Underground writing did not end in 1945. George Gissing's King's Cross has moved westwards and been altered by new Tube intersections. It has recently undergone redevelopment and is no longer the smoky underworld of steam engines that characterized his fiction, even if the horrors of the King's Cross fire in 1987 remain a watershed in the history of the whole underground system. If writers from Gissing to Woolf were the first to integrate the underground into fiction as a metaphor for modern urban life, then later writing has transformed this vocabulary into an entire language. The Tube is a pervasive cultural metaphor, seen by some as representing the postmodern condition through its identification as a place where peoples’ lives intersect, relationships are formed and the urban world defined. It is also perceived as a place where everything is fragmented, evanescent and contingent. A national if not global brand, it is a permanent referent for London with the ubiquitous logo and Beck's map garnering instant recognition on the English cultural landscape. This cultural underground has been deliberately manufactured, its artefacts and products to be found in the London Transport Museum and throughout the capital's tourist outlets. It was unified by the design philosophy of ‘Fitness for Purpose’, a unity that remains despite the fragmentation of the Tube system in recent decades. Every generation rewrites this cultural identity in its own image, as the Tube is reflected back as the stage for cultural interventions.

Such interventions now consciously use the Tube for brand identity. Fashion collections such as Bella Freud's have featured in photo shoots on Tube trains for Sunday supplements; television documentaries have appeared such as ‘Tube Night’ on BBC 4 or drama with Tube Tales, and a whole new genre of Tube writing has been published like, for example, From Here to Here (2005) which features 31 stories written specifically about the Circle line.