16 May 2008

Walking all the lines

It never ceases to amaze us the lengths some people will go to for their hobby (preparing a 28 page magazine alternate months, for example). Below is the blog of a chap called Neil who has, since December 2007, walked the entire London Underground network, taking photos along the way. The entire project has been blogged on his site: The London Photo Project.

Each Tube line has been mapped using GPS equipment and maps have been created for each line he's walked, once completed. A small amount of detail has been noted down and blogged about en route. The author calculates he's walked 378.5 miles over the 6 month period, totalling 54 days worth of non-continuous striding. Importantly this is greater than the total length of the Underground network as diversions were needed for a number of reasons: crossing the Thames is one example.

Before getting stuck into the blog we suggest reading his FAQ page, which is a fascination in itself. It's not plain sailing walking the Tube lines - the author suffered a strained calf muscle and found he couldn't get to the stations at Heathrow Airport for fear of trespassing. The blog has been summarised in a couple of ways: not too keen on reading every single entry for the past 6 months? Then there's the Walking Log - a table that details each line and what sections were walked each day in brief. The Merged Map (as seen uploaded to this blog) shows an overlay of all his individual Walking Maps of each Tube line.

A valiant effort and as the author suspects, he's the first to fulfill such a jaunt!