Books like The Subterranean Railway — picked by fans

Mark Ovenden is a broadcaster, lecturer and author who specialises in the design of public transport. His books include ’Transit Maps of The World’ - an Amazon Top 100 best-seller - and a dozen others covering cartography, architecture, typography, way finding and history of urban transit systems, airline routes and railway maps. He has spoken on these subjects across the World and is a regular on the UK's Arts Society lecture circuit. His television and radio programmes for the BBC have helped to explain the joys of good design and urban architecture. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and after many years living in cities like London, Paris, New York and Manchester…now enjoys a more rural life on the Isle of Wight.

Mark Ovenden is a broadcaster, lecturer and author who specialises in the design of public transport. His books include ’Transit Maps of The World’ - an Amazon Top 100 best-seller - and a dozen others covering cartography, architecture, typography, way finding and history of urban transit systems, airline routes and railway maps. He has spoken on these subjects across the World and is a regular on the UK's Arts Society lecture circuit. His television and radio programmes for the BBC have helped to explain the joys of good design and urban architecture. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and after many years living in cities like London, Paris, New York and Manchester…now enjoys a more rural life on the Isle of Wight.

Mark Ovenden is a broadcaster, lecturer and author who specialises in the design of public transport. His books include ’Transit Maps of The World’ - an Amazon Top 100 best-seller - and a dozen others covering cartography, architecture, typography, way finding and history of urban transit systems, airline routes and railway maps. He has spoken on these subjects across the World and is a regular on the UK's Arts Society lecture circuit. His television and radio programmes for the BBC have helped to explain the joys of good design and urban architecture. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and after many years living in cities like London, Paris, New York and Manchester…now enjoys a more rural life on the Isle of Wight.

Mark Ovenden is a broadcaster, lecturer and author who specialises in the design of public transport. His books include ’Transit Maps of The World’ - an Amazon Top 100 best-seller - and a dozen others covering cartography, architecture, typography, way finding and history of urban transit systems, airline routes and railway maps. He has spoken on these subjects across the World and is a regular on the UK's Arts Society lecture circuit. His television and radio programmes for the BBC have helped to explain the joys of good design and urban architecture. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and after many years living in cities like London, Paris, New York and Manchester…now enjoys a more rural life on the Isle of Wight.

I have always been fascinated with stargazing, bird-watching, photography, and microscopy, and consequently vintage telescopes, binoculars, cameras, microscopes, and optical and scientific instruments in general. I began my career in an optics laboratory at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, and went on to become a Chartered Engineer. After a successful career in science and engineering, spanning more than three decades, I left the corporate world to make stringed instruments and write fiction and non-fiction. Brass and Glass: Optical Instruments and Their Makers is my first non-fiction book. My novels include An Accident of Birth, and Galactic Alliance: Betrayal. I live in Kent, England with my wife, Margo, and our cat.

I have always been fascinated with stargazing, bird-watching, photography, and microscopy, and consequently vintage telescopes, binoculars, cameras, microscopes, and optical and scientific instruments in general. I began my career in an optics laboratory at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, and went on to become a Chartered Engineer. After a successful career in science and engineering, spanning more than three decades, I left the corporate world to make stringed instruments and write fiction and non-fiction. Brass and Glass: Optical Instruments and Their Makers is my first non-fiction book. My novels include An Accident of Birth, and Galactic Alliance: Betrayal. I live in Kent, England with my wife, Margo, and our cat.

Major league baseball stadiums have always enthralled me—their architectures, their atmospheres, their surroundings. Each has a unique story to tell. So I decided to tell the story of how perhaps the greatest of all American ballparks, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, came to be. As an urban historian, I also wished to tell a broader story of how the argument between 1957 and 1962 over whether, where, and how to build the stadium helped make Los Angeles into the modern city we know today. So writing City of Dreams allowed me to combine my passions for baseball, for stadiums, and for the history of American cities.

Living on the edge of a town, brought up by an enthusiastic nature-loving mother and a father involved in outdoor activities, I explored both natural and designed landscapes. When discovering that several of the natural landscapes I perceived were, in fact, (re-)designed by the nineteenth-century landscape gardener Lucas Pieters Roodbaard, my curiosity in cultural landscapes was raised. Soon, I explored a wider context and started collecting literature, ultimately studying landscape architecture, and always with a strong interest in history. The focus on public parks became inevitable when I ended up in landscape consultancy. 

I have read most of the books written about Apollo, especially those ostensibly written by my fellow participants. I have read these books for pleasure, to find out about parts of the moon effort that I did not see first-hand, and to learn what I could from the authors’ mistakes and successes — with a view to the writing of my own book. The books I have come to value the most are the books that seem to have been created for some other reason than commercial gain, the books unmarred by ghostwriting or heavy-handed editing, the books where the author’s authentic voice speaks from the page.

As a NASA Flight Controller and crewman on the high-altitude research aircraft, I met many pilots, including those who flew X-planes. I became passionate about extreme and experimental flying. I have experienced supersonic flight and have flown to 70,000 feet. These experiences motivated me to write three books about X-planes: Stratonauts, X-59: Lowering the Sonic Boom, and X-66A: Bracing for the Future.