Apologia pro vita sua

摘要

Begin at the beginning, and work your way inexorably through logical argument to your final conclusions. That was the lesson a generation of geographers learned from the great (and immortally-named) Alfred Augustus Levi Caesar, who taught us at St Catharine's College in Cambridge in the early 1950s. But in this case, where was the beginning? Was it teatime on that March day in 1932, when I originated in the New End Hospital in Hampstead, now-long-transmogrified by the iron law of land economics into a gated estate? Or was it, more likely, two years later in West Kensington, where my father lifted me high above the wall to see the Piccadilly Line trains come in and out of their twin tunnels between the District Line tracks? That evidently Freudian moment inspired an infantile fascination with the London Underground, as explained in my inaugural lecture at UCL in 1994 (Hall, 1994; 1996). Certain it is that this obsession never deserted me in the long years of wartime and post-war exile on the far north-western shore of England, in Blackpool.