Tracks : A Journey Through Metroland

An account of the rise of Metroland, the area alongside the Metropolitan Railway. This is achieved with both the aid of history and personal anecdotes of what it was like to live there in the 1950s and 1960s. Its popularity was defined by other authors and film-makers including Julian Barnes and John Betjeman.

Tracks: A Journey Into Metroland tells the story of Metroland and the development of suburbia that grew alongside the Metropolitan Railway. Originally the brainchild of eminent Victorians, the Metropolitan grew to become the queen of underground lines, eventually expanding to a point some fifty miles outside London. Author Kevin J. Last describes how the concept of Metroland was an aspiration for several levels of society, promising a better lifestyle well away from the deprivations of wartime. The idea that the working man could live comfortably outside the smoke in individually designed houses would mean that he could also thrive at work, largely due to the regular service offered by the new railway. This was quite exceptional in that, while nominally an underground line, most of the Met''s route was above ground and, in length, went far beyond other similar lines, far out into the Buckinghamshire countryside. Not marked on any map, Metroland is as much a concept of the mind as a real place.