To The End Of The Line

To the end of To The End Of The Line

2009-01-22T22:13:00.005Z

A month or so before Christmas I bought a book called The Romance Of London's Underground. I found it in a second-hand bookshop in Buckinghamshire. I think it was published in the early 1930s; there is no date mentioned anywhere in the text, but sounds as if it were written just before the creation of the London Passenger Transport Board (1933).

It's a slightly discoloured publication with stiff pages and a musty smell. The dustjacket disappeared years ago. It is written by somebody called W. J. Passingham. It boasts chapters with titles such as TRAINING THE STAFF and SIGNALLING AND SAFETY DEVICES.

Yet it surpasses all shortcomings on the very first page, in the very first paragraph:

There is beneath the City of London and its gigantic suburbs another world, a complex system of transport - of highways and byways - such as even the most thoughtful among its citizens rarely think upon in terms other than speed and comfort. For the Londoner who walks daily the familiar city streets, the sightseer in search of Romance, and the historian seeking material for posterity is written the story of this underground city and the men who created it.

Those two sentences, for me, sum up all that I love about the Underground. They embody something of what I was attempting, and not really succeeding, to achieve with this blog: a travelogue mixing both fact and sentiment, an account both empirical and subjective, an inventory of motion and emotion.

I wanted to try and record some of what I feel when I use the Underground. I wanted to talk about the way I admire its history, its design, its geography, its personality. I wanted to capture impressions of its overlooked triumphs and all-too-obvious failures. Above all, I wanted to make it feel human, to illuminate its capacity for evoking - often at the same time - melancholy and, yes, romance.

Whether I even came near to that is not for me to say. I wrote this thing to be read, and I'm grateful to those few folk who looked in now and then and left a comment or two.

I enjoyed travelling to every station on the network, despite some of my negative reviews, and even though the whole tour took much longer than expected. Some of the best moments came when I really did get to the end of the line, and found myself in that most eerie of places, the terminus. This always prompted a rich mix of perceptions: the business of lingering somewhere designed for anything but; the act of flinging yourself as far away from the city centre as possible yet still feeling attached; the sight of an Underground train overground in the middle of countryside, or a quiet suburban hollow.

I started this blog when money was pouring into the network and its backers in City Hall were full-throated and fiery. I'm ending it under a regime that seems nonchalant at best, hostile at worst.

I hope the future for the Underground is both safe and sound. I fear that it is neither.

And so to London and down the ever-moving Stairs
Where a warm wind blows the bodies of men together
And blows apart their complexes and cares.
- Louis MacNeice

The Hammersmith & City Line

2009-01-17T21:20:00.001Z

Overlooked and underused. The first by me, the second by everyone.

Welcome to the Hammersmith and City, apparently the next-to-least used line on the entire Underground. That come as no great surprise. It doesn't run to and from anywhere spectacular. It has a horrible colour on the map. Most of the line doubles up other services. The only bit that's independent links two places, Hammersmith and Paddington, that are already well-served by lines.

Above all it suffers from an identity problem - in that it doesn't really have one. It's probably no accident that I left it until last on my tour. I've always treated it as something of minor consequence, for all the reasons given above. The stations it serves exclusively are ones I've never had that much recourse to use. That's not to diminish their respective worth, it's just they suffer from association with a line that, like the Circle, owes its existence to cartography rather than construction engineering.

Bits of it date back to 1863 and were part of the very first Underground service between Paddington and Farringdon. Yet it's only been marked as a separate line on Underground maps for two decades or so. The first version to feature a pink Hammersmith and City Line was published, I think, in 1990. Until then it was officially part of the Metropolitan Line.

I've covered most of this line already: Paddington and Edgware Road; then Baker Street round to Liverpool Street; and finally Aldgate East up to Barking. The one outstanding section, the final piece in the jigsaw, the one bit of London the Hammersmith and City gets all to itself, is from Hammersmith to Royal Oak.

It's a very old section indeed, but also boasts - at the time of writing - the newest station on the entire network.

Tracks were laid here in 1864, when the Metropolitan pushed west from Paddington. For a time you could then travel onwards all the way to Richmond, using a viaduct that linked up to Ravenscourt Part, part of which is supposedly still visible. Nowadays if you want to continue your journey you have to walk from Hammersmith on the pink line to Hammersmith on the purple and green lines, a distance of all of two minutes.

If you were standing equidistant between the two buildings, mulling over which would get you to, say, King's Cross St Pancras the quickest, what would you choose?

Well, there are marginally less stations lying between your embarkation and your destination on the Hammersmith & City (11, compared to the Piccadilly Line's 12) but Piccadilly trains are more frequent. H&C trains are less crowded, but tend to get snarled up in the miasma of interchanges between Paddington and Baker Street. In the summer, H&C trains are cooler and less packed with tourists. They'll also deliver you nearer to your mainline connection at King's Cross. Speed, however, might be the deciding factor. I suspect Piccadilly Line trains are faster, but you'll arrive at your destination flustered and sweating.

I made this journey on what felt like the first night of winter. It was also a day when the media had just started cottoning onto the fact that a recession had begun and they could make money out of hysterical headlines about job losses. Here's Alexander's Barbers at Hammersmith station replete with Obligatory Depictions Of Perfectly Styled Heads plus the Evening Standard at its subtle best:

I sat on a stationary train for 10 minutes. The driver turned up and walked very slowly all the way to the front of the train. Nothing happened for a further three minutes. Finally the train began to crawl away from the platform. I realised that, seeing as how I would be getting off at every single station, taking photos, then waiting for the next service, this would be a very time-consuming journey indeed.

Goldhawk Road was opened a few months before the First World War.

It feels as if it hasn't been properly refurbished since. The platforms on all these H&C stations are desolate, forlorn places. They are all above ground. There are few signs or indicators telling you when the next train will arrive. Instead a disembodied voice tries to reassure you that "an eastbound train has just left Hammersmith" or that "a westbound train will call in xx minutes". On an especially cold and unloved evening, such announcements felt like pointedly small crumbs of comfort.

Shepherd's Bush Market used to be simply Shepherd's Bush until October of last year:

When I was there I noticed several notices inside the station explaining what had happened should any passengers still be confused. It's a cosy, compact building, but I'm not sure why its name wasn't changed long ago to avoid duplication with the Central Line. Instead it had to wait until the opening of the all-new, hugely-spectacular...

Wood Lane. Now this is a station. A glorious one, all told. It's only been open three months, but already people have found stuff to complain about, mostly the fact there aren't any staff selling tickets. But that's nothing compared to the way that, like all stations built in the 1930s or since the late 1990s and unlike every other single station on the Underground, it demands to be looked at. And photographed in a puddle.

A brand new Underground station that commands your attention in such graciously stylised fashion is a wonderful thing to behold. Plus it's opposite the greatest building in the world, BBC Television Centre. Come on Mark Thompson, you can't flog off the place now!

At Latimer Road something happened that was unique to my entire trip around the Underground: a member of the public took issue with me taking a photograph.

This wasn't the first time I'd been accosted; there was that security guard at the Piccadilly Line Hammersmith station. But it was the first time an ordinary punter had come up, asked what I was doing and told me, in a tone that was dangerously close to aggressive, that I better not have taken a photo of themselves. I went into default nerd reaction, pleading a bit pathetically "I'm taking pictures of stations - just stations!" while trying to sound as useless and inoffensive as possible. I don't think he was convinced. He gave me the evil eye and repeated his warning about not wanting his photo taken. A few anxious seconds passed. I wasn't sure what to do. There were loads of people milling around but nobody seemed bothered. Thankfully he suddenly turned away and moved off. I felt stupid for feeling shaken. I'd done nothing wrong - had I? Suffice it to say, said person is not in this photo:

At the next station, Ladbroke Grove, a policeman appeared curious about my activities. What was going on? Why all this sudden interest?

The station has been through numerous name changes and shopkeepers are currently trying to effect another one, so it becomes Portobello Road: a logical move given its closeness to the titular market.

Both Westbourne Park...

...and Royal Oak...

...share tracks with the mainline services in and out of Paddington. They feel even more unwelcoming than their predecessors, shorn of all but the most rudimentary of Hammersmith and City identities. By this point, all Underground trains were packed to bursting. It was the rush hour, but just as many people seemed to be heading into London as out of it.

I trundled into Paddington with my face pressed up against some dirty glass. It certainly felt, in my case, like the end of the line.

The Circle Line

2009-01-11T13:14:00.006Z

How to write about a line that doesn't exist, but whose stations you have - to a man - nonetheless visited?

(Clockwise: Tower Hill-Westminster; St James's Park-Gloucester Road; High Street Kensington-Edgware Road; Baker Street-Aldgate)

I thought I should give a nod to the Circle Line, not least for its status as aesthetically the most distinctive element of the Underground map. By virtue of its geography, it's become the latterday equivalent of the old City of London wall, albeit (mostly) just below the earth's surface.

When I look at the Underground map I subconsciously treat everything within the Circle Line as belonging to the city centre, and therefore - if I'm feeling particularly misanthropic - to be avoided. A number of times I've deliberately chosen routes to places that avoid this area entirely, often utilising the increasingly reliable Overground service. This is because I class the Circle Line and what it encloses as being part of work, not pleasure. If I can help it, I'd rather not step foot beyond that yellow stockade when I'm not doing my job.

There's a mindset that operates on the Underground within the boundaries of the Circle Line. It's that of the tourist-cum-worker. It's that of the no-time-to-stop-and-think, must-get-to-my-destination-at-all-costs, always-room-for-one-more-person-inside-this-already-full-to-bursting-carriage sort of person. That's fine if you're a visitor or an employee. If you're a resident or a traveller, staying above ground is always the better option.

If I find I have to visit somewhere within, what for fares purposes, is called Zone 1, I'd rather get off at one of the boundary stations and simply walk the rest of the way.

Indeed, when I worked in Soho, I'd always get off my train at Euston and complete the journey on foot. I came to look forward to this stroll, especially as it took me through the quiet back streets of Bloomsbury, at that time of the morning affably quiet and stylistically fascinating. I miss not having the chance to do it now, though I still, when I have the time, get off the Underground a few stops early and finish my commute by pavement.

That's not to say I never use the Circle Line. If you want to move sideways through the capital, are not near the Central Line, are in no mood for dawdling on foot and are too tired to contemplate any other kind of transport, it's the most straightforward way of sliding east to west and vice versa.

Except, of course, you're not actually using a single purpose, self-contained line.

The Circle shares all its tracks, save for two short stretches between Aldgate and Tower Hill and High Street Kensington and Gloucester Road, with other lines. The bulk of its southern half is duplicated by the District; most of its top half is used by the Hammersmith and City AND the Metropolitan. To this extent, it doesn't exist. It is a line created by cartographers, not engineers.

The titular circle grew out of expediency. Bits of it were built individually, with no intention to be linked into a loop. Different companies completed different stretches, beginning with Farringdon to Paddington. Those stretches creeped in either direction, but with no urgency. The circle took over 20 years to complete, finally becoming one entity in 1884.

But even then it wasn't formally identified as a circle, in the form of a separately-coloured, separately-named line, until 1949. Before then, maps simply showed the respective Metropolitan and District services (although from 1947 a circle of sorts had been denoted by the addition of a thick black border along the route). It had long been informally known as the Inner Circle, but this was never given official sanction.

At the time of writing, this non-existent line will shortly become properly non-existent once again. As early as December of this year, the Circle may become part of a Hammersmith and City Line spiral that begins in Hammersmith, runs to Paddington (along the route of the current Hammersmith and City) and then does a complete loop of the current Circle Line ending at Edgware Road.

I'll talk more about the Hammersmith and City Line shortly. But if this plan comes to pass, and it has been confirmed by the manager of the Circle and Hammersmith and City Lines, it will constitute a logical reconciliation of what has, cartographically-speaking, been a 60-year illogical quirk.

I would not miss the Circle Line in its present form. A rationalising in the shape of a merger with the Hammersmith and City would, in theory, mean smoother services and a more predictable timetable. At present, you cannot rely on Circle Line trains to actually do what their name implies. Orbital services have in-built problems. One single delay can have a terrible knock-on effect. Synchronising with those services running as District, Metropolitan and Hammersmith and City trains is an additional nightmare.

As such you'll be lucky to have a smooth journey around the loop. You're usually guaranteed fairly uninterrupted passage between Baker Street and Aldgate, and between Tower Hill and Victoria. But any route that ventures beyond these stretches will always involve a delay: FACT. You could well end up sitting for at least five minutes at High Street Kensington or Edgware Road, while there's no point assuming anything speedy about Aldgate. If your journey takes you through this station, you must always factor in an extra 10 minutes.

At the end of the day it's all to do with timing. The Circle currently runs seven trains in each direction at seven-minute intervals, with a notional complete circuit mathematically designed to take 49 minutes. But it doesn't. Because of those synchronisations with other lines. Because of mishaps. Because of unexpected delays. And so on.

Unspooling the circle and turning it into a spiral would remove much (but not all) of these inconveniences. I hope it goes ahead, and goes ahead soon. If it stops people treating it like a reason to have fun, then that alone will have been worthwhile.

How to write about a line that doesn't exist, but whose stations you have - to a man - nonetheless visited? In a rambling, hesistant, unpredictable fashion that doesn't, ultimately, go anywhere. Just like the line itself.

District Line: Hammersmith - Richmond & Ealing Broadway

2009-01-02T21:51:00.002Z

I thought that this blog, like the Great War, would be over by Christmas. Both cases proved to be incorrect.

I actually completed my tour of the Underground over a month ago. I visited the last station on my list on Saturday 22nd November. It's one of the stations that appears in this update. But since then I've had so little time that, well, there's only been one entry. And I now have a backlog of photos. I find myself having to reconstruct memories and impressions from the other side of the holiday. The blog has become a retrospective account, rather than an as-it-happens journal.

So here is the remainder of the District Line. Keen-eyed readers, and I know it's presumptuous to use the plural, will know there are still two more lines left to tackle. But neither are 'proper' lines, as will ultimately become clear, and as such will not, I'm fairly sure, require multiple blog entries. Meantime, the branches of the District that terminate at Richmond and Ealing Broadway require attention.

The two diverge just after Turnham Green, the last in a trio of agreeable, neat, no-nonsense stations that date back to the 1870s.

First up is Ravenscourt Park, originally called Shaftesbury Road, which opened on April Fool's Day 1873:

The name changed a few years later when the nearby park was first opened for public use. Its platforms are the main highlight, built above street level and boasting much of the spirit, if not the actual fixtures and fittings, of its Victorian heritage.

There's something about very long platforms high up in a city suburb that is, well, a bit exhilarating. It's as if the world has been opened up a little; you have acres of sky and space all to yourself and, especially if there aren't many passengers about, you feel like you have the advantage over everyone else scuttling about down below. Then a giant train glides into the giant platform to pick you up and swoop off down the line.

Stamford Brook...

...is the same:

- with the added bonus of the station itself feeling like someone's house. I'd be interested to know who the neighbours are and their views on living between the other half of a semi-detached building and a fully-fledged Underground station.

Turnham Green compounds the charm with the presence of a flower-seller:

If you're travelling to Richmond, the next stop after Turnham Green is a total contrast. By every measure - ambience, design, comfort, safety, convenience, you name it - Gunnersbury is shocking:

I wonder if it is perhaps the most miserable station on the entire network. I may have used that label before; if I have, forget all previous candidates. Gunnersbury takes the prize for the worst Underground stop of them all.

It is gloomy, ill-kept, badly-designed, inhospitable, unreliable, lumpen and wretched. The platform display signs are, according to a friend who passes this way regularly, always incorrect; they certainly were when I was there, referring to a train due in at 09:51 when it was already half past four in the afternoon. Underground and Overground services share the same tracks. In 1954 a tornado ripped the roof off the station but left the rest of the structure intact. If only another one would come along and finish the job.

It was too dark to properly appreciate Kew Gardens:

From what I could tell, thankfully it's a world apart from its predecessor in virtually every respect. The Victorian design of the yellow-brick buildings and some of the original features give it a very particular atmosphere. There is also a footbridge which has Grade II listed status, built with a narrow walkway and very high walls with the intention of protecting people's clothing from the smoke of engines passing underneath. Being there in the gloom of a winter's evening heightened resonances of steam-era railways.

I had thought Richmond was the very last station I had left to visit, and hence the end of my quest.

Then I remembered about Heathrow Terminal 5. Grrr. Anyway, the first station opened here in 1846; I'm not sure when the current building dates from. The exterior reminded me of Wimbledon; sadly, so did the interior. It is a place of near-utter confusion, giving rise to that perpetually frustrating aspect of busy stations: people standing dead still slap bang in the way of you and everyone else, gawping at timetables or simply trying to work out where they should be busily rushing to. It was not the most dignified of locations to symbolise the end of The End Of The Line. Which was just as well, because it wasn't.

If you find yourself on the other branch that runs to Ealing Broadway, the District Line has one last gem to offer:

Chiswick Park. This has gone straight into my list of the 10 best stations on the Underground. It's a glorious building, inside and out, and searching online I see that Charles Holden (him again) was inspired by a station in Berlin, one Krumme Lanke. Holden's design was part of a rebuilding that took place in the 1930s when the Piccadilly Line was being extended westwards and extra sets of tracks needed to be laid. Any excuse for a bit of Euro-chic where Charlie's concerned. The view from the platform of the station's brick tower is breathtaking:

The remaining three stops on this branch were all ones I had visited before; two on the Piccadilly Line, Acton Town:

and Ealing Common:

and the third being the terminus, shared with the Central Line, Ealing Broadway:

Thinking back, Chiswick Park restored a little of my respect for the District. But not quite enough. Truth be told I don't have any particular overriding feeling towards the line, positive or negative. It's just such an assortment of contrasting, not to say contradictory styles and attitudes, it's impossible to perceive of it as a whole or to sum it all up with one adjective. Well, there is one. Unreliable. But that's more to do with the service than the character or design or the line. Or is it? I'm sure I'd feel more pointedly disposed (or otherwise) towards the District were its trains not treated as an after-thought and more the reason for the line's existence.

That, and they put the original platform noticeboards back at Earl's Court.

District Line: Earl's Court - Wimbledon

2008-12-21T17:37:00.003Z

Journey south from Earl's Court and you'll find yourself following the route of tracks first laid almost 150 years ago.

There used to be a great deal more railway lines in this part of London, most of which were conceived, developed and died before the 20th century even began. This one spur of the District Line survived, and now keeps a huge swathe of south London connected to the rest of the capital.

It's a poor state of affairs. There has been talk for decades of a whole new Underground line running from south west to north east via Chelsea, Victoria, Piccadilly, Angel and onwards to Leytonstone. It needs to be built. The advantages of being able to, for example, miss out the melee that is Earl's Court and nip straight up to central London from Putney or Wimbledon are self-evident. Equally anything that eases the burden on the inner London stretches of the Piccadilly or Victoria lines can only ever be a good thing.

A route has been 'safeguarded' for development, to use the official jargon, but whether anything gets done, especially with the current fare-increasing, car-friendly regime in City Hall, is doubtful.

Meantime residents of this part of London will have to struggle on. I have a colleague at work who relies on this part of the District Line to get her to the office every day, and almost every day there is a problem. Delays. Re-routing of trains. Unexplained stoppages. Infrequent services. And a general, relentless, lack of information.

As far as she, and I, can make out, the cause of the problem is usually to do with Earl's Court (surprise surprise) and specifically getting the Wimbledon branch trains in sync with those coming from Richmond, Ealing Broadway and Kensington Olympia. How sweet the idea of a new route that omits that wretched interchange.

First stop south of Earl's Court is West Brompton, added to the overground West London Extension Joint Railway in 1866 and the Metropolitan District Railway in 1869. The District building remains pretty much as it was when first built, which gives it an air of reassurance at odds with the reliability of the train services it hosts.

This feeling is deepened when you go inside and get to stand on one of two walkways that span the platforms. Take away the signage and the sound of iPods turned up too loud and you could almost be 100 years ago.

Fulham Broadway, on the other hand, has recently junked its original building for a brash and undignified makeover inside a shopping centre.

'Life begins at Fulham Broadway'. What does that mean? Seriously, just think about it for a moment. What does that mean? What on EARTH does that mean?

At least the original building can't be demolished by virtue of having Grade II listed status. That hasn't stopped it suffering the fate of becoming a branch of TGI Friday's. Thankfully bits of the old station still survive:

Both Fulham Broadway and Parsons Green date from 1880 when the line was extended from West Brompton.

It's a compact and poky place, which would need serious redevelopment were it to ever become, as has been mooted, the point at which that new south west/north east line would leave the existing District Line tracks and plunge underground towards the Kings Road.

Putney Bridge is more airy and user-friendly:

It was the terminus of this branch until the MDR got its act together and built the Fulham Railway Bridge across the Thames, connecting up with the London and South Western Railway at...

...East Putney in 1889. Apparently this station was owned by British Rail right up until 1994, despite mainline services ending in 1941. It's another place that bears traces of how the network used to be, when this bit of the line was part of a giant loop that connected up with Clapham Junction and Barnes. You can see odd spans of disused line and ill-kept bridges when you pass this way. Lines that once ran somewhere, and now go nowhere.

At Southfields...

...you can see an evocative reminder of this line's history:

An inscription which also survives at Wimbledon Park:

I'm not sure I believe it, but I have read that there has been a railway station at Wimbledon since 1838. The current station isn't the same building, nor is it on the same site. What is Wimbledon today was first occupied by the District Line terminus in 1889, subsequently rebuilt with its marvellous Portland stone entrance in the 1920s.

The station's interior does not match the promise of its exterior. Inside it is a mess. This is not really the building's fault; it wasn't designed to be the frontispiece for the sprawling multi-platform beast that is 21st century Wimbledon station. Still, there must be some better way of organising the place than currently exists, with its poor signage, confusing cross-platform changes, lack of proper information and pervasive air of nobody giving a damn.

Splendid from the outside. Squalid from the inside.

District Line: Kensington (Olympia) - Edgware Road

2008-11-29T11:25:00.004Z

I confess I found this leg of the journey to feel more like a tidying-up exercise than anything more profound.

The District Line doesn't unfurl through west London in a particularly logical fashion. Although Earl's Court looks like an efficient and convenient interchange on the map, in reality it is neither. The five branches do not all share trains. You cannot, for instance, get to Kensington (Olympia) from anywhere else on the District Line without changing at Earl's Court onto a special 'one-stop' service. Unless you're coming from High Street Kensington, that is. You can only travel from High Street Kensington, via Earl's Court, to Kensington (Olympia). But you can travel to High Street Kensington, via Earl's Court, from EITHER Kensington (Olympia) or West Brompton.

Gah.

Best to treat Earl's Court as a bit of an eccentricity; a textbook British fudge and a 'make do' kind of place. There's no use grumbling about the place. You could be grumbling for 20 minutes or so, waiting for your destination to be lit up on this laser display board:

These have undoubted novelty value, but they don't have any charm - unlike their predecessors, which were only recently replaced, and for no reason whatsoever.

At least these had a bit of personality and hence could keep you entertained while you waited, tentatively, anxiously, and in utter bewilderment, for the announcement of your connection. The new versions are soulless and exhaust all interest after 10 seconds.

The tracks to Olympia were opened in 1872. The line from Earl's Court up to Edgware dates from 1868 (to Paddington) and 1863 (to Edgware).

For a long time Kensington (Olympia) was associated in my mind with a dotted line. It was one of those stations on the Underground map reached only by a 'limited service'. As such it had an air of mystique and remoteness. The reality is a bit of a let down. There's no booking hall of any kind. You can only buy tickets from machines. You walk straight from the street onto the platform:

The one feature of interest is this half-removed British Rail signage:

It might not have much traffic from the Underground, but Olympia is still the route by which mainline services sneak round the centre of London, and is also on the Overground line between Clapham Junction and Willesden Junction. Older maps show the station as Addison Road; the name change came ahead of the 1948 Olympics.

Wikipedia has a few interesting observations. Before the Eurostar moved to St Pancras, its trains trundled through Olympia on their way from Waterloo International to the North Pole depot. If Waterloo had ever been closed in an emergency, Eurostar services would have terminated here; immigration facilities were installed for just such a purpose. Further back, Motorail services operated by British Rail used to terminate here, enabling folk to 'convey' their cars between London and many parts of the country. Why don't these futuristic car-trains exist anymore?

Still further back in time, the link to the Great Western mainline (at North Pole Junction, three miles to the north) meant that the station was designated an important role in the Cold War should nuclear attack appear imminent. The station would have been a mustering point for dozens of civil servants on their way to the giant underground bunker at Hawthorn, Wiltshire.

None of this answers the question: why does the District Line service to Olympia exist at all? The Overground services now run fairly frequently, harking back to the days when the line first opened as part of an 'Outer Circle'. The Underground service is an anachronism, albeit a delightful one.

The Metropolitan Railway built the tracks that the District uses between Earl's Court and Edgware Road, save for the stretch that connects it with the Circle Line. This was opened by the Metropolitan District Railway in 1871. Again, it doesn't appear immediately obvious why this bit of the present-day District Line exists. It duplicates the Circle Line...although you could argue the Circle Line is one massive duplication of the District and Metropolitan lines. Which it is.

Anyway, it does mean you can get onto the Circle Line without having to double back on yourself, i.e. travel eastwards to Gloucester Road, then westwards back round to High Street Kensington:

It's an impressive entrance, but nowadays the station itself is relegated to a supporting role in a rubbish shopping centre. I took this photo almost exactly one year ago, hence the Christmas decorations:

The District Line platforms at Notting Hill Gate...

...have the ambience of a police mortuary. Or what I'd imagine a police mortuary to be like. A forensic stillness coupled with an unspoken sadness.

Bayswater I always associate with George Smiley.

The station has been variously named Bayswater (Queen's Road) & Westbourne Grove, Bayswater (Queen's Road) and Bayswater (Queensway). Queensway itself, on the Central Line, seems two stations and one change away on the map. It is in fact a walk of two minutes.

Paddington is where you join, briefly, the oldest tracks on the entire Underground.

If you're travelling up on the District Line you arrive at what was originally called Praed Street, so named to distinguish it from Bishop's Road from where the first Underground trains set off for Farringdon in 1863. Now, of course, it's all part of one giant Paddingtorium, with street level entrances and exits all over the shop and a slightly crazed air about the place. Which is not helped by one of the interchanges, with the Hammersmith and City Line, being the entire other side of the mainline station.

Finally the District Line heaves itself into Edgware Road, where I've been before...

...and whereupon you can wait for up to 20 minutes for an onward connection on the Circle Line. *sigh*

District Line: Westminster - Hammersmith

2008-11-14T11:48:00.003Z

Another very old chunk of Undergroundalia, this. The line between South Kensington and Westminster opened in 1868; tracks to Hammersmith appeared in stages up to 1874.

South Kensington to Westminster was the first passenger service offered by the Metropolitan District Railway, the perversely-similarly-named rival to the Metropolitan Railway. It's a portion of the network that shows its age (the smell of the tunnels, the grime of the platforms) but is fascinating for what it reveals about the mentality of its architects and builders.

Now and then it pops overground, or snakes between tall bridges and lets a sliver of daylight into its depths. The stations are barely below ground; at Sloane Square and South Kensington they're in broad daylight. St James's Park, the first stop west of Westminster, resembles a mainline station with a giant roof on top, its platforms facing each other across twin sets of tracks. But it's chiefly notable for...

...the fantastic building that has grown up around it. Designed by Charles Holden in the late 1920s and boasting statues and what-nots by Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and Henry Moore, it was intended to be a suitably noble HQ for the London Electric Railway (the forerunner of London Transport). It certainly fulfilled that job. Bits of Underground management still dwell inside today.

Victoria, on the other hand, is a mess. And it knows it.

There has been renovation work of some kind or other going on here for as long as I can remember. I've talked about it before. Suffice to say since that previous write-up there has been no outward sign of progress, just endless, endless building work. Fair enough, I suppose; it is the busiest station on the whole of the Underground (nearly 80m passengers a year). Its District/Circle line platforms are at least easier to get to than the deep-level Victoria ones.

When Sloane Square was opened, a river ran through it. Or more precisely, above it. The River Westbourne, which surfaces in Hyde Park as the Serpentine, flowed directly across the site of the station. But that didn't bother the engineers; they just diverted it into a giant iron pipe and carried the water above the platforms. I quite liked this station, despite its titular associations with pretension. It's got an airy feel to it, helped by the fact the platforms are above ground, and the atmosphere felt calm and unhurried compared to its neighbours.

South Kensington was where the Metropolitan District met the Metropolitan; all sorts of convoluted junctions and interchanges used to begin here (at one point there were three versions of the Circle Line in operation: an Inner Circle, a Middle Circle and an Outer Circle). The station entrance is beautiful:

The same cannot be said of the wretched subway that begins inside the station and makes you think you're within a few minutes walk of such places as the Albert Hall and the Science Museum, whereas in fact you have to trudge for ages along a dank passageway before you're even close. Up until 1908 you had to pay to use it.

Originally Gloucester Road was the terminus of the Metropolitan's extension from Paddington, before it opened tracks extending it to South Kensington.

More confusion reigned here, it seems. At one stage in its history the station had four tracks and four platforms, two of each for each rival railway company. Plus it used to be called Brompton (Gloucester Road), despite there being a separate Brompton Road station (now closed) close by. The place has been done up very sympathetically and bears, both inside and out, much of the character of the original. One of the disused platforms is now occupied by Platform For Art installations; when I was there it resembled an over-sized obstacle course made out of everyday household items.

Forewarned is to be forearmed, and that's especially true of Earl's Court:

This place would be unsettling for the unseasoned traveller even if it wasn't currently in the middle of a giant refit. District Line trains rattle off from here in five directions; I'll return to tackle some of those branches and offshoots another day. Best by far to just note that this station boasted the Underground's first ever escalator in 1911, and carry on westwards towards...

Fulham - North End, or West Kensington as it's now called. All these night-time photos date from last Christmas (so much for an orderly, sequential blog of the Underground), but I hope you can still see the station bears the acclaimed fingerprints of Charles Holden, particularly his work for the south end of the Northern Line.

You couldn't get off at Barons Court until 1905; previously all there was to see here were open fields and market gardens. Housing arrived with the turn of the century and the District Railway eventually relented to local demand (and the need to acknowledge the presence of the Piccadilly Line). This photo doesn't do the station justice. It's a Grade II listed building, and deservedly so.

So back to Hammersmith, scene of my accosting by a security officer. Before I go any further down the line, however, I need to double back and deal with those awkward diverging bits of the District at that masterpiece of orienteering, Earl's Court.

District Line: Aldgate East - Westminster

2008-11-01T20:51:00.002Z

Welcome to another very old, very confusing slice of the Underground.

Ostensibly there's nothing confusing about it at all. It is a straight line. It has no branches or curious offshoots. It doesn't even have that many interchanges.

When I started reading up on this bit, though, a familiar tale of multiple name-changes, disputed ownership and successive renovations emerged. It didn't even used to be a straight line.

It is, however, indisputably old. Very very old. There's been a station on the site of Tower Hill since 1882, when the Metropolitan Railway opened the matter-of-fact sounding Tower of London. This lasted all of two years before being closed to make way for Mark Lane station. The reason? The Metropolitan had just linked up with the Metropolitan District (now the District Line) to give birth to what was informally dubbed the Inner Circle, and a larger station was needed.

Mark Lane became Tower Hill in 1946, a year before the Inner Circle became the official Circle Line. But still the station was too small, so it was closed and rebuilt yet again in 1967, back on the old original Tower of London site. 41 years on refurbishment work is STILL happening, because the station is STILL too cramped and creaky.

Tower of London would make for a much better name than Tower Hill. It must be one of the stations most visited by tourists, and shouldn't hide its importance behind a misleading moniker. When I took this photo, on a Friday evening, 100 French teenagers were swarming outside.

Here's Monument, from an afternoon in the summer of 2007 when the Standard was essaying its usual thirst for BBC-baiting:

The station was expressly built for the new Inner Circle, opening in 1884 with tracks freshly-laid between Aldgate and Mansion House to complete the loop. This hadn't been an easy process. The two companies, the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan District, had fussed and feuded over who would build the final stretch of the circle, the precise route from one bit to the other, how much it would cost and so on. It was typical of the times that the construction of one bit of track encircling the centre of London involved two companies, big business, the government and endless delays.

Monument nowadays is part of the sprawling network of tunnels and escalators that link it with Bank. It feels like it doesn't have an identity of its own. It's so close to its neighbours, it's almost worth avoiding altogether. But that would mean having to use the monstrosity that is Cannon Street:

There was once a great building above this station, built on the site of the medieval Steelyard, the trading base in England of the Hanseatic League. It had giant towers, a huge curved roof for the mainline platforms, and a splendidly lavish hotel in the style of Charing Cross and Baker Street.

Then it fell into disrepair. Then it suffered bomb damage during the war. Then the rascal architect John Poulson knocked the whole thing down and built one of the worst stations anywhere in Britain.

It being dark when I visited, you're spared the sight of the offensively boring slab of dullness that is the present-day outside of Cannon Street. It is a building that has no redeeming features. It is horrible. It is menacing. And thankfully, finally, it is about to be pulled down. What this means for the underground station isn't clear; at the moment all you do is walk through what feels like a empty grain silo or abandoned warehouse and down some steps. Hopeless.

Mansion House must surely be the only London Underground station mentioned, albeit indirectly, in the lyrics to a children's TV programme (Rentaghost). It opened in 1871 as the eastern terminus of the Metropolitan District Railway, and was done up in the 1920s by Charles Holden.

It's part of a sequence of stations that sit on the banks of, or very close to, the Thames, but which seem to patronised chiefly by city-folk and business types. They all have an air of creeping panic to them. The platforms are dank and have the ambience of an Edwardian municipal swimming pool. Nobody lingers, except to speak briskly on a mobile phone before plunging below. You're not encouraged to pause or drag your step. And you won't see one friendly, smiling face.

Blackfriars is a soulless cavern. It's also due for major renovation, to the extent that the whole Underground station will close from March 2009 to late 2011. The plans sound promising, and include a new entrance on the South Bank, i.e. the other side of the river, making it the first station you can enter from either side of the Thames.

Temple's got a bit more character. It's been around since 1870 - when what became the Inner Circle first started to creep eastwards from Westminster - and you can palpably sense its history from its look and feel. At one point this was going to be a terminus for the Piccadilly Line, before somebody changed their mind and halted at the now-abandoned Aldwych instead. The two are only 200 metres apart.

I passed through Embankment on the Northern and Bakerloo, and have already talked a little about its garbled history. By the time it became an interchange with those lines it had already been open for over 30 years and was firmly established in the passenger mind as Charing Cross station. It was only when the Bakerloo arrived in 1906 and decided to call the place Embankment, when it wasn't, that the garbling began.

No such confusion with Westminster:

Well, except it opened in 1868 as Westminster Bridge. And it used to be the end of the line. If you were travelling from the west. And only until 1870, when Blackfriars became the end of the line. And was nothing to do with Westminster Bridge Road station, which opened in 1906, but which had previously been called Kennington Road, and which later changed its name to Lambeth North, by which point Westminster Bridge had become Westminster, so it didn't matter anyway.

Enough now!

District Line: Barking - Aldgate East

2008-09-16T21:19:00.002+01:00

West of Barking the District Line ages by around 20 years. Electric services first came this way in 1908, along tracks that had been around since - incredibly - 1854.

East Ham was added to the Underground in 1902, but if you look carefully while on its platforms you can find evidence of its original owners, the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway. There are ornate LTSR logos still in evidence on some of the canopy supports and posts. Sadly I only read about this after my visit, and hence all I have to show for the place is this photo shared with a bus:

You can see vague traces of Victorian designs all along this stretch of the line, Upton Park (original buildings dating from 1877) being a good example.

Wikipedia takes time to supply the following details about this station: "In total there are six separate food and beverage machines, two chilled beverage machines (750ml bottles), two chocolate machines (that vend a variety of Cadbury products), and two miscellaneous snack machines. Upton Park tube station is surrounded by several late night kebab and chicken and chip shops for a more nourishing meal."

Now that's the kind of information this blog needs more of.

Plaistow is a listed building, replete - like Upton Park - with LTSR livery. And, like Upton Park, I didn't get it on camera.

The construction of the original West Ham station was sponsored by Arnold F Hills, owner of the Thames Ironworks and Football Club which played at the Memorial Grounds from 1897. The club was renamed West Ham United three years later, the station opened in 1901, and the District Line arrived 12 months after that. However because it was in the middle of nowhere, passenger (and crowd) numbers were woeful. The club subsequently moved to Upton Park in 1904.

If you ever catch a glimpse of an Underground map in EastEnders, you'll see that Bromley-by-Bow doesn't exist. In its place is the famously fictional Walford East. This photo captures the news of the hour, which at the time of writing seems hopelessly inappropriate: Shares Bounce Back.

There's a bit more character to Bow Road than its neighbouring namesake. The place was opened in 1902 by the Whitechapel & Bow Railway (later swallowed up by the District Line) and the booking hall is now a Grade II listed building.

This alone is worth preserving:

It's here that services running westwards from Upminster and Barking dive underground via a tunnel to the east of the station that's apparently the steepest on the entire network.

I confess I was fairly impressed with the frequency and the upkeep of the trains during this leg of the journey; then again I was travelling during rush hour and I imagine the service is much reduced off-peak. There was no shortage of passengers either. This portion of the District Line is extremely popular. Mile End is especially busy, the interchange with the Central Line prompting mass movements of bodies in either direction. For those taking notes, this is the only subterranean Underground station that offers a cross-platform interchange between so-called 'deep' and 'cut and cover' lines. I'm sure I've mentioned that before.

On the westbound platform at Stepney Green you'll find your usual electronic noticeboard. On the eastbound platform, however, there's still one of those old illuminated displays which merely indicates the planned destination of the next train. It gives no clue as to when it might arrive. Once, all stations were like this and we lived with it because we knew no different.

I've been to Whitechapel already.

The District Line, in its original guise as the Metropolitan District Railway, struck out this way in 1884, forming an interchange with the existing East London Railway. Things get a little confusing now, as the District station was given a different name to its East London brother: Whitechapel (Mile End). Then it was closed for rebuilding, reopening in 1902 with its present name when the Whitechapel and Bow Railway came into existence (the company which, together with the London Tilbury & Southend Railway, laid tracks all the way to Southend-on-Sea).

Then there came a whole lot more business involving the Metropolitan Railway (not the Metropolitan District Railway) which is now the Hammersmith and City Line, and which I'll talk about another time. Moreover there used to be another station near here, St Mary's (Whitechapel Road), which sat between Whitechapel and Aldgate East. It existed from 1884 up until 1938, when Aldgate East's platforms were moved, er, east and given a new entrance a few hundred yards from that of St Mary's.

If you followed all that you'll be relieved to know it's the end of this entry.

Aldgate East is a relic from when rival companies thought nothing of building rival stations on rival lines a few streets apart. It's about five minutes from Aldgate on the Metropolitan and Circle lines. But it does boast this lovely antique Underground roundel...

...so it's not entirely to be sniffed at.

District Line: Upminster - Barking

2008-09-06T13:46:00.008+01:00

I began this leg of the journey with a tinge of sadness. For this was the last of the big lines, the last of the epic voyages, I had left to take. It would be my final chance to experience a ride on the Underground far far away from the centre of London and feel the might of its extraordinary reach.

I thought it would take me out beyond the confines of Greater London itself, but Upminster is in the borough of Havering and not, as I'd hoped, the county of Essex. District Line trains ran all the way to Shoeburyness between the wars, a somewhat surreal but rather delightful notion. Take the tube to the seaside!

One unrefurbished train (in the old pre-1960s aluminium style with no CCTV or passenger information displays) was still in operation until February 2008. I'm sure, thinking back, I travelled on it, as I remember getting the District Line between Westminster and Victoria one morning and being struck by how noticeably tatty and ancient the train was.

The early tracks were built by the Metropolitan District Railway (no relation to the Metropolitan Railway) and the first segment came into operation in 1868. This particular stretch between Upminster and Barking joined the Underground network in 1902, but quickly fell off again when electrification of the lines meant services had to be cut back to East Ham. Upminster became the eastern terminus again in 1932.

A glance at the sequence of photos below suggests I made this particular trip at dawn as the sun was rising. In truth I did it the other way round, travelling away from London, as dusk was falling. By the time I reached Upminster it was pitch black, so apologies for anyone interested in seeking images of that particular station's architecture. All my camera could really handle was a signpost:

As it happens the station is entirely branded in the style of the local mainline operator, c2c, and there's precious little London Underground livery to be found. It's a suitably expansive terminus and the child in me was excited by the chance to travel back into the city on an express train to Fenchurch Street in the moonlight. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Upminster Bridge, opened in 1934, was infused with the smells of Indian food:

The ticket hall is in the shape of a polygon and the floor tiles have reversed swastikas within them. I'm afraid I didn't pay that much attention to either of these. My stomach was rumbling. It was also a very desolate and unwelcoming place. There was nobody else to be seen, no passengers, no staff, nothing. The wait on the platform, although it was only half a dozen minutes or so, felt more like hours.

At Hornchurch there were signs of life, but only sporadically.

All the stations along this part of the line hail from the 1930s, even if, like Hornchurch, that date refers to rebuilding rather than original construction. There was still an antiquated feel to this place, however, with clunking wooden staircases and flaking paint that reminded me of a badly-kept primary school.

Still, I'd rather have steps than walkways, one of which graces Elm Park:

I appreciate the need for improved access at stations, but the solution here - a giant gangway that slopes up from the platform at a ludicrously feeble gradient - renders able-bodied people exhausted. It also means that, if you hear your train approaching and you're at the top of the gangway, there's an unavoidable temptation to leg it and, as even the smallest child knows, running down a slope brings as much pleasure as pain.

Next was Dagenham East:

Many of the stops along this stretch felt like they should be further removed from suburbia than they actually were. I'd expected to see open countryside. Instead it's uninterrupted housing all the way.

The closer to London you inch, the greater the number of commuters. Here's Dagenham Heathway...

...blessed, unfortunately, with another titanic gangplank from platform to exit. Tottering up this thankless walkway at the end of a hard day's work must nigh-on finish you off. Intriguingly it has been proposed that the Docklands Light Railway gets extended all the way out here, a scheme that would assuredly aid commutes into the east end besides supplying this under-served area of Greater London with better public transport.

Becontree won points for the use of that little-known novelty of transportation, steps.

Upney lost points for another flipping gangway.

I've not seen them anywhere else on the Underground. There must have been some reason for their construction, beyond laziness. Surely?

Barking is c2c property, and is nowadays contained within a small shopping centre.

It's an interchange with the mainline, hence the visible increase in personages, and is also the start of Hammersmith and City services. I'll talk more about that at a later date, but the Hammersmith and City is, at least for two thirds of its route, a ghost line. It doesn't properly exist. I've no idea why Barking is the place from which its services run. It seems a rather abitrary choice.

Anyway, I don't usually appreciate noise and bustle, but for some reason the reassuring hubbub of Barking - ghost lines and all - was for me a reminder of civilisation.

Bakerloo Line: Baker Street - Elephant and Castle

2008-08-17T10:21:00.008+01:00

Like I said, I wasn't that excited by the prospect of this leg of the journey. I'd visited all but two of the stations before. It took me right through the centre of London, which is never a nice prospect on the Underground. And Bakerloo Line trains, as I'd begun to discover during the last leg, get very very hot very very quickly.

As such this was a rather perfunctory trip, and also quite brisk. Baker Street to Waterloo is, of course, the route of the original line, then called the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway. The entire route opened on 10th March 1906, two years after its original financier, Whitaker Wright, committed suicide at the Royal Courts of Justice following convictions for fraud and embezzlement.

It seems it was never formally called the Bakerloo; this was just a contraction that caught the public imagination. Within a few months, however, the line had already been extended south to Elephant and Castle, so the name was technically out of date...but nobody cared.

South of Baker Street you come to Regent's Park, a station buried entirely underground with no surface buildings whatsoever and hence a very boring entrance:

To undergo complete refurbishment, the station closed soon after I begun this blog and only reopened early this year (one of the reasons I didn't get round to tackling the Bakerloo until now). You have to go a fair stretch along tunnels and down lifts to get to the platforms.

The next five stations are all old friends.

The Bakerloo entrance to Oxford Street, designed by Leslie Green, is still in good condition, despite that horrible billboard for Currency Exchange:

Green designed the Bakerloo entrance for Piccadilly Circus, which was in operation until 1929 and ripped down in the 1980s.

Charing Cross opened as Trafalgar Square in 1906, and kept that name until 1979 when the Jubilee Line prompted a complete overhaul of the stations in this area.

Embankment, meanwhile, for a long time laboured until the name Charing Cross. This photo was taken at 8.40am on a weekday morning. You can tell it's the rush hour because people have that steely, blinkered look in their eyes.

Waterloo again:

Lambeth North began life as Kennintgon Road and was the temporary southern terminus of the line until Elephant and Castle opened on 5th August 1906. It was then renamed Westminster Bridge Road, and then renamed again in April 1917 when it received its present, inferior, title. I took this photo during the station's 100th anniversary year, which explains the modest bunting:

Elephant and Castle's Leslie Green-designed station has been, to be blunt, ruined by this pointless glass extension. I can't see the reason for its existence! It looks awful, it serves no purpose, and just clutters up both the pavement and your appreciation of the original building. For shame!

There has been talk of extending the line further south, to Camberwell. I can certainly see the need for this, as it would introduce the Underground to an area of south London poorly served by public transport. As it was one of Ken Livingstone's pet projects, however, I can't see his successor giving it the time of day.

Bakerloo Line: Kensal Green - Baker Street

2008-08-16T11:32:00.010+01:00

After such an underwhelming and frankly lousy opening effort, I was really hoping the Bakerloo would raise its game. So far I had seen nothing to dissuade me of the view that it is the worst of all Underground lines. Its brown colour is hugely appropriate. The trains also have a smell - all fleets of Underground trains have their own distinctive smell, I'm sure other people will testify to this - that is suitably repulsive. I'd say it was a mixture of a battered cloth-seated iron chair being left too close to a three-bar fire, and a dozen wet anoraks sizzling on a radiator in a primary school classroom.

The first station south of Kensal Green, Queen's Park, did absolutely nothing to disabuse me of all these notions.

This bit of the Bakerloo was added in 1915, though as I mention below there'd already been tracks here - overland tracks - for decades and decades.

Queen's Park is the point where the Bakerloo leaves those tracks, the ones it has shared with mainline services, and dives underground. Atypically, as far as this blog is concerned, it is here that the quality of the stations improves. Usually I have found open-air stops more agreeable than those buried deep below. Instead I was caught off-guard by the pleasantness of Kilburn Park:

Denizens of the Underground will recognise this style of building. It's the work of Stanley Heaps, in the style of Leslie Green who was responsible for so many inner London stations and who popularised that dark-red terracotta glazed-brick motif.

Coming across this, a station with a bit of identity and thought behind its design, after so many desolate dumps, was fantastic. But there was more to come:

Another beautifully preserved exterior at Maida Vale.

Warwick Avenue, although boasting no surface buildings at all, is situated in a wonderfully quiet and relaxed corner of provincial suburbia, remarkably so when you think of how close it is to the city centre. It's quite a well-to-do area, or so it seemed, with the signs on the platforms bragging of how you should get off here for Little Venice.

The Bakerloo arrived at Paddington in 1913, with platforms built deep below the mainline station.

The Underground map gets very cluttered here. If you look, you'll see Paddington appears twice, as does Edgware Road. This is to try and denote the fact that these aren't interchanges, but whole separate stations. The platforms of the Hammersmith and City Paddington station, for instance, are utterly unconnected to those for the Bakerloo, District and Circle. To further mislead those unfamiliar with London, the building that houses the Bakerloo, District and Circle Paddington stops, advertises itself as the Metropolitan Railway:

At Edgware Road the two stations are on either side of the road. The Bakerloo version, which opened in 1907, was the terminus of the line until 1913; this was the handiwork of Green himself and almost didn't survive a redevelopment in the 1960s. Thankfully it persists, a lone outcrop of character in a rather faceless urban jumble of flyovers and road junctions.

Marylebone is situated within its mainline namesake; there was a stand-alone Green-designed entrance, once, but it was pulled down to be replaced by a budget hotel in 1971. Sigh.

Finally to Baker Street, where the Bakerloo first began on 10th March 1906, but where I've already called twice, and about which I can't think of anything more to say...

At least my estimation of the whole line has improved. Not really looking forward to the next, and last, stretch though.

Bakerloo Line: Harrow and Wealdstone - Kensal Green

2008-08-05T11:20:00.006+01:00

When I was young, my family used to play a board game based on the map of the Underground.

It was called The London Game, and involved you having to visit a certain number of stations in as few a rolls of the dice as possible. The premise was endearingly simple, but I remember there were penalties you could incur at certain points of the game, the most notorious of which 'Take A Trip To Kensal Green'.

On the board, this was always the furthest station away from the places you needed to visit, and hence was the most depressing of forfeits. As such it became imprinted in my memory as an impossibly remote place, miles and miles away from London, a grim exile from where a return to civilisation seemed interminable.

I'd never visited Kensal Green in reality, nor any of the stops on the top end of the Bakerloo Line, until I made this particular trip. I'd simply never needed to use the Bakerloo this far north, nor had cause to pass anywhere near its stations. So this was a proper voyage of discovery.

The London Underground map doesn't do this stretch of the Bakerloo any favours. It bunches up most of the stations, cramming them between other lines and blurring them into one. Looking at the map, it's hard to tell how near or far apart any of the stops are. But then it decides to place the end of the line, Harrow and Wealdstone, in the middle of nowhere, ostensibly a huge distance away from its neighbouring stations, whereas in reality they are all quite close to each other. It's a poor piece of design work, being both amateurish and misleading.

The whole of this first leg is shared with mainline services in and out of Marylebone and Euston. Most of the stations and all of the track existed long before the Bakerloo officially passed this way (1917). Longer, in fact, than almost any other train service in the country, for there has been a station at Harrow and Wealdstone for almost 200 years.

On opening - as part of the London and Birmingham Railway - it was called Harrow and surrounded entirely by fields. By the time the Bakerloo arrived (which, at the time, ran all the way up to Watford) it was completely urbanised and occupied. It's actually quite a nice station, with exits on either side of the platforms advertised as being to 'Harrow' and, naturally, 'Wealdstone', and plenty of information to help you distinguish between the various train services passing through. All of which were qualities, as I was to find out, rarely applicable to stops on this part of the Bakerloo.

Like Kenton, for instance.

This is a poky place with a tiny entrance hall and barren platforms that reminded me of badly-kept edge-of-town stations that nobody cares about.

South Kenton is even worse.

To get to it you have to use a grotty, filthy tunnel that runs between the car park of a pub and a housing estate. It's horrible. The platform isn't even level with the floor of the carriages, so you have to step down into the train and clamber up out of it. There are no ticket barriers and anyone can come and go as they please. I think it might be the worst station on the entire network.

North Wembley is the spitting image of Kenton, from the entrance to the booking hall to the platforms.

Wembley Central, by contrast, is in total confusion at the moment, and doesn't really have any obvious design at all.

It's in the middle of renovation and as a consequence feels very soulless and depressing. Fittingly, the place has had at least four different names during its near-two centuries' existence, including Sudbury, Sudbury and Wembley, and Wembley for Sudbury. In the 1960s it was encased within a shopping complex, losing whatever trace of individual identity it retained from the 19th century.

There's a bit of character to be found at Stonebridge Park, thankfully, despite the station building having been destroyed by bombing during the Second World War and subsequently burning down twice.

Harlesden fits what is clearly a pattern on this part of the Bakerloo: a tiny entrance hall perched on top of massive, desolate platforms. Such is the lot of stations that share their tracks with mainline trains, I guess.

Five separate lines - I think - run out of Willesden Junction, and the platform complex, with multiple layers at different angles and numerous entrances and exits, makes changing a bit of an ordeal. This official didn't actually challenge me, merely give me the evil eye:

And so to:

For all that, it's not a bad place. The station has a nice design and is in a good state of repair, certainly compared to its predecessors. It doesn't deserve the associations piled upon it by one particular board game. I was even quite glad to arrive. Surely, I reckoned, the quality of the Bakerloo's stations would now start to improve as I got closer to the city centre...

Central Line: Hanger Lane - West Ruislip

2008-08-04T20:51:00.015+01:00

I'd been meaning to take care of this final stretch of the Central Line for ages. But I'd not had the time. Or rather, I hadn't made the time to travel all the way out of central London. I'd also been kind of put off by the fact that, domestically speaking, it was a good hour or so's distance from home.

I made the trip one weekday afternoon, when the stations in question were fairly unpopulated and the services conspicuously empty. Indeed, by the time I got to the end of the line at West Ruislip, I was the only person left on my train. That's never happened to me before. An entire train being operated for the benefit of just one passenger. For myself. I felt a bit humbled.

This portion of the line came into operation just after the Second World War and had, it seems, been intended to stretch even further into Buckinghamshire had green belt legislation not come into force. Most of it has the appearance of being quite rural, but unlike the other end of the Central Line, outcrops of habitation are never that far away.

Hanger Lane is not only in the middle of but also underneath the titular gyratory, where the Western Avenue meets the North Circular Road. It's not entirely underground, however, and light passes down inside the station thanks to its cunning design:

The outside of Perivale turned up in an episode of The Thick Of It: a suitably remote location for a vaguely important middle-ranking minister to find himself temporarily sidetracked.

There was a real find waiting for me at Greenford:

No, not just a flower shop called Making Scents. I mean this:

A wooden escalator! And, apparently, the only one still in operation on the entire London Underground. Plus, it's the only instance of an escalator ascending from street level up to platform level anywhere on the network. Why it still exists is presumably because a) it's not below ground, and hence escaped the cull that followed the King's Cross fire of 1987; and b) now that smoking is banned everywhere on the underground, wooden furnishings are officially safe again.

To top everything off, there's a great view of Horsenden Hill from the platform.

At Northolt it was back to the familiar layout of the booking hall at street level and the platforms on an island reached via a massive staircase:

Functional, but at least it was discreet compared to this:

South Ruislip looks better on the inside, with an attempt at tasteful decoration, but it's hard to find anything positive to say about the exterior. It's all one colour, I suppose. And it curves. Erm...

Here's John Betjeman:

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens Runs the red electric train, With a thousand Ta's and Pardon's Daintily alights Elaine; Hurries down the concrete station With a frown of concentration, Out into the outskirt's edges Where a few surviving hedges Keep alive our lost Elysium - Rural Middlesex again.

And here it is, from the platform:

To the end of the line:

Like I said, I was the only person to disembark at West Ruislip. I didn't realise it, but I'd had the whole train to myself. I also had the whole station at my disposal, as nobody was around to either travel or drive back the way I'd came. Clearly the place had some kind of staff in attendance...didn't it? These hanging baskets suggested as much:

Outside the station I could see the tracks continuing into Buckinghamshire, where they carry services operated by Chiltern Railways:

Eventually someone showed up to run the red electric train all the way back to Epping, and I was on my way again.

Central Line: Bond Street - Ealing Broadway

2008-06-28T15:20:00.003+01:00

The further you travel west along the Central Line, the more gentrified it becomes. With the exception of the interchange with the Circle and District lines at Notting Hill Gate, and the terminus at Ealing Broadway, its stations are also increasingly downcast. Several are in a bad way, and one - Shepherd's Bush - is completedly closed at the time of writing.

Marble Arch is a poky gateway to a noisy, musty warren of platforms and corridors and subways. As with most stations on Oxford Street, it's flanked by innumerable (well, not quite) currency exchanges.

Lancaster Gate is where you start to lose the tourists and idle travellers. The station has nothing whatsoever to commend itself, other than some fairly efficient lifts. It sits underneath a hotel, the original building (opened in 1900) long demolished.

Queensway hails from the same year, and at least bears some traces of its original construction. A few years ago it was closed for over 12 months while its creakly lifts were replaced and a new lick of paint applied. There's a great quote from Transport For London which was issued when the renovation work, being carried out by Metronet (before it went into administration and got taken over by TFL), overran for something like the 56th time: "This is a further, and one hopes final, pathetic delay on a project that Metronet has failed to manage to time."

At Notting Hill Gate you originally had to reach the Central Line through a separate building instead of, as now, the same one you use for the Circle and District lines. Nowadays the interchange is entirely underground, hence this picture of some steps (replete with cheery passengers).

Pedants might be interested to know Notting Hill Gate was the first station to have escalators with metal side panels rather than wooden ones.

Stepping out of Holland Park you can, ahem, smell the affluence. The building itself seems to exude a certain well-to-do mentality. It's eerie to emerge here just one stop on from the pell-mell patchwork of communities that is Notting Hill. And you can forget your currency exchanges or taxi cab firms sheltering next to the station; here they have a nutrition clinic:

Shepherd's Bush is next, but I couldn't get off as the platforms have been stripped and gutted and left for dead. It's depressing to associate such an iconic name with such (temporarily) reduced circumstances. White City is not much better:

Apparently the architectural design of the station won an award at the Festival of Britain and a commemorative plaque testifying to this is on the left of the main entrance. Good luck trying to find it. At least there's the glory of Television Centre directly opposite to compensate. Plus there's this, on the platform itself:

In particular, the half-hearted attempt to cover up the old Epping-Ongar branch line:

There's a disused station lurking in these parts, called Wood Lane. It was built for the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908; fittingly a brand new station, with the same name, is opening later this year, exactly a century since its forerunner.

Before the 1908 exhibition, the Central Line terminated at Shepherd's Bush. After the exhibition it was decided to keep Wood Lane open to service places such as the White City stadium. Once the line as a whole was extended through to Ealing Broadway in 1920, Wood Lane had to be rebuilt to accommodate through-running trains, a convoluted exercise which it seems left the station resembling a lop-sided triangle. Nobody was very satisfied with the arrangement and the whole placed closed in 1947 when White City was opened. There's nothing left of the station today.

East Acton is one of those stops that's seemingly tucked away on an ordinary residential street. It's in the open air, the first Central Line station to be above ground since Stratford. As such, and because of its suburban credentials, I like it a lot:

Here's the sun setting over one of its platforms:

North Acton, complete with hanging baskets:

The line divides here, with one branch heading north westwards towards West Ruislip. The other, shorter, branch, calls at West Acton...

...before limping into the multi-platform maze that is Ealing Broadway.

It felt like it took an age to walk out of this station. The fact the District Line terminates here, but mainline services pass on through, compounds the sense of slight confusion. The faces of everyone I saw were tightened into a rictus of grim resolution. The place is a horrible design, done up in the 1970s to incorporate loads of shops and a huge high rise office building. It's best to just get the hell out of Ealing Broadway and not look back.

Central Line: Stratford - Bond Street

2008-06-08T11:29:00.003+01:00

There's a motif that runs right through almost every photo from this leg of the journey...

...people. Dozens of them. All oblivious to me and my camera, thankfully. But still. People, eh? Whatever happened to those carefully-staged shots of beautifully-deserted stations in remote, romantically-abandoned locations?

That's Mile End above. It was too busy for me to stand right outside the station entrance, so I had to perch on a traffic island.

Wikipedia claims it's possible to travel between any two stations on the London Underground making only two changes if one of them is at Mile End. This is because, I imagine, it's an interchange with two of the most inter-connected lines, the District and the Hammersmith & City. It also presumes that you'd need to change at Mile End in the first place, which I'd suggest rules out around 80% of the network. Whatever, it's a threateningly busy station, through which trains have passed since 1902.

Its neighbour, Bethnal Green, opened much later, in 1946. Three years before, however, it was witness to one of the worst tragedies in the history of public transport. The half-finished station complex and connecting tunnels were used as a shelter during the Second World War. On 3rd March 1943 137 people were crushed to death attempting to enter the building during an air raid. Inexplicably, it was not until 50 years afterwards that a tiny commemorative plaque was erected at the site. There's nothing to see of the station above ground; it exists entirely below road level. It's not a nice place to linger.

The Central Line arrived at Liverpool Street in 1912, the first extension eastwards to what was called, at the time, the Central London Railway. Up till then the line had its terminus at Bank, where electric locomotives hauled by a train of trailer cars would run from Shepherd's Bush.

When it opened in 1900, the Central London Railway must have been a marvel. It ran directly through - as the name implied - the heart of the capital, calling at many of the city's major locations and tourist spots, at a depth once-thought impossible, charging just tuppence to travel any distance, bequeathing the line its nickname of the 'Twopenny Tube'.

Moreover, the terminus at Bank had to be built entirely underground thanks to the presence of the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England and Mansion House, plus the exhorbitant price of property in the City. Then, to avoid compensating the owners of all these lofty establishments for vibrations during construction and operation, tunnels had to be aligned to run under streets rather than buildings. This is why, when you're at Bank station, the platform curves in such a peculiar fashion, meaning you can't see one end from the other.

Bank is undergoing a mammoth refurbishment at the moment. It must be a nightmare of logistics to do anything to this station, what with the connections to the Northern and Waterloo & City Lines, the Docklands Light Railway, plus the escalator link to the Circle and District Lines at Monument.

St Paul's, by contrast, has just the Central Line as its tenant.

It was originally called, with a simplicity that's rather endearing, Post Office, thanks to it being near the headquarters of the GPO.

Again, because the tracks have to follow the route of the street, the eastbound and westbound tunnels here sit on top of each other. It's somewhat disconcerting to think of this out of context; you always imagine tunnels to be built adjacent to one another. Yet more refurbishment work is going on here at the moment. I only hope the new mayor of London displays the same concern and passion for upgrading the Underground as his predecessor.

Here's a topical announcement outside Chancery Lane:

An unexploded bomb had been found the day before near Bromley. Someone had done something - kicked it probably - and it had started ticking. While I was doing this stage of the journey a great hubbub was unfolding, and a bit later I heard it announced that much of the Underground in east London was to be closed later that evening and overnight. I'm guessing the bomb was ultimately defused safely. I certainly didn't hear anything more about it.

Chancery Lane is another station entirely underground, and like its neighbour has its two tunnels on top of each other. Those taking notes might like to know it is home to the shortest escalator on the entire network, and still has a deep-level air-raid shelter underneath it.

The next four stations I have visited before.

The Central Line didn't stop at Holborn until 1933, despite its tracks running directly under the station. This was because of another Central Line stop just one hundred yards away, British Museum, now one of those mythological disused stations of the Underground. British Museum was thought too far away from Holborn (on the Piccadilly line) to be connected by, say, a foot tunnel, so the two stations co-existed side by side on different lines.

You can see now why the originally Central London Railway, with stops such as Post Office and British Museum, plus the likes of St Paul's and Marble Arch and so on, was very much conceived around London's man-made landmarks and important edifices.

Anyway, British Museum was closed in 1933 when a new interchange was opened at Holborn. The station was kept in use up until the 1960s as an emergency command post in case of nuclear war.

Central Line stations opened at Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Circus and Bond Street before any other lines passed that way. Little now remains of their original guises, though there's that lovely architecture at Oxford Circus which nobody ever notices:

At one point Harry Selfridge wanted to build a subway from Bond Street directly into his new store. He was opposed at the time; nowadays no doubt his idea would've been proposed *before* the station itself.

Central Line: Woodford - Stratford

2008-05-31T20:15:00.003+01:00

There's no subtle change in the atmosphere of the Central Line as you get nearer to central London. It happens very abruptly. Suddenly you're on a busy line with loads of passengers piling on and off the carriages. The contrast with the sleepy branch line-feel of the stations you've just left behind is jarring.

South of Woodford lies, unsurprisingly, South Woodford. It celebrated its 150th birthday a couple of years ago, along with a near-complete renovation that somehow managed to miss the giant signs on the platforms that still use the station's original name of South Woodford (George Lane). There's nothing at all to distinguish its surroundings. You're now in proper urban sprawl.

At least Snaresbrook has retained a bit of character, thanks to its Victorian exterior remaining largely un-meddled with (the fact you have to walk up a steep incline to reach the station adds to its feeling of grandeur) and some great features on the platform, including wood canopies and rather ornate, well, ornaments.

Leytonstone doesn't appear very distinguished from a distance...

...but up close you discover its walls are lined with brilliant murals and mosaics in honour of local boy Alfred Hitchcock, which were originally commissioned to mark the centenary of his birth in 1999:

It's here that the line dives underground for the first time (that's if you've avoided the Woodford-Wanstead loop-that-isn't-a-loop, which rejoined its parent line just north of Leytonstone).

I read somewhere that Leyton is apparently the most used stop on the entire Underground, but I find that extremely hard to believe. More used than Leicester Square? King's Cross St Pancras? Victoria?

Sure, it's busy, but not in the way that a mainline interchange is busy. Perhaps it just has ideas above its, erm, station. It used to be called Low Leyton. Maybe it's suffered poor self-esteem ever since. Another bit of folklore - to be taken with another huge pinch of salt - claims that to begin with trains weren't allowed to stop here on Sundays as the local vicar had successfully convinced the line managers the railway was "the devil's work".

If it's truly busy stations you're after, take Stratford. Here the Central Line emerges above ground briefly, as if to take a few gasps of air before plunging back into darkness. It's hardly the most tranquil of locations to pause for breath; Stratford is a warren of inter-connecting, overlapping lines that is only going to get bigger and more baffling as time goes on and the Olympics get nearer. Still, it's capped by a marvellous station building that hails from the 1990s when it was decided to route the Jubilee Line this way (along which I have already travelled).

There's only been a Central Line service running through here since 1946, when tunnels were completed linking Stratford (and hence the whole of east London and beyond) with Liverpool Street. Central London is calling. Again. *shudder*

Central Line: Woodford - Wanstead

2008-05-25T12:41:00.002+01:00

This portion of the Underground usually gets referred to as the Central Line Loop, or the Fairlop Loop, or some other kind of loop.

It's nothing of the sort, as I would find out to my cost. None of the trains performs such a manoeuvre, and in fact it's impossible to do so as a passenger without changing onto different services at least twice. Different services, moreover, that run at different frequencies. Good luck to you if you want to try and get from one 'side' of the loop to the other in a hurry.

In effect what you have is the main Central line service (running from Epping into central London) forming the western half of the loop, while separate services complete the eastern half of circle from opposite directions. It's more a combination of branch lines than a loop. Woodford is where the division occurs; you can either stay on the main line and get to Leytonstone in double quick speed, or go the route of this blog, via Hainault and Wanstead, and get to Leytonstone in twice the time.

Given all this it's no surprise that most of the stations from Woodford round to Wanstead are those least troubled by passengers on the entire network. I did this section of the Central Line on a Saturday afternoon, and invariably I was the only person to not only get off but also GET ON the train at each successive station.

The fact a train only passes along the tracks between Woodford and Hainault (halfway round the loop on the eastern side) once every 20 minutes meant it took me an hour and a half or so to travel five stops...but admittedly the timetable isn't planned around people so desiring to photograph every single station on the London Underground. More's the pity.

From Woodford you actually travel north to reach the first of the 'loop' stations: Roding Valley, built in 1936 and named after the nearby River Roding. It sits on the edge of nowhere, feels like an outpost of civilisation and holds the title of the most lightly used station on the whole of the Underground.

Look, it's raining again.

The wet weather just compounded the sense of abandonment and a feeling that I really ought not to be loitering in places like these. For somewhere entirely absent of people (including any station staff), it was still in pretty good condition.

Remember how so many stations I've visited have a rather shabby or perfunctory minicab or ironmongers next to them? Chigwell's having none of that. Oh no. Its next-door-neighbour is...

...a garden centre. Is there anything more stereotypically fitting for such a shamelessly well-to-do Essex community?

They won't allow any buildings at all alongside the line itself:

While the platforms make you feel like you're in a well-tended glade or National Trust forest:

It's always said that the district of Grange Hill has nothing to do with the shortly-to-become-defunct titular children's programme. This was certainly the case from 2003 onwards when the show suddenly became full of northern kids and was officially deemed as having always been set 'somewhere in Britain', despite the majority of preceding series featuring scenes clearly set in north London. Anyway, I imagine my presence with a camera was put down by these locals to the behaviour of a sad fan.

It's certainly a world away from Chigwell, being a pretty rundown and unwelcoming station. As is Hainault, the next stop along and the place where any remaining pretence of there being a Central Line 'loop' falls apart.

I had to wait here for ages for a separate train that would take me any further. In fact, I had enough time to leave the station, go in search of a newsagents, come back and sit on another train going nowhere for 10 minutes.

Fair enough, Hainault is one of the main depots on the Central Line and bound to involve some sort of a delay. But in effect you're crossing onto a different line completely, one that runs to a separate timetable and can't be relied upon to provide you with a direct connection. Low usage is, I guess, the rationale behind carving up this ostensibly unified bit of the network. They might advertise it as such, though, and not pretend it's a continuous service.

Enough moaning. From here onwards the trains were very frequent. Fairlop looks almost identical to when it was built in 1903.

It's a charmingly subtle, well-maintained station, with a resident dove:

Plus surrounding views of the countryside:

...albeit largely unnoticed by passengers, due to there being, well, largely no passengers. Apart from that person with a camera.

Barkingside is a more elaborately-designed building, and is Grade II listed, but is still as refresinghly underplayed as its neighbour:

Below left, evidence of the first of Boris Johnson's diktats:

And despite now begin back in Greater London, there's still a fair bit of open country about:

Newbury Park was the place where, just after the Second World War, the existing mainline railway tracks that dated back to the start of the 20th century were connected up with the Central Line proper.

Previously services had run southwards to Liverpool Street; now they joined the Underground network and, fittingly, dived underground for the first time on this stretch of the Central Line. To mark the occasion this fantastic structure was built:

It's a bus station, and won a Festival of Britain architectural award in 1951.

Pity there's nothing to match its elegance by way of an adjacent Underground station. Pity there's not really any adjacent Underground station at all. Ditto Gants Hill, which is entirely underground...

...but is worth venturing underground for, because it was designed by Charles Holden and its platform level concourse was apparently a homage to the Moscow Metro. It is, of course, superb:

Redbridge is another one of Holden's seemingly unending contributions to the London Underground. Although construction began in the 1930s, it didn't open for business until 1947. The half-finished tunnels were used as a factory to build aircraft parts during the war.

Holden's signature motif is present and correct:

Likewise at Wanstead, albeit hidden - temporarily - behind a load of metal sheeting and redevelopment junk:

And beyond Wanstead...well, you're back on the 'main' main line and off the loop. Kind of. After a fashion. You're certainly back into the world of bustling, noisy, dirty stations and far far away from near-abandoned Edwardian outhouses in near-silent ruritania.

Central Line: Epping - Woodford

2008-05-10T17:33:00.003+01:00

I'll never get used to the experience of travelling on the Underground through open countryside - and in a way that's how I'd like it to stay. It's a novelty as much as anything else, and if it became the norm, which it obviously is for those commuters so disposed as to live 17 miles away from the centre of London, I don't think it'd retain as much appeal.

It struck me, while travelling along this stretch of the network, that I probably wouldn't see countryside in quite the same volume again. All of the remaining lines on my journey are, I suspect, in stoutly urban or suburban areas. So this was a bittersweet leg of the voyage. I never suspected I would hold Essex in any sort of particularly wistful regard, but there you go.

Epping is the start of the line, but only since 1994. Before then Ongar was the terminus, even further eastwards into the shires and even less frequented by regular travellers. As far as I can see this now redundant part of the line never really justified its existence; one of its stations, Blake Hall, allegedly served just six passengers A DAY.

Saying that there's a privately-owned heritage railway company that runs special trips on Sundays and bank holidays along part of the route, with the dream - ha! - of one day reconnecting Ongar with Epping and hence the rest of the world.

For the time being, and probably for a very long time, Epping is where it all begins/ends. And it's a uncaringly nonchalent place. Outside even the M25, it's got nothing to do with London or the Underground at all, other than by virtue of some tracks that happen to pass this way. Over which trains have passed since 1865, when the Great Eastern Railway arrived, succeeded by the Central Line in 1949.

You can see very clearly where trains once carried on beyond here, through a now rather sad and sorrowful cutting and onwards past Betjeman-pleasing places like Coopersale Halt, North Weald Bassett and Toot Hill:

The Central Line is the longest on the entire London Underground (46 miles) and even this first stretch of six stations felt like it took about half an hour to complete. Theydon Bois, which I'd always assumed was pronounced after the French spelling, is in fact - according to the in-carriage announcer person - Theydon *Boyce*.

It's the least used station zone 6 - not a particularly difficult title to acquire - and has one the longest platforms on the whole network, thanks to the fact it was originally built and used by dairy farmers serving London. These 'milk trains' into Liverpool Street and the now defunct Broad Street were written into the timetable until an underpass from Leyton to Stratford further down the line was built.

Like all the stops in this part of the world, it seemed uncomfortably quiet and embarrassed by its size. The fact it was raining almost non-stop both here and right down the line just compounded the eerieness. Who lives out here? Who works out here?

Welcome to Debden, home of 'Eats & Bits':

This portion of the network was bolted onto the Central Line after the Second World War; but there had been tracks this way for almost 100 years previously - indeed, the next stretch was first opened in 1856, with Loughton originally acting as the terminus of the Eastern Counties Railway out of London.

It's not the same building, of course; the current one was thrown up in the late 1930s and is grade II listed. It was here that I saw the most recurring evidence of Essex Women going about their business, thanks to a giant branch of Sainsbury's close by. Even though it was pouring with rain these folk were walking around in a mixture of velour pyjamas and tiny flowery numbers, and while not to fall into any lazy stereotypes, they did seem utterly oblivious to the inclement weather. And, naturally, the brilliant architecture.

Buckhurst Hill is a beautiful station, with a palpable Victorian-era feel to its interior and splendidly-tended platforms:

Woodford, though, is a odd jumble of old and new, with yours truly captured on camera in the middle:

The line divides here, venturing off eastwards in a giant loop via Hainault while also continuing southwards towards London. Hence this blog will also veer off, first into silence and then, when time and inclination next allows, the likes of Roding Valley, Barkingside and - yes really - Grange Hill.

The East London Line

2008-03-24T20:17:00.015Z

Welcome to a line that no longer exists.

The East London Line closed, permanently, the weekend before Christmas. The Saturday before that, I travelled along that part of the railway still open to the public. It was a cold, overcast afternoon that threatened rain which - as you'll see - duly arrived. All the stations I visited felt like they'd been put out to grass: dirty, worn, battered. There weren't many people around. The whole atmosphere was one of desertion. It was about as far removed from the spirit of Christmas as it was possible to get. Plus I was ill. It was not the most inspiring of journeys.

Nonetheless I felt a strong sense of history right down the line, and not just because it was about to shut for an enforced hibernation.

Here were some of the oldest railway cuttings in London - in the country, for that matter. Here was the world's first tunnel under water. Here were names and places that carried associations with centuries of London's past: Whitechapel, Rotherhithe, Wapping. Above all, here was a line that nobody, but nobody, would be able to travel along ever again.

Not in this guise, at any rate. The line is scheduled to come back into use in 2010, but as part of the London Overground network, with extensions and appropriations turning the once self-contained stand-alone route into merely an anonymous segment of a giant whole. Never again will there be a strangely shaped, illogically-designed stump of a line sitting just to the east of Liverpool Street on the Underground map.

In one sense it's merely reverting back to its original purpose. When tracks first opened here for public use in 1869, it was as the East London Railway, a line operated by six different companies connecting north and south London and the counties beyond. It was never intended to function as a route that ran from nowhere in particular (Whitechapel) to somewhere else nowhere in particular (New Cross). Goods services rumbled along the line as late as 1962. Passenger trains from Liverpool Street crossed the line as late as 1966. At least incorporation into the new Overground service should see more people passing this way, albeit heading further afield than the East End.

Still, it'll be strange to see it no longer on the map. I'm sure the planners are glad to see the back of it. They could never decide what to call it, what to colour it, how to brand it, anything. For ages it was officially called, as if for punishment, the Metropolitan Line East London Section. Sometimes it'd be coloured purple. Other times it would be purple with a white stripe. It's only been orange since 1990.

The northern terminus, Shoreditch, closed in 2006. Since then trains have started and stopped at Whitechapel, a six-platformed maze of entrances and exits that line up alongside Whitechapel Road where, the day I was there, an enormous street market sprawled as far as the eye could see. The main part of the station was very busy, but the East London section was almost deserted. I almost felt embarrassed standing on it. This feeling would persist along the entire line.

Shadwell was, for a time, called Shadwell & St George-In-The-East, before the vogue for long and geographically-precise names was deemed too frivilous just after the First World War.

As much as I wish this was snow, it's just rain illuminated by a flash bulb.

That orange notice on the right informs the occasional stubborn traveller such as myself that there really is no point passing this way after 22nd December:

A station that's about to be closed is surely one of the saddest places to be in the world.

Wapping is right on the edge of the Thames, and marks the start of the tunnel, built by Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard between 1825 and 1843.

Originally designed for, but never used by, horse-drawn carriages, it's an astonishing sight. You can - you could - see all the way down it by standing at one end of the station platform. It's incredible to think this took almost 20 years to build:

There's a fantastical history behind the tunnel, involving floods, deaths, illness, bankruptcies, bizarre multi-manned human shields, digging equipment designed to sink into the ground, and the Tsar of Russia. Essentially it was built more for the sake of it than anything else, quickly fell out of favour with London's gentry, became a doss-house for vagrants, closed for a time then became the fulcrum for the East London Railway once somebody figured out how to fit a train through.

The coming of the railway totally changed this part of London, restyling it as a powerhouse of industry and shipping and, in the process, bequeathing the city with acre upon acre of disused dockyards. And yet, over on the other side of the tunnel at Rotherhithe...

...the work of Brunel father and son is justly commemorated:

I know it sounds unashamedly childish, but I found riding through this short tunnel strangely thrilling. Or maybe thrillingly strange. At any rate, I saw somebody else taking a photo of it, so I knew I wasn't the only one.

Next stop was Canada Water, where I've been before, and which made for about the most complete contrast you could imagine.

Similarly I next went from a station opened in 1999 to one that hailed from 1884.

There's that orange notice again. I've read that Surrey Quays was only called Surrey Quays in 1989 when somebody somewhere thought its original name Surrey Docks was too old-fashioned and negative. In other words, docks = decay, the past; quays = progress, the future. The locals were not happy.

Lastly, to the end of the line - or rather, the ends of the line, in the shape of New Cross and New Cross Gate.

On paper, it's pointless. On the ground, they're only 600 metres apart. Yet thanks to rival companies rushing to lay tracks through London in the early 19th century, two stations called New Cross were built, one opening in 1839, the other in 1850. And both were called New Cross for ages. For almost 100 years, in fact. Clearly such a colourful anachronism could not be allowed to survive after the First World War, so one was redubbed New Cross Gate - the one that opened first, confusingly.

From here, eventually, you'll be able to continue onwards on board the London Overground all the way down to West Croydon or, ultimately, north westwards towards Clapham Junction and hence, if you so desired, in a massive anti-clockwise direction via Willesden and Highbury & Islington all the way back round to Whitechapel.

For now though, and for the next few years, you can't pass this way at all. The marvels and memories bound up in the East London Line are locked away, its eccentricities hidden from view, its identity abolished forever.

Interlude: top 10 stations

2008-03-16T11:20:00.008Z

OK, given I'm roughly halfway through my journey around the Underground, I thought I'd name what I think are my 10 favourite stations I've encountered so far.

Feel free to agree, disagree, or simply ignore.

In no particular order, other than alphabetical:

1) Arnos Grove (Piccadilly Line)

2) Canary Wharf (Jubilee Line)

3) Croxley (Metropolitan Line)

4) Moor Park (Metropolitan Line)

5) Osterley (Piccadilly Line)

6) Rayners Lane (Metropolitan Line)

7) South Kensington (Circle Line)

8) Wembley Park (Jubilee Line)

9) Westminster (Circle Line)

10) Woodside Park (Northern Line)

Piccadilly Line: Acton Town - Heathrow

2008-03-08T14:42:00.016Z

I was a bit uneasy about travelling this final stretch of the Piccadilly Line.

I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps it was because I would be so far from where I lived. Perhaps it was because it looked a long way on the map. Perhaps it was because I was heading towards an airport, where I would be trying to take photographs and not look suspicious.

There have been tracks down this way since 1883, when the Metropolitan District Railway (now the District Line) opened a service to Hounslow Town. The Piccadilly began running trains during that decade of uber-expansion: the 1930s. District Line services disappeared 30 years later. The last piece in the jigsaw, the extension to Heathrow, only materialised a couple of decades ago. Indeed, part of it is still materialising today.

South Ealing, one of only two stops on the entire network to boast all five vowels in its name (I have yet to visit the other), squats by a pelican crossing at road level but opens out into a huge, recently refurbished cavern inside.

It's only just down the road from Northfields, or Northfields Halt as it was originally called. Or Northfields and Little Ealing as it was subsequently called. Either alternatives, I think, would improve the character of the place today and match the regal pretensions of its design (another Charles Holden effort).

Holden's tentacles extend down the line through Boston Manor and Osterley. These are fantastic creations, enhanced - inevitably - by the kind of brooding skyline that accompanied me on my trip. It's the towers that do it. They reach up into the firmament for no reason other than they can. The one at Boston Manor has an illuminated strip that rises above the tower itself, challenging the sky to do its worst.

Osterley, though, goes one better. Here the tower is capped by...another tower, poking up even higher, which feels like it's almost scraping the clouds. How many people pause to look up at this edifice when they're entering the station? Depends how many people have got the time and the inclination, I suppose. Probably not enough, though.

The trio of stops in Hounslow turn out to have vastly contrasting, confusing histories. The line used to terminate here, at a station called Hounslow Town which no longer exists. Then it was extended to Hounslow Barracks, which is now Hounslow West. For a while there were no, as there are now, Hounslows East and Central. Central turned up in the guise of Heston and Hounslow, but to the west of Hounslow Town. Then a new Hounslow Town opened, which is now Hounslow East. Following all this?

It's not that important. Nowadays Hounslow East, the first you come to when you're travelling towards Heathrow, is a real shock: uncompromisingly modern and completely at odds with its surrounding neighbourhood. There's no real point for it to look this way, other than to make a point.

By contrast Hounslow Central looks like a village shop...

...and Hounslow West like a university library:

No prizes for guessing who designed that one.

Here was where the Piccadilly Line ended for a very long time. Since there has been a civilian airport on the site of Heathrow since the Second World War, it's surprising now to think there was no Underground link until 1977. Hatton Cross only opened in 1975, acting as a temporary terminus until the final bit of the line was laid two years later. This last stretch of the Piccadilly was simply dug just under the ground then covered back over, in the same way the very first Underground lines were dug an entire century earlier.

Hatton Cross is a horrendous place. The station is like a warehouse: cold, vast, ugly, dumped in the middle of nowhere, and with absolutely no concession to anybody desiring to do anything other than pass through en route somewhere else.

Trains from here run either straight to Terminals 1, 2 and 3, or the same destination via Terminal 4. Or at least they did when I was there. In a matter of days this is set to change, when Terminal 5 opens and - hooray! - all the London Underground maps across the city will need to be replaced.

Terminal 4 was opened in 1986 and is a far more obvious and logically-designed place than its neighbour. It took me only a few minutes to get up from the platform and into the terminal arrivals lounge, a route clearly signposted and easy to use.

1, 2 and 3, originally called simply Heathrow Central on its opening in 1977, is a completely different matter. I didn't know where I was going once I'd left the station, first ending up in a bus depot, then outside with a bunch of smokers. All I was looking for was the main station entrance. This was as good as it got.

There's no way of getting directly from Terminals 1, 2 and 3 to Terminal 4 by Underground. You'd have to go back to Hatton Cross and start again. The line runs one way only, hence why there's only one platform at Terminal 4 station. Heaven help you if you need to nip to Terminal 4 quickly from 1, 2 or 3.

Believe it or not, this was my first proper visit to Heathrow. When I was very young my family went on a day trip on a plane from East Midlands Airport to Heathrow and back again - the height of sophistication and exoticism, I'm sure you'll agree.

Maybe it was that trip which gave me my fear of flying. I certainly recall being terrified at the mere notion of not having anything by way of solid matter underneath me. Anyway, since then I had never been to, or had cause to go near, Heathrow.

It's not a nice place. I felt as if my brandishing a camera around the place was being picked up by 100 security cameras. Despite it taking me hours to get to, being something of a national landmark, and representing the end of my vast journey around the Piccadilly Line, I got out of there as soon as I could.

Piccadilly Line: Acton Town - Uxbridge

2008-03-02T10:53:00.011Z

So much for believing I would have this project completed in a year.

Anyway, there were two sections of the Piccadilly Line I needed to visit, and I did them both during one Saturday afternoon (and evening, as it invariably became).

This branch, which curves round from Acton Town to head northwards towards a rendezvous with the Metropolitan, represents another uninterrupted of Charles Holden-inspired stations, save for North Ealing which - as you'll see - stands out by virtue of resembling someone's house.

It's not a very well-served branch. It took me twice as long to travel this stretch as it did the Acton Town to Heathrow route (taking into account my need to get off at every single station, take photos, then wait for the next train). What the service is to frequency the stations are to hospitality. Despite their impressive designs, none of them were very welcoming. Then again, that could have been because they were mostly deserted, it was getting dark, and this was the middle of February.

There's been a station at Ealing Common since 1879, but Holden's version, like all of them in this part of London, opened in the early 1930s. Originally the District Line passed this way, in its previous guise as the Metropolitan District Railway. When the Piccadilly was extended to run west of Hammersmith, Ealing Common changed sides and marked the point (as it still does) where the two lines diverge.

It is, as ever, an imaginative creation, boasting the requisite Holden talking point: in this instance, a hexagonal roof. There also seemed to be the now familiar battery of small businesses skulking in side rooms, such as a taxi cab firm, estate agent or barber.

Actually, North Ealing looks more like a church hall than someone's house, but the incongruity of its design compared to its purpose remains. There's a cosy feel to the place nonetheless, not borne out by its platforms which stretch for miles and are barely welcoming.

When this bit of the line was built at the turn of the last century, a station was opened specifically - and temporarily - purely to serve the Royal Agricultural Society's recently opened Park Royal show grounds.

This sort of thing doesn't happen anymore. Stations are built to last, permanence is considered a premium, and there's neither the time nor money to waste on frippery that will have a short shelf life. I think this is a shame. Imagine the pleasure to be had in first discovering, then using, a station only erected for three months. Well, I'd find it a pleasure.

The main station at Park Royal still stands, and is a dazzling edifice. When the light starts to fade and evening creeps in, Underground stations turn into beacons of solace and safety. A lot of this is undoubtedly due to the way they are lit inside, which in turn is thanks to their overall design. Park Royal draws you towards itself like a well-tended hearth.

The onset of dusk doesn't always make for valuable photography. I had trouble at Alperton, where - by the time I eventually arrived - it was now almost pitch black.

This station was originally called Perivale Alperton, about as suburban and domiciled a name you're likely to get. Holden's building is once again giant-like in both size and ambition. In fact it's huge. It dominates the surroundings like an airport terminal.

Sudbury Town's lack of decent outside lighting rendered the chance of a decent photo almost negligble. I don't know if you can actually see anything here:

That is Sudbury Town station, I can assure you. The interior lighting did, at least, make for a rather dramatic wall of yellow, looming out of the murkiness.

For further proof, here's a shot of the platform:

The shot of Sudbury Hill below is almost two years old, and is another one taken during my circumnavigation of London on foot. I doubt, if I'd been here in the dark, I would have been able to capture anything on camera:

Finally, South Harrow and another station benefiting from a warm illuminated interior. Although this belied the mood of the place, which was grim and combustible. Saturday night was beginning, and Harrow's hordes were roaming. I got out of here as quickly as I could.

North of this point the Piccadilly meets the Metropolitan at Rayners Lane and runs in tandem all the way to Uxbridge: a section of the Undergrond I have already covered.

There was still unfinished business, however: that stump of the line that sprawls south westwards towards the sprawl of a terminus that is Heathrow airport.

Piccadilly Line: South Kensington - Acton Town

2007-12-30T17:36:00.001Z

You begin to shake off the tourists on this stretch of the Piccadilly. You also shake off the ground itself.

The line breaks cover just before Barons Court. I feel the same thing every time this happens, anywhere on the network. It's a sense of escape, a sort of liberation. The sprawl of the city centre is behind and away from you. Ahead is the open air, the suburbs, and space. And, of course, places you can take photos of without having to schlep up and down escalators all the time.

All the stations on this stretch have counterparts on the District Line, and it was for the District - or rather the Metropolitan Railway, or the Metropolitan District Railway, or the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway, or the London and South Western Railway, and so on and on - that all of them were founded.

So none are technically Piccadilly stations. Their histories are bound up with that aformentioned jumble of erstwhile multi-named companies and conglomerates, dating back to the 1860s. The Piccadilly only turned up in 1906, and then only as far as Hammersmith. It wasn't until the 1930s that the likes of Acton Town joined the line.

As such, passing this way and photographing the stations as members of the Piccadilly family is, I guess, somewhat disingenuous. That's my way of saying I'm not going to bother much with the histories of the buildings and leave that for when I write about the District Line. Meanwhile here are half a dozen west London destinations snapped, as usual, in varying stages of daylight and nighttime, becoming evermore ornate and everless populous.

Gloucester Road is worth loitering in awhile, in order to check out the art installations that take up the whole of the disused platorm 4.

Anybody with little English and even less patience will have a torrid time at Earl's Court, a brilliantly sprawling junction with bits of the District line sprouting off in all directions where there's no telling what train will be passing your way next. It's still got these fantastic old-style multi-purpose destination boards as well. But I realise I'm talking about the District line and the Piccadilly has nothing to do with them at all, so instead here's an interesting (well, I think so) view from the station's Warwick Road entrance.

Come Barons Court and you're above ground, with the Piccadilly and District line tracks running side by side. The building is Grade II listed. I took this photo, along with the other night ones here, after work in the week before Christmas.

I always wonder what people must think of this weird bloke standing outside Underground stations taking photos of them without their permission. Yet nobody has ever come up to me and said anything, or enquired what I was doing, or asked me to stop. Nobody, that is, until I got to Hammersmith.

I only realised this afterwards, but in this photo you can actually see the security man who's about to ask me to put my camera away. He's the one walking towards the lens, in the blue anorak, right in the middle of the shot.

He didn't give me any valid reason for not being able to take a photo. It wasn't like I was even anywhere near the station entrance itself, as you can see. So much for festive spirit.

I took these last two photos during the week after Christmas, one wintry afternoon when I was feeling ill and continually eating Strepsils.

Piccadilly Line trains don't call at Turnham Green most times, only stopping in the early morning and late evening. Although it doesn't look like it here, the flower seller was doing an OK trade for the time of day (and year).

Notice anything familiar about Acton Town?

Recognise that 1930s-ish minimalist art deco-esque look? Yup, we're back in the world of Charles Holden, with stations meant to be looked up at rather than just passed down through. I suspect there'll be a fair bit more of this as the Piccadilly shakes itself free of the District line and strikes north towards Sudbury.

Piccadilly Line: Covent Garden - South Kensington

2007-12-29T19:57:00.002Z

There can't be many other stretches of the Underground which boast such a concentrated sequence of landmarks to their name.

No wonder this is one of the busiest parts of the whole network. No wonder it's better to walk overground between most of these stations rather than put yourself through a few minutes of crush-carriage hell. No wonder these stations not only feel but most definitely look a century old.

One that I forgot to mention last time, and which isn't quite so busy - mainly because it doesn't exist anymore - is Aldwych. It's not been closed that long, comparatively; it shut in 1994 after ever decreasing usage and ever increasing costs. It was a route to nowhere, forming one end of a stub of a branch line that spewed off north of Covent Garden. Originally it was to be the southern terminus of the Great Northern and Strand Railway, running from Finsbury Park in the north, under King's Cross station, to a point near The Strand. But the concoction of the Piccadilly Line put pay to all that.

I'm not sure I miss it that much. It always looked out of place on the Underground map. It didn't fit into the logic of Harry Beck's original diagram, appearing squat and ugly. It didn't seem sensible to have a branch line going nowhere right in the middle of London. It didn't even serve a part of the city barren with Underground stations.

Still, it's one of the most easily located disused stations in the city, bearing its original name 'Strand'. And it's always turning up on TV and in films, whenever 'Generic Underground Station' is required, so it's not entirely redundant.

South of Covent Garden and Leicester Square, where I've been before...

...is Piccadilly Circus: a swaggering ogre of a station, none of which lies above ground, but which rolls majestically in a giant circle just under the titular thoroughfare.

The cavernous complex is a fantastic creation, unsurprisingly the work of Charles Holden (though the old, above ground booking hall, closed in 1929, was Leslie Green's handiwork), around which flock folk from all corners of the globe, defiantly pushing train tickets into incorrect slots, filming everything on camcorders, and shouting. It's a mini-tornado down there. I've never been inside the station and not felt half-swept up by a torrent of bodies bobbing and weaving non-stop around and around and around.

Beyond Green Park, another old friend, of which there will only be more as this project continues...

...lurks another disused station, but with nowhere near the pedigree of Aldwych. Down Street was axed in 1932, briefly sparking back to life during the Second World War when Churchill and his War Cabinet used it as an air-raid shelter. It seems to have been something of a folly from the start, though, as it was built in an area (Mayfair) where the residents were too posh to want to use the Underground and just that bit too close to its neighbouring stops.

The surface building, another Leslie Green creation, is still standing, albeit shorn of its original purpose. Just like that of its neighbour, Hyde Park Corner:

Green's entrance hall is now a pizza restaurant. This station is, boringly, entirely below ground.

As you'd expected, entering and existing Knightsbridge is a right roustabout. Especially the entrance right next to Harrods.

All the stations on this stretch of the line were opened almost exactly 100 years ago. There's little of the original Knightsbridge nowadays, thanks to an apprently unending attempt to render it more fit for coping with batteries of consumers charging for bargains.

The tunnels between Knightsbridge and South Kensington allegedly follow such a twisting route to avoid a 17th Century plague pit. Lurking in their depths is yet another ghost station: Brompton Road. Despite proving convenient for the eponymous Oratory and the Victoria and Albert Museum, it was pretty much ignored once Knightsbridge station started expanding, and was duly boarded up in 1934.

So to South Kensington, where the Piccadilly aligns itself with one of the oldest Underground routes in the capital (the District), duplicating and stealing stops from this and other lines all the way out to Ealing and beyond. There's been a station here since 1868, the Piccadilly arriving in 1906 in its initial guise as the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway running between Finsbury Park and Hammersmith.

The new platforms needed a new building, which meant the existing, dazzling entrance...

...had a bit of Leslie Green ruby brick artistry bunged on the back.

As nice as South Kensington is, there's a huge case to be made for having a new station in this part of London, one that would mean you wouldn't have to walk miles through dripping, gloomy passages to get anywhere near to the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal College of Music, Hyde Park and Kensington Palace. It could be called Kensington Gore, or even just Albert Hall. Anyone standing for Mayor who put this in their manifesto would romp home.