London is a bit like the sun; hostile, overwhelming, sprawling and definitely the centre of everything. With impossible parking. Double yellow rays all over the place. Ironic really, as it is a city greyer than if one were to colour in the skin of an elephant with a graphite pencil and sew it into a stormy sky. With Gandalf’s beard woven in. In the shade. But it is still our capital, and how absolutely capital it really is. In the lead up to May 6th (remember election fever? Far more exciting than the result), Michael Hann of The Guardian suggested that journalists have a “sneering attitude” towards places outside the Big Smoke. His reason for identifying this “metropolitan sneer” was due to the mockery by the media of the UK Space Agency setting up shop in Swindon and at the certain unremarkable buildings winning Civic Society awards in Macclesfield. He’s got a point. It is true that any journo sent around the country to interview residents of those obscure lands outside of Zone 3 does so very gingerly. It is as if they are wondering why on earth they are suddenly in the marginal seat of Chester deigning to ask stall-owners about national insurance when the other week they were standing outside Number 10 holding a power umbrella and shouting devastatingly cutting edge things at the camera. Or there are the other types, who are even worse - attempting to hide their London snobbery, emphasising any traces of a regional accent they once had - they fasten a thoughtful yet compassionate frown onto their faces and act all pleased with themselves for talking about real issues with real people in real places, mate. Sal’ of the earth, mate.

Whereas the rest of the time, Hann was right in saying, the news is guilty of Londoncentricity. But despite his love of the distant North and dear, sweet Basingstoke, he did not stop to think that there is a reason for this urban chauvinism. A reason often overlooked, underrated and taken for granted. It’s not only that places like Basingstoke should by law be reserved for those strange bathetic reports at the end of the news, when Fiona Bruce allows herself a strained smile after an evening of telling us all about the dramatic rise in knife crime and escaped flying killer paedophile sharks, triumphantly reporting, “and finally, a parrot in Basingstoke has learnt the National Anthem backwards <insert dull yet slightly surreal interview with said parrot’s bespectacled owner> ...well he’s certainly ruffled some feathers. Thank you, and good night.” Thanks, Fiona. No, it is because, unlike London, these places are not on the Tube map. A fact that caught me by surprise worryingly late in life when I realised that the Underground network did not extend throughout the whole country; bringing an end to my confusion as to why the “Tube” to faraway green and pleasant lands had tables and food trolleys. Privileged country bastards. The London Underground Map is a work of art, a complex blueprint of a way of life, the symbol of urban wisdom...and yet all that we hear on the subject are mumblings about strikes, delays and the number of casualties on escalators in the past year illustrated by stickmen staggering around on raggedy posters in stations. In reality, the Tube is a lifestyle, and yes you may shudder at the very thought of a cynical lived-in-London-all-me-life tour guide, but I can almost hear the grunts of agreement from my pollution-inhaling, pigeon-kicking, touching-in and touching-out brethren. My partners in grime. There is nothing more enjoyable than seeing the eyes of one’s visitors from abroad/rural pastures light up, or preferably fill with tears of abject horror, when you take them on their first Tube ride. Incidentally, a reaction remarkably similar to that of being faced with city drink prices. You know the one. For the Londoner, the Tube is a beast that it has come to tame; for the outsider, it is a chameleon – a foreign creature whose workings are elusive and changeable, hidden behind an impenetrable colour code.

New Yorkers, Parisians and the rest of our Metro-riding comrades may be wondering what the fuss is about – an underground network is surely just a fact of city public transport. Something not special, but simply necessary. But to dismiss is it as just another banal alternative to a bus or a tram is to be a philistine. There is a certain sense of artistic endeavour surrounding the Tube and its fellow Metros; and this is not merely a result of the countless grainy photos of it used by art-kids on their indie album covers and Myspace pages, or even due to the vaguely patronising Poetry on the Underground posters bringing GCSE anthology-worthy sound bites to indifferent commuters. Its design in itself is quite impressive, and it has won awards in cartography as well as graphic design. Here is when Muscovites guffaw at this half-hearted celebration of functional beauty, boasting their own Metro network which is essentially a massive subterranean museum filled with ostentatious palatial architectural features and chandeliers – making it one of the most impressive, if surreal, underground systems in the world. Well, listen up Russia. London was the first city to conceive of, and to construct, an underground railway (as early as 1863, fact fans) and according to architectural historians, you copied the design of that pinnacle of Western development, Gants Hill Tube stop, for your first stations. So you know where you can put your Faberge eggs.

It is true that just like rats, in the UK’s capital, one is never more than two metres away from a London snob. But this is for a perfectly sound, if underground reason: the superiority of our sprawling, spidery and spectral Tube network. It may even be a subconscious cause of the ever-prevalent urban swagger. And this is coming from someone who is genuinely suspicious of the actual existence of Cockfosters. Has anyone ever actually been there? It is clearly a hilarious name invented by the government and piped through the Underground to keep the morale up of those stuck in the eternal rat-race. Please mind the gap.