Walk the Lines

Mark Mason,
£12.99, Random House Books,
ISBN 978 1847946539

At first glance, I presumed this was just another ‘quirky’ vanity project, with the author’s account of his personal obsession to walk overland the entire London Underground making for a neat, quick-pitch idea to the publisher. But my antipathy was eventually thwarted as I began to admire Mark Mason’s grand motivation to conquer London on foot and claim it as his own. It’s a driving sense of completion that every rambler can relate to, and the Tube-walking conceit is as good a way as any of trying to interpret and understand the sprawling capital. In the end, I was charmed by the book’s profusion of insightful anecdotes and fascinating trivia, which only occasionally gets mired in too many facts and figures. Tom Butler