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David Pike explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when technology and heavy industry were transforming urban life. A site of crisis, fascination and hidden truth, the underground was at once more threatening and immediate than the ordinary world above. The metropolis had long been considered a moral underworld of iniquity and dissolution. As the complex drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults of the modern cityscape superseded the countryside of caverns and mines as the principal location of actual subterranean spaces, ancient and modern converged in a mythic space that was nevertheless rooted in the everyday life of the contemporary city. David L. Pike delineates a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially 19th-century in...