Down the Tube: the battle for London's Underground Christian Wolmar Aurum Press, 246pp, £9.99 ISBN 1854108727

This book should be compulsory reading for everyone forced to endure the near-Hades that is the London Underground during rush hour. Following on from Broken Rails, a meticulous account of recent events on the railways, Britain's most astute transport observer now turns his hand to explaining what has gone wrong with the Tube. Explaining the finer points of the public-private partnership (PPP) is a daunting task (the documentation alone extends to more than two million words) but Wolmar does a fine job of unravelling the complexities of the subject.

PPP developed out of the private finance initiative (PFI) policies of the mid-1990s. With deadpan humour, Wolmar argues that the only difference between PFI and PPP is that the latter is a more spin-friendly acronym - at least, spelled out, it contains the word "public". He also suggests that plans to privatise the Tube were included in the Tory party's 1992 election manifesto as an afterthought. This whim gathered momentum, however, and eventually became irreversible.

In the sections dealing with the history of the Underground, Wolmar shows that the problems the network faces today are nothing new. Since its inception, the Tube has enjoyed only one brief golden age, during the 1930s, when Ramsay MacDonald's government created the London Passenger Transport Board, and private business and socialist visions smoothly coexisted in a manner that we can only dream of today.

It was the decades following the Second World War that really crippled the Underground. Underinvestment, combined with ill-advised spending of the cash that was available, meant that, for much of the 1960s and 1970s, London Transport was playing catch-up for the neglect of the proceeding era. How the Tube's infrastructure was allowed to come to this sorry state makes depressing reading.

Wolmar ably documents the events leading up to PPP. The "fares fair" policy of the Ken Livingstone years at the GLC (which in turn led to the introduction of the zone system and Travelcards), the King's Cross fire of 1987 and the Jubilee Line extension are all explained in full. His grasp of detail is impressive.

The book concludes that the effects of the PPP will be no less disastrous than the privatisation of the national rail network: "One of the key home truths of railway economics which, even today, many politicians try to ignore, is: urban transit systems virtually always lose money."

This, it would seem, is an essential fact that has still not been grasped.

Dougal Stenson is transport correspondent of the NS Books pages

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