John Lanchester rides the London Underground

During rush hour, the London Underground is as populous as Glasgow. What happens to us when we travel on the tube, and how is this linked to its strange absence from film, TV and novels? John Lanchester investigates

• John Lanchester
• The Guardian, Saturday 2 March 2013

Daniel Craig as James Bond in Skyfall: 'The whole sequence is a fascinating exercise in the limits and difficulties of depicting the underground on screen.' Photograph: Landmark Media

The first District line train out of Upminster in the morning is the first train anywhere on the underground network. It leaves the depot at 4.53, the only train anywhere in the system to set out from its base before 5am. That's a kind of record: if you catch that train, you might be tempted to say ta-dah! – except you probably wouldn't, because nobody is thinking ta-dah! at seven minutes to five in the morning; certainly nobody on this train. People look barely awake, barely even alive. They feel the same way they look; I know because, this morning, I'm one of them.

I've lived in London for more than quarter of a century now, and this is the first time I've ever been on the day's first train. It's something I'd often wondered about, though, from both a practical and a romantic point of view. The practical question was a simple one: if the transport network isn't running in the early morning, how do the people who operate it get to work? How does the driver get to the train, if there are no trains to take him there? The answer is prosaic: they get there by minicab. The cabs travel a prescribed route to the various depots on the District line, picking up staff en route as they head to Upminster, Earl's Court, Ealing Common, Barking and Hammersmith. Of these postings, Upminster is the most popular, because a large number of drivers live nearby – that's one of the reasons it is, as I was told by a District veteran, the "senior depot". The first train out from Earl's Court in the morning is at 5.21, but to get there, allowing for multiple pickups and some waiting around at the depot, the minicab from the East End starts as early as 2.30 in the morning. That's an early start to a working day.

The romantic side of the first train is harder to define. It's something to do with the secret nightlife of the city, the London that is carrying on while the rest of London fidgets in its sleep. There's a romance attending on those jobs, the ones that keep things running all night long: it's part of the fascination of big cities, the sense that something is always going on somewhere, even in the smallest of small hours. Bakers and police and nurses and cab drivers and market porters all belong to that secret city, the one which rumbles along so late it starts to get early. Once or twice, carrying on a long evening by going to the place after the place I started, and then to the place after that, I've ended up in versions of this super-late or super-early London. I remember once, back in the days when journalism was wilder than it is now, ending up in the place-after-the-place-after-the-place with a group of sports desk colleagues: a packed Greek taverna, surrounded by people howling for more retsina, waiters swerving between tables carrying platters of burnt meat, the room not merely loud but roaring, and looking at my watch to see that it was a quarter to four in the morning – and the point that struck me was that everyone around seemed to regard it as perfectly normal.

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The Underground Lines series, published by Penguin, is out this week.- box set of all 12 titles (RRP £60),