If being squashed, fighting for a seat or horrendous delays on London’s antiquated Tube system has put you off venturing underground on your city break, think again. Seeing your destination from below its crowded streets will add a fresh dimension to your holiday, because many of the world’s 150 metro systems are far superior to the beleaguered London Underground.

Take Athens, for example. On the surface it can be intolerably polluted with seemingly endless traffic congestion. But the newly opened Attiko Metro is an air-conditioned, spacious environment resplendent with precious antiquities unearthed by the building of what was Europe’s largest construction project.

Or Stockholm’s T-bane, run with ruthless efficiency and blasted from the hard rock which acts as a craggy canvas for experimental artists. Or Washington’s modern £6.25 billion investment in precision engineering that races you in style between attractions. Or the Foster-designed Metro Bilbao, whose armadillo-esque glass entrances are a bold addition to modernist landmarks such as the Guggenheim.

• Graphic: New York Subway
  
  

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  Views from the carriages can be striking and unexpected. For example, on Sydney CityRail (not a proper subway but it has an underground loop in the centre complete with London style “roundel” station nameplates), the sight of the Harbour Bridge at Circular Quay as the line emerges briefly into the daylight is staggering.

  While London’s Piccadilly Line may have been the first purpose-built metro to a large airport, many cities have caught up. The long schlep out to Chek Lap Kok from Hong Kong Island is a swift, simple ride on the MTR past impressive coastline, and much cheaper than a taxi. Madrid’s airport has a bright new Metro extension right to the heart of the city.

  Almost every conceivable destination can be found on a subway line: Coney Island is easily reached from central New York; the Edo façades of old downtown Tokyo have Asakusa station; the Rio de Janeiro Metro will take you from the commercial centre to Copacabana’s beaches, and you are never more than a baguette’s throw from the Métro at virtually every sightseeing spot in Paris.

  But subterranean architecture’s crown goes to the former USSR. Perhaps because the populace endured such hardships above ground, but probably due to altruistic desires for a degree of luxury, almost every city has at least some of its major stations decorated with chandeliers and ostentatious praise of socialist values . . . in marble. It is not just Moscow whose stations pay lavish homage to the opulence forbidden to most of its eight million daily riders: from Kiev and Kharkov, Baku and Minsk, to Nizhniy Novgorod and Novosibirsk, Samara and Yekaterinburg to Tashkent and Tblisi, grandeur is the order of the day.

  Finding one’s way round the subway is also quite an art. Londoners are used to the quirky concept of line names with snappy titles such as Hammersmith & City, while most others simply number their routes. “Northbound” or “Eastbound” seem strangely inappropriate when covered by 20 metres of earth, so most systems use the line terminus as the orientation point.

  Anyone who has attempted to navigate the Paris Métro will be au fait with ferreting around the warrens, seeking trains towards Château de Vincennes. A cursory trip to Porte de Clignancourt however would land you at the largest flea market in Paris, or, should you go all the way to Porte Dauphine, you would discover the only surviving Guimarddesigned entrance, and an ideal access to the rambling Bois de Boulogne.

  The key to every Metro, though, is its map. Ranging from the shabbiest sketch to works of graphic genius, the map, or more accurately diagram, was born in London with the creation in 1933 of Harry Beck’s design classic. Fascinated by its urbane delicacy, I began collecting counterparts produced by Metros of cities I visited.

  After being handed a New York subway map and contrasting it with the more diagrammatic European ones, I sought maps from cities I had not even visited, and soon I had a collection often called on by friends travelling abroad.

  After the umpteenth visit to the nearest photocopier shop I wondered why these things were so difficult to find when not in the country. Could you put your hands on a Lyons Metro map if you live in Newcastle? So the idea came to bring them all together in one place. Metro Maps of the World is the first such collection of official, current maps.

  Metro Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden is published on November 12.

  Next page: five places you might be suprised have a metro 

  () Five places you might be surprised have a metro

• Glasgow — no revelation to the Scots, but few southerners know of “The Clockwork Orange”
• Cairo has the only subway on the African continent and it will take you directly to Giza and the pyramids
• Beijing is massively expanding in preparation for 2008 Olympics
• Tehran has more than 55km of metro with plans for seven more lines
• Naples — tunnelling at the foot of the famously unstable Vesuvius volcano

  Most recent cities to join the metro league

• Lima (2003) Naha (Japan) (2003) Delhi (2002) Porto (2002) Copenhagen (2002)

  Five places planning to build a metro

• Dublin plans an underground from the city to the airport and suburbs
• Venice wants to link the famous waterway-filled city to the mainland by tube
• Dubai is proposing a 50km, two-line network
• Ho Chi Minh City wants a 200km network by 2020
• Auckland is the most southerly city to plan a metro, expected by 2008

  Five elevated "sky trains"

• Vancouver; Las Vegas; Hiroshima; Miami; Bangkok

  Biggest urban areas with no subway

• Lagos (15-17 million); Jakarta (16m); Dhaka (13m); Karachi (10m); Bogotá (8m)