Coming from a city with only a very limited rail service, I’ve always been fascinated with subway systems in general and the London Underground in particular. My friend Molly and I, backpacking in 2004, were in love with the Underground, finding it the easiest, most logical and most charming way around. We weren’t much in the habit of buying silly souvenirs, but we both came back with “Mind the Gap” t-shirts.

“Mind the Gap” had a sinister and, like most location-names in London, literary, connotation before I even arrived. In Neil Gaiman’s book Neverwhere the gap between the train and the platform edge reveals a link to the mythical world of London Below, a place where Knightsbridge indeed features a knight and a bridge, and where there really is an Angel in Islington. To this day, every journey on the underground leaves me ruminating about the possible underworld realities behind every name, and like so many British place names they all have a bizarre and discordantly musical sound. Shepherd’s Bush, Covent Garden, Swiss Cottage, Elephant and Castle, Tooting, Harrow-on-the-Hill. And Burnt Oak, perhaps the best of all. I like to imagine it having been named for an actual burnt oak in an actual field, and now it’s only a suburb on London and the birthplace of Tesco.

Like most people who have had to commute or in any way depend on the London Underground, I no longer find it charming, but I can’t even imagine London without it, and “Mind the Gap” remains in my mind the ultimate expression of Britishness.