautiful, strangely haunting and empty, bright and colourful yet oddly nostalgic and gently melancholic photographs that entirely fulfil the photographers remit of making us look anew at the familiar and seeing it again for the first time through renewed eyes. James knows that if we look closely the tube does not actually quite fit our expectations of it, doesn't quite fit the image we have in our minds. He shows us history (surreally capturing a sign for a "Secret Nuclear Bunker") and often impressive architecture, suburban hinterlands and the proximity of the countryside (surely in most minds the tube's radical "other"), and reminisces about offices, platforms, walkways and cuttings. This is the tube as you've never thought you've seen it before. --
Mark Thwaite
Product Description
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.
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