To the end of the line

Riding the Tube from A-Z

2011-02-20T20:39:00.004Z

Here's an admission that hopefully won't come as too much of a surprise: as far as I'm concerned, there's little that beats a public transport-based quest.

Oh dear. Perhaps I should be a little more reticent about this belief. Perhaps articulating enthusiasm for such an ostensibly mundane, some might say joyless, activity isn't quite the done thing.

But then how else could I explain why I decided to spend a day visiting, in order, a London Underground station for each letter of the alphabet?

I can't, other than to say the very conceit was my motivation, and the work its own reward.

I didn't treat my challenge as a race. I wasn't trying to get from A-Z in the shortest time possible. But neither did I want to prolong the journey unnecessarily or find myself retracing my steps... although as it turned out I had to do the latter in order to avoid the former.

I did consider attempting to visit the first A of all the As, the first B of all the Bs, and so on. This, however, would have required me to cross the entire Underground network from one end to the other several times in a row (Dagenham East to Ealing Broadway to Fairlop, for example) and taken at least 16 hours.

Plus I had ruled out using the Docklands Light Railway. And even though there are no Underground stations for the letters J, X, Y and Z, I still intended to visit suitable substitutes.

Given all this, I knew my mission would take the best part of a day. Even without factoring in changing trains, changing lines, taking photos and taking breaks, my route clocked in at eight-and-a-half hours.

Therefore in order to visit as many stations as possible while it was still light, I intended to set off as early as possible.

Inevitably, this did not happen.

Last-minute faffing, including deciding to pack a flask of hot water and tea bags, meant I didn't leave West Finchley until 8.20am.

I tried to reconcile myself to this delayed departure by reasoning I would at least have missed the peak of the rush hour.

Inevitably, I was wrong.

I arrived at my first letter of the alphabet, Archway, at 8.43am precisely.

But I didn't leave Archway until almost 9am, having had to let one train go because it was too full and a second train go because it was heading for the Charing Cross branch. I needed the Bank branch, in order to get to St Pancras for a connection to Barbican.

And right here is an example of the rather lax attitude I took to my quest.

A more dedicated, competitive A-Z traveller would have pushed their way on to the first train, or jumped on the second regardless of its destination, purely in order to keep travelling. Revisions to routes and awkward interchanges could be worked out later; the key thing would be that they were on the move.

Conversely I did not and would not ever feel an urgency to charge round the Underground network. Still, my hold-up at Archway made me realise at this very early stage that the entire trip could take far longer than the eight-and-a-half hours it totalled on paper. I might not even finish until late in the evening.

Resolving that from now on any dawdling had to be constructive dawdling, I hastened to Barbican, where by virtue of it being above ground I didn't have to leave the station to both take and upload my proof-of-presence photo.

This was another rule that I had concocted which, in retrospect, I can see further lengthened the trip.

If I hadn't decided to take a snapshot of myself at each stop, and use my phone to upload it there and then, I clearly needn't have had to leave so many stations or get off so many trains.

At Barbican, for instance, I could have just taken a photo of a sign through the doors of the train.

But I wanted to document my progress as it happened and share my endeavours online in, as close as possible, real time. Even if that meant a host of grisly mugshots.

I had tried to structure my route to best accommodate lines and distances I needed to take to reach those more remote stations. Ickenham was the prime example of this, being the only station beginning with the letter I and hence unavoidable, but dwelling way out in zone 6 on the very edge of north-west Greater London.

This meant picking stations for letters C-H that brought me ever closer to my far-flung prize. I continued on the Circle line from Barbican to Liverpool Street, then picked up the Central line westwards to Chancery Lane.

After nipping out for the photo, I resumed my journey west, changing on to the Jubilee line at Bond Street for a dash up to Dollis Hill.

By now rush hour was over and I had more space to, in the words of Jimmy Savile, stretch out and move about.

Off-peak passengers are less self-conscious in general, and I travelled up the Jubilee line in the company of, among others, a woman doing her knitting and a man singing folk songs.

It was, as ever, a joy to break cover just before Finchley Road and be above ground once more.

I think the weather had actually turned colder; at Dollis Hill a mist and a chill clung close to the ground.

I had neglected to bring a hat. I would rue this more and more as the day wore on.

I then had to retrace my steps, the first of a number of doubling-backs that were essential if regrettable, returning back down the Jubilee to Baker Street, where I nipped on to a Circle line train to Edgware Road.

I scored my first success of the day here, chancing upon a District line train to Wimbledon almost immediately, which carried me all the way down to Fulham Broadway without a hitch. Yup, I avoided Earl’s Courting disaster.

In Fulham Broadway shopping centre I took a short break, utilising a popular chain of coffee shops to recharge my phone and have a hot drink, besides paying 30p to use the precinct toilets. Well, what can you do?

Then it was back to Earl’s Court and a short wait for a Richmond train to take me down to Gunnersbury.

By now I had tired of capturing my own gurning features on camera, and began to opt for what can best be described as limb shots:

It had gone midday by this point.

I really wanted to do Ickenham by lunchtime, but getting there was by no means straightforward.

I had to double-back again, then face an epic wait at Turnham Green before the right connection ambled along, then change at Acton Town and again at Rayners Lane before Ickenham hoved into view.

But even then I couldn’t cross it off the list, as I still had an H to do, which meant going through Ickenham and getting off one station further on: Hillingdon.

Luckily there was a train heading back down the line almost straightaway. I had 30 seconds to snatch a photo, jump on board, pull into Ickenham, hop off… then wait 15 minutes for the next London-bound service.

I’d been on the move for over five hours, but had only done a third of the alphabet.

To restore my spirits I made myself some tea from the flask I was now extremely thankful for remembering to pack.

On the Metropolitan train back towards London I was surrounded by people eating lunch, including, most cruelly of all, a woman guzzling chips. My stomach lurched.

At Finchley Road (my third visit of the day) I changed on to the Jubilee line and hopped down to St John’s Wood, which I figured was the closest I could get to a letter J.

Then it was back the way I came, through Finchley Road once more, in order to visit Kilburn:

And then I had to double-double-back and pass through Finchley Road a fifth time, heading back through St John’s Wood (again), Baker Street (again) to reach Bond Street (again).

Connoisseurs of economy of travel, I can hear your disapproval.

After a pointless search through Bond Street shopping centre for toilets, I zipped back and forth along the Central line, first heading west to Lancaster Gate, then east to Marble Arch, then west again to Notting Hill Gate.

This was a very satisfying haul in a very short time. I was suddenly over half-way through my challenge, but the time was 3.15pm and I was flagging.

I now embarked on a diversion.

I couldn’t find anywhere near Notting Hill station that supplied the holy trinity of a power socket, relief and refreshment.

Perhaps I didn’t look hard enough. Instead I gave in and popped back down to Fulham Broadway shopping centre. At least I knew all three would be there.

Yes, I know this was just compounding my already baggy schedule, but the interlude meant I didn’t have to stop again for the rest of the day.

I caught a District line train round to Victoria and fought my way on to a titular service up to Oxford Circus, by which time it was 4.25pm.

A run of good luck delivered me a swift change on to the Bakerloo up to Paddington, then another quick train up to Queen’s Park by 5pm. At this point I felt I was really making progress.

However it was starting to get dark, my flask was empty, rush hour was beginning and a mammoth trek to the other side of the city lay ahead.

Again, it was a matter of accommodating a far-flung station.

To take care of the letter U, I had either to go all the way out to Uxbridge (which meant passing through Hillingdon and Ickenham again) or strike out for the eastern end of the District line and the likes of Upton Park, Upney or Upminster. I opted for the latter, and so began working my way over to east London.

Along the way I ticked off R in the shape of Russell Square, which I reached by taking an Overground train from Queen’s Park to Euston then walking the rest of the way (considerably quicker than travelling between the two on the Underground).

I then zoomed up the Piccadilly line to Finsbury Park.

Here I changed on to the Victoria line in order to take care of Seven Sisters and Tottenham Hale.

It was now 6.15pm.

I continued on up the Victoria line to Blackhorse Road in order to pick up an Overground service round to Barking, from where it was two stops westwards to Upton Park.

I was quite pleased with this solution to the U issue, but it did mean I now faced a hefty journey back into the city centre to deal with the V issue.

It was now 7.10pm.

By now quite exhausted, I schlepped down the District line to West Ham and on to a Jubilee line train all the way round to Westminster. I almost fell asleep during this leg of the journey.

Then it was back on to a Circle line train - my 40th train of the day - to carry me along to Victoria, through which I had last passed three-and-a-half hours earlier.

It was now 7.50pm.

The end was in sight, but typically I had complicated things by deciding to find substitutes for the missing letters X, Y and Z.

So instead of ending my quest after I'd scurried up the Victoria line to Warren Street...

...I then had to continue up to King’s X St Pancras (do you see?).

Now came the coldest and most desolate leg of the journey.

I came out of King’s Cross station and walked all the way up York Way, past the offices of The Guardian and over the Regent’s Canal to visit the remains of the disused station York Road.

It was too dark for my phone to take a photo of any merit, but I had to prove I had been there.

From there I hurried back to King’s Cross and down to the Underground for a train along to Great Portland Street, from where I walked to Regent’s Park station which, by virtue of its proximity to London Zoo, was doubling as my finishing post. It was 8.45pm: almost exactly 12 hours since I arrived at Archway.

My quest was over.

If I hadn’t made the detour to York Road, if I hadn’t bothered with stations for J, X, Y and Z, if I hadn’t taken those breaks at Fulham Broadway, if I hadn’t needed the toilet or food or bothered to recharge my phone, if I had rushed for each and every connection, if I’d even included DLR and Overground stations, I would have been done with the alphabet much quicker.

But I wouldn’t have had half as much fun or finished my journey with quite the same sense of achievement.

An alphabetical challenge

2011-02-17T16:58:00.002Z

I've decided to attempt a self-devised London Underground-based mission.

Barring unforeseen developments, tomorrow - Friday 18 February - I'm going to try and visit, in order, a station for each letter of the alphabet.

Seeing as there are no stations beginning with the letters J, X, Y or Z, I've had to come up with vaguely-related alternatives. J, for example, will be covered by a visit to St John's Wood, while Z will have to suffice with Regent's Park, aka London Zoo. If anyone can think of better ones, speak up.

The challenge should be manageable in one day. I did consider attempting a stricter mission, involving visiting, in order, the first A of all the As, the first B of all the Bs and so on. This, however, would have required me to cross the entire Underground network from one end to the other several times in a row (Dagenham East to Ealing Broadway to Fairlop, for example) and taken at least 16 hours.

As it is, I still have to visit zone 6 thanks to the location of the only station beginning with I.

There are also some unkind diversions courtesy of the paucity of Ds and Vs.

But unless I run into trouble of a kind that adds up to hours of delays or station closures (you better damn well stay open tomorrow, Ickenham!), I should complete the challenge and be back home before the Underground network goes to bed.

By way of proof of my journey, I will take photos outside each of the stations, which I'll also be posting on Twitter as the day unfolds.

The fun, or possibly the foolishness, begins tomorrow at breakfast time at Archway.

Aldwych, then and now

2010-09-26T15:01:00.002+01:00

I'd always assumed this blog had settled into a kind of permanent siding when I ticked off the last London Underground station on the map back in January 2009.

Then came the trip around the Overground earlier this year, which I decided to write up as a kind of epilogue.

Now I have an epilogue to that epilogue, in the shape of a visit to the disused Underground station of Aldwych.

It wasn't your ordinary tour of a disused station, however. This was part of a three-day event organised by the fine folks of the London Transport Museum entitled Under London, with Aldwych station recreated to appear how it would have looked 70 years ago when it became a shelter from air raids during the Blitz.

As well as dressing the station with posters and props from 1940, a small cast of character actors was also on hand to give the tour a kind of dramatic structure.

Now this might sound a bit unnecessary, even silly; but honestly, it was a masterstroke. It really was a fantastic experience, right from the outset when we were shuffled into the station ticket hall to be addressed by an authentically stoic ARP warden:

Our man did a bit of business about gas masks and what to do if we were caught short, before right on cue an air raid siren sounded.

We had to file down the spiral staircase of 160 steps to be greeted by an authentically bossy female shelter supervisor, who delivered her lines with great aplomb, switching effortlessly between upbeat banter ("Been shopping, dear? How lovely!") and downbeat prophecy ("Remember, the bomber always gets through"), along with more potty talk. Toilet training was clearly of utmost concern during the Blitz. (Tip: bring a blanket to preserve your modesty, plus some cloves of garlic for the smell).

We were then split into groups and taken on to the platform itself, where a train was parked, decked out in period advertising.

More colourful characters lurked within the carriages: a gossipy woman doing knitting, and a smooth-talking spiv who promised me two tickets to see "Snakehips" Geraldo at a local dance hall next weekend, besides asking me to vouch for the quality of the material on a pair of parachute knickers.

Yes, this was a hands-on tour and no mistake.

My friend Chris and I started wondering how they must have recruited these actors. 'Must look convincing in tin helmet...know how to handle gas mask...Cockney accent...moderate rhyming slang...jovial countenance essential'.

Smart-eyed readers will observe that the train parked in the platform was rolling stock not from the Piccadilly Line, but the Northern Line. I overheard one of the museum staff saying that this train was still in service as late as 1988. I certainly remember its wooden floors and hard-backed seats from trips to London as a child.

Aldwych only closed in 1994, but it must have been in a pretty dilapidated state even then. The walls and tunnels bear signs of decay that are depressingly long-term.

The platform was kept in darkness during the tour so it was hard to get a true sense of what it must have been like when fully operational - but in a way that wasn't the point, for this was a semi-fictionalised event, not merely a facts-and-figures tour.

The whole thing ended with a montage of sounds depicting an air raid going on above us, followed by a brief attempt at a singalong. Sadly, not many people seemed to know the words to It's A Long Way To Tipperary, but I joined in, as lustily as I dared.

Then it was back up the 160 steps (not as much of an ordeal as it sounds) and out past an array of merchandise including Ministry of Food fudge, which really ought to be brought back (both the fudge and the Ministry of Food).

I've always been intrigued by Aldwych station and to be honest for much of the tour I was walking round with a stupid grin on my face.

Hats off, or rather helmets off, to London Transport Museum, together with London Underground, for devising such a superb way to allow people a glimpse of a bit of a subterranean icon.

Oh, and on the way out we were all handed one of these: a tour guide designed to look like a ration book. The perfect finishing touch.

Gospel Oak to... Gospel Oak: An overland circumnavigation

2010-06-02T20:39:00.017+01:00

When I laid this blog to rest at the start of last year I tried to make it sound and feel as final as possible, partly for melodramatic reasons but partly to dissuade me of any temptation to keep returning and adding indulgent epilogues or self-defeating updates.

When I decided to ignore all of that and make a slight return to the blog, I knew I had to do it in the guise of something more than just an excuse to make a few partisan points about the state of public transport in London.

So I'm making a few partisan points about the state of public transport in London... with additional photos!

The recent re-opening of the former East London Line, which I last visited a few days before its closure at Christmas 2007, allowed me to do something I'd often speculated upon back when the London Overground was merely a glint in Ken Livingstone's laudably integrationist eye. Namely, a circumnavigation of the city using overland, not underground, services.

Of course, the Overground is still not quite complete; there's a gap between Surrey Quays and Clapham Junction that's a couple of years away from being joined up.

But I saw this as an opportunity, not an obstacle, and besides I hadn't been on one of the spruce new Overground trains since their introduction last year.

They are fantastic. Clean, spacious, quiet and air-conditioned, they are a joy to ride in. The air conditioning was particularly welcome on the day I made my journey, which was one of those lumpen, sticky, not-quite-the-height-of-summer days you get in the capital.

This didn't stop one woman complaining that she was cold, going so far as to assail one of the Overground staff on the matter (who inevitably, but probably correctly, said "There's nothing any of us can do about it").

Oh look, here's that very woman, sitting in clean, spacious, quiet and air-conditioned carriage eating a yoghurt - that's right, a COLD foodstuff:

I took that photo at Dalston Junction, one of the brand new stations on the brand new bit of line that fills in the north east "gap" of the Overground circle, between Dalston and Shoreditch.

It's a smashing building, and to step inside is like entering a giant cool and elegant freezer cabinet.

The other new stations at Haggerston and Hoxton look great as well, while Shoreditch High Street is amazing: a massive concrete hangar that squats above the titular location, into which trains slide as if docking in a futuristic transport hub. Which, of course, it is.

Anyway, I began and ended my circumnavigation at Gospel Oak, Michael Palin's own parish, using the Overground to go to Dalston Kingsland.

Here I had to change trains and cross a couple of roads to get to Dalston Junction - the two won't be connected by rail until next year - from where I got another Overground train all the way down to West Croydon.

I'd never been to Croydon before, and I don't really want to ever go there again. At least, not into the town centre, which was noisy and ugly and uninteresting save for this somewhat grand edifice:

...which is East Croydon station, outside of where I got a tram to continue my clockwise journey round to Wimbledon. The tram service in south-east London is another treat. In fact, trams in any city in any part of Britain in the 21st century are a treat. I sat up the front so I could see through the driver's windows and right down the line.

I love the way these tracks sneaked across roads, around gardens and behind hedges, until suddenly arriving at Wimbledon. The only downside to this leg of the journey was that I was sitting facing an old man and his grandson, and I didn't want to eat my lunch for fear of looking too coarse.

To complete the circle I had to then nip up the main Waterloo line to Clapham Junction, from where the Overground resumes its course round to Willesden Junction, which is an absolute sink of a station.

To be fair, it only exists as an interchange and hence has no reason to entice new passengers in or kick existing ones out. But still. Even its surroundings are rotten:

From there it was on to yet another Overground train, this time one of the old rolling stock, to get back to Gospel Oak.

What was the point of this excursion, arriving at precisely the same place from where I departed?

The point, as ever, was the journey itself, not the destination. The London Overground is a real asset to the city, and all the years of investment and redevelopment have utterly paid off.

I couldn't believe how quickly I was out of my stamping ground of north London and heading through the unfamiliar acres of Forest Hill, Penge and Norwood (the latter only known to me before now by virtue of its setting for a particularly fine Sherlock Holmes story).

When the circle is complete there'll be no need to go as far south as I did, so you won't need to use the trams.

But, as I said earlier, this obstacle is, for the time being, an opportunity for like-minded souls to sample another bit of London's vast public transport network - one whose future, sadly, is in even more peril than when I previously signed off, thanks to the newly-installed coalition axemen.

I suspect the completion of the Overground is too far down the line, literally, for any of its remaining upgrades and additions to be binned off.

But as for the next set of proposed new transport links, not least the incredible Crossrail, I fear Boris Johnson is even now trying to bury them deep enough in his waste paper basket so Ken can't find them come 2012.

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.

Piccadilly Line: Manor House - Covent Garden

2007-12-22T19:49:00.001Z

I make these journeys as and when I can. Sometimes, as is obvious from the dates of some the entries, weeks will go by when I just don't have time to write anything. But that doesn't always mean I'm not out photographing.

I made a point, for instance, of travelling the length of the East London Line a few days ago, all too aware that it shuts for good just before Christmas. In fact it shuts this very day, 22nd December.

As the year has gone on I've also collected photos in twos and threes when the opportunity arises, such as trips to unlikely places for work-related things, or brief forays along nearby lines after office hours.

The longer I continue this blog, the more the entries will reflect this pick and mix approach to capturing the whole of the Underground on film. I can't help it. It's the only way, I think, I'll ever get to the end. And so my account of this particular stretch of the Piccadilly Line is made up of photos taken on two separate occasions, separated by six months. It was winter north of King's Cross; summer when I travelled south.

I've come to enjoy visiting stations in the dusk, or in fading light; it enhances their romantic, eerie quality, and paints them increasingly as ports in a storm or beacons of light amidst a mass of flat, featureless darkness.

South of Manor Park, and also Finsbury Park - which I visited back on one of the hottest days of the year - are three stations I passed through on one of the coldest, as the light was starting to dim. All opened on the same day: 15th December 1906.

At Arsenal it was gloomy but still, ostensibly, daytime:

It was originally called Gillespie Road, switching to its current name in 1932 after a campaign led by the then Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman. When I was there a match was in progress at the nearby Emirates Stadium and police were everywhere. At the same time you could see the cranes at work dismantling the old Highbury stadium, towering over houses like they were in their back garden.

I couldn't believe how far you have to walk to get from the platform to the exit and vice versa; then I realised there are no escalators or lifts inside the station at all. It's a real slog to make your way through the seemingly endless winding tunnel and up into fresh air. Equally it's difficult to resist the temptation to run down the tunnel when making the trek in the opposite direction.

Both Holloway Road and Caledonian Road were designed by Leslie Green and bear his trademark ruby tiling. What with Charles Holden's 1930s extravaganzas north of Finsbury Park and Green's work below, the Piccadilly line must surely boast the most beautifully-styled stations of the whole network.

You can see the same architecture on the disused remains of York Road station, which also opened in December 1906 as one of the original stops on the-then Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway.

Being so close to King's Cross it was never in great use, and Sunday services were stopped just 12 years after its opening. The whole place shut down for good in 1932, but Liberal Democrats on Islington council advocated the reopening of the station in their 2006 local election manifesto, and apparently at least one candidate for the Islington Conservative Party has spoken out in favour of its return.

It'd certainly be very easy to add back to the Underground map: there's acres of room south of Caledonian Road. With much of the original building still standing it'd probably be fairly simple to restore to active service. A cost-plus analyis, however, would probably suggest an unsustainably low level of use.

I looked in on King's Cross St Pancras again since I was last there in the summer, and of course it is now an architectural marvel. One of the new entrances:

The stunning renovated roof:

Our old friend John Betjeman:

And some of the man's great words:

Rewind back to the summer, when I was photographing the likes of Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road. Russell Square, Holborn and Covent Garden are again all the handiwork of Leslie Green. Russell Square is a gem, beautifully preserved and, you suspect, rather under-appreciated by the millions of tourists who seem to be particularly prevalent at the station, presumably because of the dozens and dozens of tiny hotels and bed and breakfast in the area:

By contrast Holborn has lost most of its charm and also half of its original name: Holborn (Kingsway):

Covent Garden is an appallingly overcrowded place and seems to have always been that way. I can't recall ever not finding the station heaving with people and a tangible hysteria in the air. At least much of Green's original edifice still stands, despite struggling to call attention to itself amongst the multitude of market stalls, street entertainers and people walking in their own worlds:

It's apparently fine to have this and Leicester Square station both in operation despite being a five-minute walk apart, yet the idea of having York Road and King's Cross (a further distance) both up and running would be laughed out of court. Ah well...

Piccadilly Line: Cockfosters - Manor House

2007-11-30T22:34:00.001Z

It's felt like I've spent half the year finishing off the Metropolitan. As such it's nice to get started on a fresh line, especially as it's one I've been looking forward to for ages.

The reason for that is the fact this first stretch of the Piccadilly is, I think, unique by virtue of its stations being entirely the product of one man's spectacular mind. The designer Charles Holden was responsible for every single one of the buildings between Cockfosters and Manor House. They were all opened in the space of twelve months from 1932-33. Several are Grade II listed structures.

Together they comprise the most stunningly realised, architecturally coherant set of stations I've encountered so far. Each and every one is a delight. Each and every one is far, far more than a stub on an Underground map. They represent quite possibly the closest anyone has come to repeatedly marrying splendour with utility in the ostensibly functional world of public transport.

Cockfosters sets the style: a European-inspired, Art Deco-esque appearance, centred around brick, glass and reinforced concrete, with loads of neat straight lines, cubes and crisply tailored furnishings. Plenty of glass allows natural light to dive deep into the premises.

This isn't your run-of-the-mill terminus: this one feels spacious, welcoming and optimstic, rather than cluttered, gloomy, the end of the road, a blunt and uncompromising full stop. There's no confusion over where to get the first train heading west. It's just been refurbished and renovated. It is wonderful.

Oakwood has a more prominent trademark Holden feature: the cavernous ticket hall, making you feel like you've arrived at an airport or bus depot. Especially when the lights are on inside, and dusk is falling outside:

In the station car park, meanwhile, there's this stunning, eerily-futuristic beacon beaming out to passers-by. I especially like the illuminated bit at the bottom; it really ought to rotate to complete the magic.

Southgate looks like a giant spinning top. It's also not clear, from the outside, how the thing actually holds itself together: where, for instance, is the support for that striking whatchamacallit sitting right on the top?

Everything pales, though, when you reach the next station: the majestic, shimmering Arnos Grove:

What is is about this building that is inexhaustably, unambiguously, spectacular? I really can't beat Jonathan Glancey's description:

"In my imagination, I see Holden's great drum starting to revolve, and then spin as if designed, like some great centrifuge, to draw in commuters from the suburban homes all around it, together with their cases, rucksacks and shopping bags, their umbrellas, furtive hoods and mobile phones, their paperbacks, laptops and newspapers, their brow-furrowing concerns, daydreams and season tickets. In reality, I can't help hoping that this king, queen and all princes of a metro station raises at least one commuter's spirit each day as he or she passes into and out of what remains one of the finest of all 20th-century buildings."

It's one of The Guardian's 12 greatest modern buildings, and rightly so. When you go inside, it's like entering Aladdin's cave, or Santa's grotto. There's just something fundamentally transforming about Arnos Grove. Why, even shortlived cable TV-only late-1990s BBC channel UK Play transmitted a short, eulogising documentary about the place.

Next down the line, Bounds Green is the only station not to have been realised directly by Holden. Instead his collaborator C.H. James designed the nuts and bolts from a template established by his esteemed colleague. Again, it's fantastic stuff. An octagon, for heaven's sake!

Both this and the next station in line, Wood Green, have been the target of bombings. Historical bombings, that is. Bounds Green was damaged by a German bomb in World War Two, which killed 17. An IRA bomb exploded at Wood Green in 1976, injuring one.

A man in a jester's hat was leaving the station when I was there. He was oblivious to everybody and, such is the British way, everybody was oblivious of him.

The splendour never lets up. Turnpike Lane is blessed with a mammoth tower that allows light to penetrate far into the ticket hall.

While Manor House is perhaps most notable for boasting no fewer than nine entrances, encouraging you to believe it is entirely below street level:

Named after nearby pub, it was at one point slated for transfer to the Victoria Line. Instead it stayed put and remains, depending on which way you're heading, either the first or last in a chain of overground Underground gems.

Quite simply, to view and visit them is to raise not just your spirits, but your belief in people's ability to fashion miracles out of the mundane.

Metropolitan Line: Harrow-on-the-Hill - Uxbridge

2007-10-31T20:26:00.001Z

This one, final branch of the Metropolitan spools out through a chain of pointedly well-kept, purposefully low-key settlements and suburbs.

All of the stations, apart from the terminus, were pretty much deserted when I passed this way. It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and dusk was creeping in. Nobody seemed much gripped by an enthusiasm to travel anywhere local. Groups of teenagers were heading into London for the night; groups of shoppers were heading back home to Uxbridge. In-between, little happened.

This was the last stretch of the Metropolitan to be built, in 1904. Many of its stops weren't added for several years. One didn't materialise for almost two decades. The whole branch has a sparse, uncluttered feel. Nobody travels this way out of pleasure.

West Harrow didn't become a station until nearly 10 years after the line arrived. Unashamedly small, it feels almost apologetic for existing.

Nonetheless it can play host to the most spectacular of sunsets.

Rayners Lane, its neighbour, is the point at which the Piccadilly line, heading up from Sudbury, joins the Metropolitan and shares its tracks all the way to Uxbridge.

When it opened the place was called Rayners Lane Halt, and served a few scattered village cottages and little else. Harrow Garden Village slowly washed up around it, and the station was finally remade in the 1930s by Charles Holden, whose buildings I've met before, and who made sure to stamp his signature motifs - the flat roof, the geometric shapes, the glass ticket hall - here as elsewhere.

By necessity it's a sprawling place, but not especially bustling, the trains shunting to and fro at their own pace with little sense of wanting to go anywhere. Well, to go anywhere fast. The sun was sinking low when I stopped off, casting the whole place into deep, sentimental shadow.

Eastcote is also Charles Holden's handiwork, bordered, as seems so often to be the case along this line, by tiny antiquated-looking businesses and musty corner shops that nobody goes in.

Ruislip Manor is the same, albeit lacking the grandeur its name implies.

Ruislip was, for a time, the only stop between Harrow and Uxbridge and has, perhaps understandably, more of the look and feel of a proper branch line station than its predecessors:

Ickenham was the next to open in chronological terms, but you wouldn't think it surveying its dismal structure today. The building was completely demolished and rebuilt in the 1970s. It's surely one of the grottiest and most unwelcoming edifices on the whole Metropolitan line.

Except for the platforms, that is:

Hillingdon was the last stop to be added to this branch of the line and therefore the last new station to be added to the Metropolitan in its entirety.

It spent two decades loitering under the name of Hillingdon (Swakeleys), and is still referred to as such on signs on the platforms. Its present condition, though, is far removed from its antecedent, and literally so. In 1992 an entirely new version of Hillingdon station was opened, south of the original, to enable the A40 to be expanded and re-routed. As such you can now stand on the platform and, rather eerily, watch one of London's major arterial roads rumble beneath you. It's a fantastically designed place, full of gleaming corridors and giant walkways that won it the title of Underground Station of the Year 1992, but which seem utterly at odds with its location out in the middle of nowhere, hard to reach, and next to a dual carriageway.

Finally, then, to Uxbridge, where the Metropolitan came to rest on 4th July 1904, a little way to the north of where the station is today. Its present form is another Holden creation, topped off by a pair of sculptures over the entrance depicting giant mechanical wheels with leaf springs.

It's a cavernous, rather impressive place, totally at odds with its immediate surroundings - Uxbridge's noisy, ramshackle shopping precinct - and, with its stained glass and canopy roof, seems to have arrived straight from another age.

And that was it. The end of the Metropolitan line. No more tiny branches to investigate, no more dead ends to explore, no more Metro-land lingering over the horizon. It felt like an epic trek was concluding in, as usual, a profoundly underwhelming fashion. Uxbridge town centre, despite once being the setting for Press Gang - the best children's TV series ever - was no gold at the end of the rainbow. The value of this excursion had been the journey itself, not the arrival at a destination. All change, please. All change.

Metropolitan Line: Moor Park - Amersham

2007-10-13T14:16:00.002+01:00

This stretch of the London Underground, being neither in London nor underground, exists in a world of its own.

It bears none of the symbols of the rest of the network: crowded carriages, gruff commuters, regular services, and mile upon mile of darkness. Instead it operates at a pace and in a manner entirely divorced from its parent.

Trains are infrequent. Carriages are almost empty. You can sit in a station for ages, entirely at the whim of whoever is - or isn't - at the controls. And you pass through landscape so beautiful and undisturbed as to suggest you aren't so much in a different county but a different country.

North of Moor Park the line divides yet again, with one branch curling off towards Watford. To ride this service is like taking a Sunday afternoon excursion along a miniature railway. You pass through fields and forest, with trees bending right over the line to form a dense tunnel of foliage. I saw foxes, hares and squirrels alongside the track. It really is as far removed from any notion of an Underground railway as it's possible to get. Here's a photo of the line I took from a bridge outside Croxley station:

The Metropolitan reached here in 1925. Initially the station was named after the village: Croxley Green, a charming place and thoroughly, unashamedly, rural. It reverted to its present title after the Second World War.

The Herfordshire countryside intrudes right onto the platforms:

After Croxley it's but a few miles and minutes to Watford, though the station, such as it is, is no way a direct link to the town. It sits far out on the edge of the suburbs and resembles, much like Mill Hill East, a terminus by default. Originally the line was to have continued into the town centre, and recently plans have been revived to try and achieve just that. For the time being, though, it's a curious cul-de-sac into an unlikely port in the middle of nowhere.

If you take the other branch from Moor Park you're following mainline services towards Buckinghamshire. As late as 1961, Rickmansworth station was the point at which Metropolitan line trains bound for London switched from steam to electric locomotives. Up until then, if you wanted to travel north of here you'd find yourself being decoupled from your swish diesel service to a wheezing, hissing steam engine hailing from the back end of 19th century. Electrification of the line was seen as less of a priority, clearly, in this backwater of the Underground.

Rickmansworth, like many of its neighbours, seems to pride itself on its horticultural exhibitionism, and so it should:

Chorleywood, meanwhile...

...is even more at one with nature:

By now I was passing through stations that felt untouched for over 100 years, where the arrival of a train seemed almost an inconvenience, disturbing the tranquil inertia and unapologetic calm.

Chalfont and Latimer opened in 1889 to serve the numerous similarly-named, quaintly-titled Chiltern outcrops of Chalfont St Giles, Chalfont St Peter and Little Chalfont. Entering the station was like going through the door of a village hall.

Here the line divides yet another time, offering a choice of destinations: Chesham or Amersham. Chesham is a dead end, served during the day by a desultory four-carriage train that goes back and forth, back and forth every half hour or so. It's possibly the least integrated example of public transport on the whole network. The train leaves when it feels like it and arrives likewise. I sat on it in Chalfont and Latimer for 25 minutes before it moved an inch.

Chesham itself, opened in 1889, is a real end of the line place. It has the longest distance between adjacent stops on the entire London Underground, and is the most westerly station there is.

Unmanned, somewhat ill-kept and not a place to want to linger, its only appeal - when I was there - was its view across the Chess valley towards the rest of Buckinghamshire.

Its neighbour, Amersham, is the resting place of all through-services on the Metropolitan. By dint of being on a mainline route it's nowhere near as disheartening as Chesham, but you're still at the mercies of the system as to when the next London-bound train will be leaving. When I was there, campaigners were handing out leaflets to try and stop the planned closure of the ticket office.

I might have had more sympathy for them had they not made the central point of their argument the rather fusty claim that the Oyster card was "complicated". It's nothing of the sort!

As John Betjeman took great trouble to point out, the Metropolitan didn't always end here. Originally services continued, on to Great Missenden, Wendover, Stoke Mandeville and Aylesbury (up to 1961), and also beyond, even further into Buckinghamshire, to Waddesdon Manor, Quainton Road, Granborough Road, Winslow Road, and Verney Junction (up to 1936).

The latter was conceived by captains of industry to be one of the great interchanges of the country, on a par with Crewe or Clapham, with trains from the north joining the Metropolitan to rush all the way down to London, through the city, onto the coast and, spectacularly, under the sea to France.

Such ambition seems preposterous nowadays, at a time when it takes almost 20 years to merely get agreement to build a single new railway to run from the west of the capital to the east. But at least those engineers and planners had the inclination to dream.

They also had the foresight and willpower to extend the Metropolitan deep, deep into the shires outside London, thereby allowing the city's residents and workers an ongoing chance to escape into the restorative meadows of Metro-land.

Metropolitan Line: Harrow-on-the-Hill - Moor Park

2007-10-06T13:06:00.001+01:00

There are two ways north out of Harrow on the Metropolitan, and both - thankfully - quickly shake off the dour atmosphere of the station and its surrounding area.

One route spirals towards Uxbridge; the other strikes out for Hertfordshire and, ultimately, Buckinghamshire. I was now travelling through a part of the Underground network that had always, by virtue of its distance from the city centre, seemed to me to have an air of otherworldliness.

What were all those stations doing so far from central London, in travelcard zones that were so remote they needed not numbers but letters? Why did the line have so many branches and peculiar offshoots? What kind of tiny places were these, joined artificially to the likes of the swaggering Baker Street and Kings Cross?

Rattling towards the Hertfordshire border in a carriage of ever-diminishing passengers, the first stop is North Harrow. There's a tangible difference in the air between this station and its predecessor, effectively summed up by the way there's a door out of the booking hall directly into a coffee shop. There's also a wonderfully parochial shop next door (Soles And Heels), which is part-ironmonger, part-shoemaker, and which looks like it's been there for 60 years.

When the Metropolitan first passed this way in 1885, there was no reason for trains to stop here because - as with other stations further down the line - there was nothing to stop for. It wasn't until 1915 that passengers could get on and off, presumably to have a cup of tea or a get a key cut.

A feeling of staid, unruffled suburbia intensifies at Pinner.

The trains did stop here as early as 1885, but only to attend to folk dwelling in the tiny village and surrounding farmland. The very name Pinner seems to embody a certain, well, frame of mind or attitude to life. It's a place where cosy primetime sitcoms take place. It's a place from where people write letters to broadsheet newspapers. It's a place where people settle, rather than simply somewhere to live. This is the view from the station bridge back towards Harrow (the church spire is on the horizon):

Northwood Hills didn't open until 1933. The titular greenery can be seen in the distance, disclosing the fact that the area isn't actually on a hill at all. There were two old women waiting by this entrance, watching me with piqued curiosity and discussing - inevitably - the weather.

Northwood station, meanwhile, is another of the 1887 vintage and currently covered in scaffolding. When I was there it was also full of schoolkids on their way home, eyeing me suspiciously. This bloke, though, didn't seem to care what I was doing.

Pulling into Moor Park you're finally out of Greater London, into Hertfordshire and more or less on a regional branch line rather than an urban public transport system.

It's a lovely station, reeking of days gone by, full of brown colours and old oak panelling, and originally built purely to serve patrons of the local golf club. Indeed, its original name was Sandy Lodge. Standing on its platforms, surrounded by trees on all sides, a few buildings in the distance, peace and quiet everywhere, it's possible to believe you're hundreds of miles away from London and fully ready to hear the sound of a steam engine in the distance.

But this still isn't the end of the Metropolitan line.

Metropolitan Line: Baker Street - Harrow-on-the-Hill

2007-09-29T11:26:00.001+01:00

Leaving Baker Street on a Metropolitan Line train heading north feels like embarking on an excursion rather than hopping onto local public transport.

Your final destination isn't just in another London borough, it's in another county. Miles and miles and a multitude of stations lie ahead. It takes a while to forget about the city, though; there's a dingyness and brow-beaten air to this section of the line, a sense of it not belonging to anyone or anything, of being stubbornly tolerated by the suburbs and positively shunned by the provinces.

Perhaps part of it is down to the way the present-day service avoids most of the intervening stations between Baker Street and Harrow-on-the-Hill, keeping its head down and charging on regardless towards Metro-land. You're not encouraged to linger. You're not advised to admire.

It wasn't always this way. The line as remembered by John Betjeman didn't, for instance, run non-stop from Baker Street to Finchley Road, as now; it made three intervening stops, at stations long gone: Lord's, Marlborough Road and Swiss Cottage.

All were opened in 1868 as part of the first extension to the original Metropolitan Railway, and all were summarily closed when a second set of tunnels were built nearby and two new stations - St John's Wood and a different Swiss Cottage - opened up on the Bakerloo line (now the Jubilee).

You can still see, I think, part of Marlborough Road station from the carriage windows as you pass. Betjeman visited the ruins for his Metro-land pilgrimage, noting pointedly how the booking hall had become an Angus Steakhouse.

The previous Swiss Cottage was also the terminus of the Metropolitan line for a while, while owners, investors and politicians dithered over whether to take the plunge and turn the Underground into a fully-fledged network. After all, there wasn't much London left in the direction the line seemed to be heading.

Ultimately they went for it, taken with the notion to create London around the Metropolitan Railway rather than vice versa. Hence the huge urban sprawl towards Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, through what was once Middlesex, beginning north of Finchley Road.

When I was here before I'd just travelled down the Jubilee Line through a number of stations once part of the Metropolitan's domain, including West Hampstead (opened, like Finchley Road, in 1879), Kilburn and Willesden Green (1880) and Neasden (1880). Today the Metropolitan doesn't stop at any of these, rushing past on a set of tracks built alongside the others, spiriting you hastily towards Wembley Park.

Betjeman venerated this stretch of the railway, revelling in the contrasting character of the suburban villas of St John's Wood and Neasden, "home of the gnome and the average citizen", typified for him by an encounter with the affably eccentric ornithologist Eric Simms. There's little variety nowadays. Wembley Park, despite its international appellation and hugely impressive station, feels even less part of Betjeman's world now the stadium has been completely rebuilt. The surrounding area seems hugely undistinguised.

Thankfully green spaces being to poke through as you get towards Preston Road. Apparently this station has a reputation for horticultural displays. It's even won various awards. Goldfish used to live in ponds on the platforms. Sadly there wasn't much evidence of anything when I passed through.

This stretch of the Metropolitan was laid in such a rush to reach Harrow that no station materialised in the vicinity for almost 20 years. And then it was only to serve the local clay pigeon shooting site for the 1908 Olympic Games.

The trend towards openness and fresh air continues when you reach Northwick Park, a station so discreet it looks like someone's garage.

When you're waiting on the platform, with the spire of Harrow church in the distance, you do feel like you've finally put the grime of central London behind you and are shaking off the mantle of inner-city malaise. Here's the view at sunset on a Saturday evening:

Again, the station arrived long after the railway, chiefly because there was nothing here except fields when the tracks were opened in 1880. Only in 1923 was there at last a place to board the trains, initially called Northwick Park and Kenton.

Harrow-on-the-Hill had been earmarked for a station from the off. It wasn't properly marketed as both a place to live and a place to learn until after the First World War, when the 'Metro-land' concept was born and the outer reaches of the Metropolitan began to be advertised as almost the new Jerusalem.

However its name is a huge misnomer: it's not on a hill at all, and isn't really in Harrow either, but the governors of Harrow School didn't want the line going too close to their precious playing fields, hence the station's location in Greenhill. In, it has to be said, a horrible area. The station is a real dump: grotty, cumbersome, unwelcoming, and caught up in an equally miserable shopping centre. It's certainly no enticement to come and settle in the presumably now less-than-rolling meadows of Middlesex, nor a romantic gateway to the mythical heart of Metro-land. All in all it was a thoroughly dispiriting end to this stage of the journey.

Were my initially somewhat idealistic expectations about the allure of the far-flung Metropolitan about to be dashed?

Metropolitan Line: Aldgate - Baker Street

2007-09-13T20:26:00.002+01:00

"Early Electric! With what radiant hope, Men formed this many-branched electrolier"

In terms of popular legend, cultural impact and poetic evocation, no other Underground line comes close to the Metropolitan. Admittedly a lot of this is thanks to John Betjeman, but even before his televised paean to 'Metro-land' in 1973 a mystique seems to have surrounded the line, one that had been pointedly cultivated for almost a century.

I guess some of it was due to it being simply the world's first underground railway. It naturally commanded influence upon all that followed. The Paris Metro, for instance, took its name from the line, its full title being Chemin de fer métropolitain. But there's also a unique character to the line that is, I reckon, still palpable today.

You sit in its trains and you're transported back decades, both in a literal sense - the carriages hail from the early 1960s - and an emotional one: from out of the depths of the city of London the line hauls and heaves its way to the daylight and open spaces of Buckinghamshire, through landscapes and environments dotted with relics of days gone by.

Feeling suitably stirred, I decided to travel the Metropolitan in a different manner to those lines I'd covered so far. It's the only major line to not cross London from one side to the other; rather it begins in its heart and heads one way and one way only: north west. Hence I thought I'd start in the centre of the city (the oldest part of the line) and voyage outwards, in part to mirror the line's expansion, and in part to shamelessly follow the same hallowed path as Betjeman.

That meant embarkation at the rather grim vista of Aldgate:

Outside might not be that preposessing, but inside things are very different. Aldgate's a right roustabout, to be honest, with trains beginning and terminating from all sorts of platforms, besides stopping off seemingly at whim en route around the Circle Line.

There's little apparent logic to what goes on here. You can sit in a carriage at Aldgate for 15 minutes and have no idea when or if you're likely to move, all the while watching trains steam in and out of an adjacent platform, oblivious to your plight. I know this, because it happened to me. The place must operate as a kind of "resting" point for Circle Line trains as well. Then there's the fact that everything and everyone has to wait if there's a Hammersmith and City line service about to join the tracks just north of the station.

Suffice to say if you're not in a rush, and you're fascinated by all this kind of thing, watching Aldgate at work is, I have to confess, quite thrilling. It's a grand station as well, dating back to 1876 when the original Metropolitan line began inching its way south from Farringdon. You descend to the open-air platforms via a string of capacious staircases, and then the fun begins.

It wasn't always the start/end of the Metropolitan, though; trains originally ran onwards along what is now the East London Line towards New Cross, while you could catch a service in the opposite direction running all the way to Richmond. Such was the scope of the original, swagger-esque, pre-London Transport Metropolitan.

Aldgate also has the distinction of playing a crucial role in the Sherlock Holmes story, The Bruce Partington Plans. Holmes uses his knowledge of the points system north of the station - naturally - to deduce, among other things, a particular dead body hadn't been pushed from a carriage but had fallen from the roof. Comical confusion, vexatious connections, a whiff of murder: is there nothing this station can't do?!

Liverpool Street opened as Bishopsgate in 1875, later renamed along with the new mainline terminus in 1909. There's precious little personality here; endless revamps and ongoing renovation have stripped the station of scant sense of history.

Both Moorgate and its neighbour, Barbican, date back to 1865 and were the first 'new' stations to be added to the original Metropolitan service. I'd already visited Moorgate when travelling along the Bank branch of the Northern Line.

Barbican, by contrast, was something of a revelation. Squashed in amongst the titular estate, it has a somewhat imposing entrance...

...which gives way to a cavernous interior open to the skies and blessed with enough light to allow everywhere to bathe in a rather wistful early evening sunset:

You won't find Barbican on old maps of the Underground; it originally went under the name Aldersgate Street, later shortened to simply Aldersgate. There are no traces of this former moniker to be found today, though - unlike the next station along the line, Farringdon:

Here's where you venture furthest back through time. It was near here, on 9th January 1863, that the terminus of the original Metropolitan Railway was opened. Farringdon Street, a short distance from present-day Farringdon, was one end of line that ran from Bishops Road (near Paddington), a distance of four miles.

Conceived as a means of linking London's various north-serving mainline stations, and a way of alleviating road congestion, the world's first underground was, history implies, a shambolic yet dignified affair prone to smog, flooding, and slander. Yet almost immediately there was talk of expansion, and after just two years the station was moved to its present location when the Metropolitan opened its extension to Moorgate. It was then temporarily renamed Farringdon and High Holborn in 1922, a name that is still emblazoned across its stirring exterior:

To leave Farringdon on a train heading west is to travel through tunnels built almost 150 years ago.

Next, King's Cross St Pancras - again:

The Metropolitan platforms were moved in 1941 to make the business of changing lines easier; now, in 2007, the whole station is still being tinkered with to achieve much the same ends.

Euston Square, the interchange-with-Euston-that-isn't, opened as Gower Street. It's a poky, horrible station that now lives entirely below ground. The sooner they build that connecting tunnel with Euston mainline station the better.

Great Portland Street, conversely, is represented by an impressive standalone building into which you cheerily pass and, after navigating some stairs, find yourself standing on platforms that look and feel straight from the late 19th century.

Unlike deep-level Underground lines, the Metropolitan shares with the Circle, District and Hammersmith and City a penchant for platforms either side of one broad stretch of railway (as opposed to each track - and therefore each platform - using a different tunnel). This creates a sequence of vast cave-like stations, reeking with an atmosphere that's sometimes magical, sometimes miserable.

Yet another latterly renamed station, Great Portland Street was opened as Portland Road.

And so, once more, to Baker Street.

You don't pass through the original Metropolitan line platforms here either; they're now used by the Circle and Hammersmith and City lines. When the first westward Metropolitan extension was built to Swiss Cottage in 1868, the present day platforms were added. And it's from these that I was to begin my journey into Metro-land.

Jubilee Line: London Bridge - Stratford

2007-08-26T19:42:00.002+01:00

Just as with previous legs, this last section of the Jubilee Line boasts its unique class of passengers.

There are two discernable groups: the suits, who once upon a time would have been called yuppies, who work either at London Bridge or on the Isle of Dogs; and the locals who live around West Ham and Stratford. There are no tourists on this part of the Jubilee. You don't venture this far down the line if you're sightseeing, for there are no sights to see. Indeed, the only ostensible tourist attraction closed to regular visitors at the end of 2000: the Millennium Dome, for which North Greenwich station was exclusively built.

So you're faced with a sequence of stations serving people coming to and from work and then, beyond Canary Wharf, to and from home. Nobody hangs around this part of the Jubilee Line. Its stations are the newest on the whole network, but the least dwelt in. You use this stretch of the line to get somewhere else; the stations themselves sit in desolate areas of land largely devoid of anything whatsoever bar roads leading to other places far away.

Conversely, you also get some of the most extravagantly-designed buildings of the whole Underground, and in the shape of Canary Wharf the most specatular of them all. It seems this was always the intention, to bedeck the Jubilee Line extension with the finest efforts of Britain's finest contemporary architects. Pity nobody gets to see them other than those in a hurry to get somewhere else.

After the sprawling interchange of London Bridge you come to the compact and, it has to be said, rather pointless Bermondsey. Built seemingly for the sake of it to break the journey between London Bridge and Canada Water, it was apparently meant to have a multi-storey office block on top, but looks perfectly fine without.

Opened on 17th September 1999 it shares an endearing trait with most of its Extension brothers in letting natural light spiral right down almost to the platform. There are also traces of Westminster-esque futuristic caverns and big blocks of concrete sitting around to represent, well, big blocks of concrete sitting around.

Canada Water is a far more swaggering affair. Opened the same day as Bermondsey, it's basically a giant glass cylinder stuck in the ground, around which trail staircases and elevators spiralling you down and down to the trains below. At the bottom the space allotted to the platforms is so big it could fit one of the Canary Wharf skyscrapes on its side.

This endless size and splendour is all very well, but I have to admit it does make the actual business of getting to the precise place where you can board a train really really convoluted. No chance of anyone dashing for a last minute connection here; it must take at least five minutes to go from entrance to platform. There's an interchange here with the East London Line, due to close by Christmas.

Memo: must do East London Line before the end of the year.

The cathedral-like Canary Wharf was opened by by Ken Livingstone setting an escalator in motion on 17th September 1999. Norman Foster is the man responsible for what is unarguably the mightiest Underground station of them all. I think it's the size of at least one football pitch.

Squatting right between the tallest tower blocks in the land, the descent to the station floor is breathtaking in itself: a majestic escalator ride that opens up the entire edifice before your eyes.

Once again it takes ages to actually get to the platform. But again, such is the trade off between design brilliance and passenger convenience. Its biggest defect is its claim to be an interchange. In fact it takes ages to schlep all the way to the "connecting" Docklands Light Railway - ironic given Canary Wharf was the sole reason the Jubilee Line extension ended up unfurling the way it did. At one point investors demanded the entire Underground Map be changed to put Canary Wharf at the centre. Yup, you read that right.

North Greenwich, as already mentioned, was built solely for the Dome. When the Dome closed, the station had no point. Nowadays it has a bit of traffic but only when something is happening at the re-named O2 Arena. The evening I was there The Rolling Stones were playing and the place was thronging with middle age men looking discomfited in denim jackets and ill-fitting T-shirts. It's yet another massive construction, obviously conceived when it was thought millions would be streaming to and from the Dome, but yet again gets away with it by virtue of an imaginative design, decked out in blue tiles and loads of columns.

By now you've lost all traces of business travellers and local residents take over. There's been some kind of station on the site of Canning Town since 1846, but the Jubilee Line arrived on 14th May 1999, forming an intersection with the Docklands Light Railway and the overground North London Line. It's a brutal construction slap bang in the middle of a messy interchange of roads and bus routes. There's no reason whatsoever to linger here, and precious little compulsion either.

West Ham station, meanwhile, was completely done up as part of the Jubilee Line extension; it's a somehow a much more welcoming interchange than its predecessor, maybe because it's actually close to something of obvious relevance (a residential house or two) and doesn't involve walking miles to reach a platform.

But for all its capacity, West Ham is still utterly dwarfed by Stratford, the end of the Jubilee Line and a titanic meeting of all sorts of different services and connections. I'll talk more about its origins and its glittering future when I'm travelling the Central Line.

For the time being, Stratford's elephantine (I'm running out of different adjectives to describe "big") building gobbles up bits of platform and brickwork dating back to 1839, and is a fittingly bombastic conclusion to a voyage along one of the most ostentatious portions of Underground to be found.

Jubilee Line: Baker Street - London Bridge

2007-08-08T17:31:00.002+01:00

The Jubilee Line must hold a record for taking the longest span of years to complete. It's taken over a century to reach its current state, and to travel along it from one end to the other is to pass through both some of the oldest and newest stations on the entire network.

South of Baker Street is where you leap forward several decades, and where the line becomes far more functional. Between here and London Bridge it's interchanges all the way, apart from Southwark, a station invented purely to serve Waterloo East mainline station and which isn't in Southwark at all.

You get a different kind of passenger on this stretch of the line: no-nonsense, hurried and often weighed down by numerous tourist-esque accoutrements. There's no quicker way of getting from the north west of London to the south east, but it's usually a grim, crowded and hassled experience.

The tunnels south of Baker Street were built in the mid-1970s as part of an extension to what was to have been called the Fleet Line. The plan was to have dug all the way to Charing Cross and then on along Fleet Street to stations at Aldwych, Ludgate Circus, Cannon Street, Fenchurch Street, St Katharine Docks, Wapping and then under the River Thames to New Cross, terminating at Lewisham.

Inevitably the money ran out. The extension was only built up to Charing Cross, which is where the now-renamed Jubilee Line terminated upon opening officially on 1st May 1979.

An alternative plan was then drawn up to extend it parallel with the River Thames, on from Wapping to Thamesmead via Surrey Docks North, Canary Wharf, North Greenwich, Custom House, Silvertown, Woolwich Arsenal and ultimately to Thamesmead. This too, however, was binned and for ages it looked like the Jubilee would run up to Charing Cross and no further.

Of course, the new Charing Cross interchange was itself something of a mess, constituting bits of the old Trafalgar Square and Strand stations (on the Bakerloo and Northern lines respectively), a reconfiguration that had also involved renaming the existing Charing Cross station on the District and Circle lines as Embankment.

All that convoluted and costly revamping, however, got junked completely in the 1990s when the extension finally got underway - not along Fleet Street, but, at the behest of big business in Docklands, south via Waterloo and London Bridge then east to Canary Wharf. More on that later.

What happens today is that the Jubilee Line (renamed from Fleet in 1977) travels to Bond Street and Green Park as before, then swerves away from its original course to hit Westminster. In fact if you watch from the carriage window you can clearly see the point at which the old, now-disused tunnel peels off to Charing Cross.

Bond Street is a grim place above ground, lurking underneath an unremarkable shopping centre at one of the busiest points on Oxford Street.

Virtually no elements of the original 1900 Central Line station survive. Its Jubilee Line platforms, though, have a brusque, tidy air about them; not qualities you can apply to Green Park, which seems to have been designed to induce people to want to exit its premises as soon as possible:

Both of these Jubilee interchanges were opened on 1st May 1979, as was the original terminus, which then closed on November 19th 1999.

I remember well scores of newspaper headlines bemoaning the cost of and delay in the Jubilee Line extension. There was a particular palaver surrounding the new Westminster interchange, no doubt inspired by it being in parliament's back yard and the fact it was the last of the new stations to open to the public (22nd December 1999).

But it was worth the wait, for Westminster station turned out to be an absolutely awe-inspiring creation. It is without doubt one of the best stations on the entire network. Every time I enter it my breath is taken away. The scale, the design, the sheer ambition: it's incredible.

Its construction was a feat of marvel itself. Each of the new stations on the extension was meant to be an architectural wonder, and was contracted out to different designers. Those responsible for Westminster, Michael Hopkins & Partners, began by digging a giant 39-metre hole underneath the existing station to house all the escalators, lifts and platforms - the deepest-ever excavation in central London.

Then they faced the difficulty of constructing the station around the Circle and District line tracks, which had to be kept in operation throughout. To fit in with the design, these tracks had to be lowered by 300 millimetres - something achieved a handful of millimetres at a time during the few hours each night that the Underground was closed.

At the same time, the towering Portcullis House directly above the station was being built. For a few years that patch of ground by Westminster Bridge and opposite the Palace of Westminster was a shocking eyesore - but, again, it was all worth it.

The station's design won a 2001 Royal Institute of British Architects award, and anyone with unblinkered eyes will realise why. Massive concrete beams and columns criss-cross the interior, rising up and below stainless steel walkways, staircases and elevators. It feels like you're walking on the set of a futuristic TV show, but one made in the 1960s; in other words, an idealisation of the 21st century from a 20th century viewpoint. Utter genius.

From here on things can only be something of an anti-climax. The interchange at Waterloo, which opened on 24th September 24 1999, is notable only for its rather neat moving walkway helping to shorten the massive distance between the Jubilee and Bakerloo/Northern line platforms. Otherwise the gleaming silver-panelling and metallic walkways are kind of overshadowed by the sprawling, confusing layout. There's no trace of any of this, ironically, above ground:

You get a complete change from classical to modern when you reach Southwark, which opened on 20th November 1999, and which is currently the newest station on the whole network.

As mentioned above, it suffers from not really having a point to its existence, but makes up for it by virtue of its compact yet striking layout. Designed by Richard MacCormac of MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, it's a maze-like structure weaving in and out of the Victorian railway viaduct carrying trains from Waterloo East and Charing Cross railway station across the Thames.

As such Southwark station boasts not one but two concourses at different levels. The first has the inspired touch of a glass roof allowing natural light to penetrate right down into its heart. There's also a superfluous yet stunning glass wall 40 metres long, consisting of 660 specially cut pieces of blue glass, designed by the artist Alexander Beleschenko.

Then you have to go down escalators to reach the platform-level concourse, itself on two levels, with features like unpolished steel panels and metal beacons - apparently, according to MacCormac, inspired by the designs of the 19th century Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

Suffice to say during rush hour there's barely time to notice let alone appreciate any of this.

Finally, on this leg, to London Bridge, the Jubilee Line part of which opened 7th October 1999.

Once again, major reconstruction work was needed to incorporate the new line and, once again, much congestion of the surrounding streets was the result. The volume of passengers now using the Jubilee as a means of leaving this part of London, however, makes you wonder what conditions were like before the line passed this way.

Oh, and apparently during excavations to create the new booking hall, numerous Roman remains were found. Some of these are supposed to be on display somewhere in the station. I've never seen them. Perhaps that's because I'm always too distracted by all those food stalls offering fresh salads and pastries. The commuters' menace, I tells you!

Jubilee Line: Willesden Green - Baker Street

2007-08-01T20:44:00.002+01:00

South of Willesden Green there are still a few stations above ground before the Jubilee Line dives into darkness, and all of them - like Dollis Hill, Neasden and Wembley Park before - have twin sets of tracks running through.

On the outside, not served by platforms, are those used by battered, dirty Metropolitan Line trains operating what is dubiously described as a "fast" service to Finchley Road.

On the inside scuttle the smaller Jubilee Line trains with their purring engines and well-scrubbed carriages. All the stations are pretty close together, though, especially West Hampstead and Finchley Road. On the day I did this part of the journey it was actually quicker to walk between both stations given how, for some reason, the frequency of trains had suddenly slowed to one every 10 minutes.

Anyway, all the way down to Baker Street you're passing along the route, if not necessarily the same tracks, as that first etched by the Metropolitan Line in the 1870s, which then became the Bakerloo in 1939, and which ended up the Jubilee in 1979.

There's little to see of this pensionable heritage nowadays, thanks both to refurbishment and expediency. Kilburn, for instance, got completely rebuilt after the Second World War, in the process having its name contracted from Kilburn and Brondesbury.

It's somewhat overshadowed by the A5 passing overhead, which means that when you leave the station you kind of feel you haven't really emerged into daylight - despite having travelled in it to and from the station.

West Hampstead is a far more appealing prospect, lurking discreetly on a bridge above the line itself. As Laura pointed out in her comments on the last blog, some thoughtful renovation has been going on. Not that I'd bet most people using the station have noticed, but, like a local library or Antiques Roadshow, it's reassuring to know it's there.

Finchley Road has one of the best interchanges on the whole Underground. You can step off a Jubilee Line carriage and walk three paces - at most - to climb aboard a Metropolitan Line train. As such the station has a sort of compact, bustling feel a bit like a small ferry terminal or airport; the fact it's right on the edge of the first tunnel on the Jubilee Line compounds the air of departure and anticipation.

If you're heading south it's the last place to gasp a few breaths of fresh air before plunging underground. Equally when you're heading the north on an especially crowded and stuffy train, arriving at Finchley Road can, if you're feeling suitably emotional, feel akin to reaching the promised land. Albeit with fusty shopping arcades at the exit and a squawking dual carriageway alongside.

Finchley Road is where the Jubilee Line waves goodbye to its true Metropolitan ancestry. In the 1930s, to ease congestion on the line, a second set of tunnels were dug; but unlike the existing, just-below-the-surface ones (or 'cut and cover' tunnels to give them their official name, because they were cut into the ground then covered up), these were bored deep.

Hence the stations between here and Baker Street - Swiss Cottage and St John's Wood - lie a long way under the earth, and a long way from the original Metropolitan tracks. When the new route was opened in 1939, so were the two new stations, and the whole line all the way up to Stanmore became part of the Bakerloo.

At the same time, two old stations closed: Lord's and Marlborough Road, which I'll talk more about when covering the Metropolitan Line. Their de facto replacements have, I'd argue, two of the most evocative names on the whole network. Swiss Cottage and St John's Wood have also had much of their 1930s design restored or enhanced, notably those magical escalator uplighters which I last saw on the Morden branch of the Northern Line.

Outside Swiss Cottage there's this curious brick tower, the only element of the station that's above ground:

St John's Wood is more substantial and memorable: a sleek circular building that's retained - or recovered - much of its original elegance, despite the ugly block of flats above. I waited ages to take this photo because I wanted to get people in it; I love the way the woman appears oblivious to what looks like a deliberately exuberant pose.

The station itself was originally going to be called Acacia Road, or simply Acacia, thanks to being on the corner of the eponymous street. Granted it would have made for something even more evocative than St John's Wood, but then you wouldn't have been able to apply the latterday ubiquitous rule of the station being the only one on the Underground not to contain any letters in the word MACKEREL.

Finally to Baker Street, one of the stations on the very first underground line, indeed one of the stations on the very first underground line in the whole world, opened in 1863.

With ten different platforms it's the most sprawling station on the network. The story of its development belongs more to the story of the development of its long-forgotten parent, the Metropolitan Railway. Rising above the entrance, however, you can still see the essence of that company's breathless ambition and extraordinary imagination in the shape of Chiltern Court, designed by Charles Clark, opened by the Metropolitan in 1929, and originally consisting of half a million square feet of shops and luxury flats, some of which were home to, at one time, the likes of Arnold Bennett and HG Wells.

It's also the point at which the Jubilee Line bids farewell to the old, and plunges unblinking into the new.

Jubilee Line: Stanmore - Willesden Green

2007-07-17T22:03:00.001+01:00

Here's a confession: I really like the Jubilee Line.

I like the way its trains make a sleek, gentle revving sound when they leave the platform, and a weirdly becalming sighing noise when they pull to a stop. I like the fact the carriages look and feel really new, because they are (dating from 1996), unlike the Northern Line carriages which look and feel really rank, despite also dating from 1996.

I like the line's colour: silver. I like the name, because it refers to an event rather than a place. And I like its implausible route, being shaped by expediency and happenstance and illogic, which leads to it binding together the most disparate of places: genteel suburbs, hectic interchanges, unbecoming backwaters, forgotten tourist attractions and above all loads and loads of stations that used to belong to someone else.

The line kicks off with a whole slew of these which, even more appealingly, are all above ground. After the dungeon-esque horrors of the Victoria Line, this was a real relief.

Indeed, this entire first leg of my journey was in the open air - and entirely through stations that were once the property of not one, but two different owners.

The whole of the Jubilee Line north of Baker Street was once part of the Bakerloo Line, up until 1979 when the Jubilee was officially "born". But before the Bakerloo took up residency from 1939, it was the run as part of the Metropolitan Line. Hence when you travel south from Stanmore, you're running along tracks that have masqueraded under more different names than anywhere else on the Underground network.

It starts off as a very pleasant excursion through pure suburbia. Until you get to Wembley Park there's no real urban sprawl in sight. Stanmore itself was built as a terminus and has stayed that way ever since, replete with the eccentricity of having a ticket office downstairs at platform level and the booking hall upstairs at street level, where you can find a bank of old fashioned public telephones that nobody uses.

They're in the process of adding a third platform to the station. As it is, it's a sprawling, spacious terminus with that slightly giddy feeling of being on the edge of nowhere. It's very well kept, though, as is its neighbour, Canons Park.

This opened like its predecessor in 1932, but under the rather fussy name of Canons Park (Edgware).

At least this title did have some local resonance; the next one down the line, Queensbury, wasn't named after anything at all, conceived merely as complement its own neighbouring station, Kingsbury. It does, however, boast this rather wonderful construction just outside its main entrance:

What it's there for I've no idea, but it does look ace. Here's a long line of people, all of whom watched me take the above photo before finding themselves the stars of this one:

Queensbury was clearly an add-on to the existing line, opening two years later than all the stations north of Wembley Park. Indeed, Kingsbury feels a far more established and logical presence, sitting on a main road yet with platforms cleverly sunk below large verges covered in woodland.

Only when you get to Wembley Park does the Jubilee Line start to feel suitably regal. For here, surely, is one of the greatest stations on the entire network. Wembley Park is magnificent: a cavernous, palatial-esque playground with extraordinary flights of steps to rival any cathedral.

To arrive here ahead of a crucial football match must be one of the most thrilling feelings in the world. There's a stunning view upon exiting of the new Wembley Stadium arch. It really is the perfect introduction to a couple of hours in the company of several hundred thousand people watching a national team forget how to win.

The station dates back to 1893, but its current incarnation only opened last year, in a ceremony blessed by the presence of Ken Livingstone (naturally) and David Seaman (er...). Even more excitingly, mainline London to Aylesbury trains run *underneath* its platforms.

After all that, Neasden can only be an anti-climax. Which it is.

Opened in 1880, it was first called Kingsbury and Neasden, then - presumably due to local politics - Neasden and Kingsbury, then finally just plain Neasden in 1932. Immortalised, not to say bowdlerised, by a spoof Private Eye 7" single in 1962, it was given equally portentous canonisation by John Betjeman during his televised travels through Metro-Land, more of which another time. Today the place is sadly lacking in pomp or swagger; it's tatty, dirty and trite. Albeit with locals willing to stare straight into a camera lens.

On the day I was making this journey the next station, Dollis Hill, was closed for repairs. Or "planned engineering work", to use the official euphemism. Hence all I have to show here is this non-descript photo:

The station, singularly absent from this scene, hails from 1909.

And so to Willesden Green, another grand building but of an entirely different vintage to Wembley Park.

Opened in 1879, it was completely redesigned and rebuilt in 1925 by CW Clark, the Metropolitan Railway's chief architect. Much of his work remains, thankfully, intact, and quite rightly became a Grade 2 Listed Building in 2006.

Willesden Green I will forever associate with the one thing I don't like about the Jubilee Line: its tinny-voiced, strangulated-sounding in-carriage recorded announcer person, an elderly woman who mis-emphasises all her words and all in the poshest accent imaginable. "This train," she will cry, "terminates at WilllLLLLLLLEESSSSSDDDen Greeeeeeeeen". And so does this blog.

Victoria Line: Green Park - Brixton

2007-07-05T21:09:00.001+01:00

South of Green Park lies the commuter chicken run that is Victoria. Perhaps the best place to view Victoria is from as far away as possible, which conveniently enough is where this picture was taken, from a balcony on the fifth floor of the building where I work.

Any closer and you're likely to get caught up in the tide of 80 million travellers that rolls to and from the place every year. It's been an interchange with the Victoria Line since March 1969, and was the terminus until the Brixton section was fully completed in 1971.

Despite the grand entrance and commanding atmosphere, it's not a nice place, especially during the rush hour when various parts invariably get temporarily closed and great mobs of people are held by staff halfway down some steps or alongside the barriers or, worse of all, on the concourse of the mainline station.

This is ostensibly to prevent overcrowding, but can't help but contribute to the problem by swelling still further the already dense clusters of pugilistic punters. And sometimes the hold-ups can go on for a couple of hours. Electronic hooters and foghorns sound a siren whenever these kinds of operation are in progress, which fuels the hysteria even more.

Something is being done about this. Or rather, people are thinking about doing something about this to ensure an entirely new station is up and running by 2014. It's also the hottest stop on the Victoria Line by far: no mean feat when you consider the competition from its almost equally suffocating rivals. There's a big notice up by the escalators vowing that cooling systems are being 'tested'. The notice has been there for as long as I can remember.

Pimlico, by contrast, is about as timid as they come. It wasn't even part of the original Victoria Line, opening a year after everywhere else, as if the builders decided it wouldn't be missed and they'd come back to deal with it later. Moreover it's the only stop on the line which isn't an interchange. I like its unassuming nature. It sits in an office block that was entirely occupied, up to 2006, by the Office for National Statistics. Pimlico is the only station on the Underground without any letters of the word 'badger'.

It's quicker to walk to Vauxhall, the next station on the line, but then you'd miss out on the treat that greets passengers passing through the ticket hall: unashamed, unadultered classical music, pumped out at full volume through the tannoys. The audacity of this decision is its greatest asset.

I felt even more self-conscious than usual, however, taking this photo. There are security cameras all over the place, both inside and outside, for despite there being no above ground station at Vauxhall, it's right next door to MI6, itself surely one of the most self-conscious "secret" bases in the world.

By this point on the journey, the heat inside the train gets more bearable thanks to it being almost empty; few commuters seem to stray south of Vauxhall, and after you've been through Stockwell - which I've already visited - you're usually alone in your carriage.

Brixton, the terminus, was closed for a while last year while asbestos was removed. It's got a great exterior, comprising chiefly of a massive Underground logo, which is really what you want.

There's talk of extending the track further to Herne Hill, adding a new station as well as a proper loop so trains don't have to reverse before heading back up the line. It'd make sense, because then there'd be an southern interchange with Thameslink services to complement the northern one at King's Cross. Even were this to become the case, however, and even were all the rickety carriages replaced at the same time, I wouldn't be able to find it in my heart to like the Victoria Line until the day someone figured out how to turn the thermostat a degree or so below scalding.

Victoria Line: Finsbury Park - Green Park

2007-06-25T21:33:00.001+01:00

When I was growing up in the 1980s, my parents used to take me and my sister on trips to London to visit an old work friend of my mum. She lived in Highbury, hence her local Underground station was Highbury and Islington. It was for a very long time, after King's Cross St Pancras (where our train into London would terminate), the only Underground station I really knew. Even venturing one stop further north to Finsbury Park was a no-go.

As such I took lasting intricate mental pictures of Highbury and Islington, the kind you do when you're 9 or 10 years old, to the extent that when I revisited it for this journey, despite not having set foot in it for decades, I remembered the design and layout eerily well.

I have particularly vivid memories of being intrigued by the platform adjacent to the Victoria Line one, which we never used but of which I forever caught glimpses through connecting tunnels. This was, and still is, the old Northern City Line, about which I've talked when I visited Moorgate, and which back then was run by British Rail.

The fact it's adjacent to the Victoria Line platforms is testament to the logic applied to Highbury and Islington when the station was reconfigued to incorporate the Victoria Line. It's a brilliant interchange all round, really, with the mainline service on adjacent platforms to the Victoria Line both north and southbound, plus an easy link to the Silverlink North London Line, which this year will become - excitingly - the London Overground.

Anyway, the current entrance to Highbury and Islington hails from the opening of the Victoria Line in 1968 and has little merit:

The original 1872 station, however, still stands in all its splendour on the opposite side of the road:

At the time of writing, King's Cross St Pancras is even more of a mess than usual. Ironically the entrance to the Underground is one of the few bits that's actually fairly tidy.

Work has obviously picked up apace ahead of the fixed opening of St Pancras International in November, and now there's an even more tortuous route from the mainline station to the Underground. What there is to see of the renovated building, however, looks monumentally stunning.

Similar Herculean work is scheduled to begin at Euston soon, to construct a sensible and long-needed tunnel between it and the nearby Euston Square station, hence enabling a simple, if long, connection between the Victoria/Northern lines and the Circle/Metropolitan/Hammersmith & City lines.

Both of these stations, and the next - Warren Street - I've already visited on the Northern Line. As this blog goes on, more of these duplications will inevitably arise. I can't think of anything else to say about Warren Street except the new University College Hospital building opposite is superb.

Saturday afternoon outside Oxford Circus station is one of the worst places in the world.

It seems there was never not a time when this insidious interchange wasn't overcrowded, or in a state of renovation, ever since its opening in 1900. Intriguingly, during the expansion to accommodate the Victoria Line in the 1960s, a large bridge-like edifice was built over the Regent Street/Oxford Street junction, over which all traffic was diverted for five years. Despite being such an iconic and ostensibly flagship station, you take your life in your hands when you enter during the rush hour. Some of the corridors bear posters from the late 1980s.

Green Park is only marginally less busy, but gains points for boasting an acoustic guitar-wielding busker every weekday morning who plays, among other things, the theme from The Deer Hunter.

It was first opened in 1906, called Dover Street. The name was changed in 1933 when new entrances were added on the south side of Piccadilly, thereby allowing you to exit and be inside the titular park within seconds. All I can say is that this nearness to nature is a blessed relief when you're emerging, always hot and usually bothered, from the Victoria Line of a workday morning.

Victoria Line: Walthamstow Central - Finsbury Park

2007-06-20T17:21:00.001+01:00

Pertinent Truths about the Victoria Line:

- its trains don't have drivers - it is the only Underground line never to emerge above ground - it is the line with the highest proportion of interchanges (all stations bar one are connecting with something or other) - it was originally going to be called the Walvic Line - it is ridiculously, relentlessly, hot

This last point is the most obvious to the seasoned traveller and one-off visitor alike. During the summer a journey on a Victoria Line train, whether crowded or empty, is like stepping inside a mobile stove. Air quality is appalling. Air conditioning is non-existent. It's downright horrible at times. But even in winter the temperature is unseasonably high. In fact, I have never not left a Victoria Line train, regardless of the time of year, sweating and desperate for air.

The trains haven't been replaced since the line opened in 1968. Given their age the carriages' infrastructure is holding up well, but the decor is woefully uncomfortable. If you choose one of the inward facing pews, as opposed to the segmented seats, you invariably end up bouncing around like you're sitting on a trampoline, especially when your train hits top speed.

Which will happen often, given the line was designed to rush passengers as quickly as possible from the outskirts to the centre of the city. Hence the way it only takes six stations to get from one side of Zone 1 to the other.

All of these gripes might very well disappear when the 43 1967 vintage trains are replaced with a new fleet in 2009. In its day, however, the Victoria Line was a marvel: the first automatic (i.e. non-driven) railway in the world and much needed relief for the Piccadilly Line in carrying people from NE to SW London.

Top of the line is Walthamstow Central.

It all looks very impressive on the outside, as befits an entrance done up in 2006; inside, however, it seems bits of the station haven't been, well, finished. At all. The platform ceilings are still unpainted from when the place opened to the public on 1st September 1968. Worse is the fact there is no standby escalator to cope when the other two break down (a symptom all too common in Victoria Line stations north of King's Cross).

It's quite a cavernous place, though, as befits a terminus, and as usual there's the exciting dilemma facing the passenger of choosing the right platform from which a southbound train will leave first. Chances are you'll climb on one, then sit motionless for 10 minutes.

The top four northern-most Victoria Line stations all opened for business simultaneously. Blackhorse Road is blessed with a less than spectacular entrance:

but a rather striking visualisation of, well, its name:

Tottenham Hale mainline station was renamed from simply Tottenham when the Underground interchange arrived. I like the giant blue box.

Seven Sisters, meanwhile, was named after a septet of elms reportedly planted in the 1300s, and has the most ethnically diverse postcode in the European Union.

The ensuing section of the line is the longest between sequential stations in deep level tunnels on the whole network. The frazzled passenger ultimately emerges blinking into the grim lights of...

Finsbury Park. This station is a menace. Aside from the sensible alignment of Victoria and Piccadilly Line services (you change from one to the other by simply walking onto an adjacent platform), everything else about Finsbury Park is designed to hinder rather than help the traveller.

There are no escalators or lifts to reach the platforms; instead there's an endless, pitiless winding tunnel, along which punters ebb and flow, being buffeted, barged, jostled and, more often than not, robbed. It's very easy to get carried along with the tide of people and miss the turning onto your platform completely.

Moreover there are no ticket barriers at the station whatsoever. People surge in and out of Finsbury Park with no attempt at regulation or authorisation. Then there are the bolted-on exits to the mainline station, which itself is a conundrum of platforms, by virtue of having passed through numerous conflicting owners since opening in 1861. Finally there's not one but two sprawling bus stations outside.

It's not a place you'd want to linger long, but woe betide if you happen to get caught in a mob of people surging one way or the other. If you don't have your wits about you, you'll never end up where you want to go.

Northern Line: Kennington - Morden

2007-06-17T19:31:00.001+01:00

I'd hoped that, rather like what to me is the top end of the Northern Line, the bottom end would also be largely above ground and blessed by a sequence of personable, quiet suburban stations.

Instead it's entirely below ground save for 15 measly seconds' travelling time. For someone charged with the self-appointed task of hopping on and off trains in order to pop in and out of every station, the prospect of almost a dozen round trips on soot-lined escalators via almost a dozen dirt-blown warm-to-baking platforms was not a welcome one. I thought the reason why there are so few lines running south of the Thames was because of the poor composition of the earth - yet here was a line remaining stubbornly out of daylight until almost journey's end.

In fact if you count the Northern Line's submersion between Morden and East Finchley as a continuous excavation, you have one of the longest tunnels in the world: 17.25 miles. I'm still picking the black snot out of my nose now.

Anyway, at least those near-dozen soot-lined escalators almost wholly conform to this brilliantly preserved art deco style of lighting:

And it'd be churlish to not admit some of the most strikingly-ornate stations of - I suspect - the entire network can be found south of Kennington, courtesy of Charles Holden who designed every single one of the class of 1926 (Clapham South - Morden inclusive). Indeed, as you head south from Kennington you move through four decades of history, beginning in the 1890s and ending up between the wars. So it's not all bad. Plus it even rained while I was doing this stretch, meaning at least I was cool above ground.

Both Oval and Stockwell originally hailed from 1890 when they formed part of the old City & South London Railway. Oval's interior has long been tastefully decked out in the inevitable cricket murals, while outside a nearby fountain afforded the chance for some ill-advised experimental photography.

Stockwell was opened in 1890 by the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, but has since been totally rebuilt - several times. Originally it was the terminus for the world's first ever deep-level underground line, the City and South London Railway, which ran from King William Street (near Monument). It's now an interchange with the Victoria Line. Interchanges, I'm learning, are never that nice to look at from the outside. Still, it's another of those stations with a deep-level World War Two air-raid shelter underneath - the fourth I've met so far on my journey (after Belsize Park, Camden Town and Goodge Street). There are three more further south on the Northern Line - Clapham North, Clapham Common and Clapham South - with the eighth, and only non-Northern Line shelter, buried at Chancery Lane.

Here's a photo of Clapham North, and I'd like you to observe closely the behaviour of its subjects.

Yup, that's right - everybody is talking into a mobile phone. It wasn't staged; I only noticed it when I got home. Until the technology arrives that allows people to use mobiles underground, I guess this kind of sight, persons clustered around station entrances like workers round a factory tannoy, will only compound itself.

Of much more excitement (relatively speaking, of course) is the fact that Clapham North shares with its neighbour Clapham Common the distinction of being the only two below ground stations on the entire network which have single island platforms, i.e:

It makes for a right scrum when trains arrives simultaneously, reminiscent of those dreadful scenes in the Forty Minutes documentary on Angel when a horde of passengers fight to go up and down the same set of stairs at the same time. Fortunately it wasn't rush hour here:

It's actually quite thrilling (again, relatively speaking) to use such a perfunctory, if perilous, platform. Above ground Clapham Common (built in 1900, like its predecessor), boasts an equally distinctive quality...

...no proper station building. This dome sits on a traffic island. I'm glad I caught the rain in this photo.

When you get to Clapham South you're at the first of Holden's buildings, all opened in 1926, all to a similar design, and all defiantly eye-catching. This one sits on the edge of the common (grass included in shot) and was originally going to be called by the far more evocative name of Nightingale Lane.

This photo of Balham was taken a year ago, when I was walking the Capital Ring.

Meanwhile back in 2007, Tooting Bec was bedecked with flowers.

And Tooting Broadway was blessed with a statue of his nibs Edward VII himself.

More of the same excellence at Colliers Wood:

South Wimbledon isn't even in Wimbledon, but was given its name in the belief that Wimbledon had a higher social standing than its actual location of Merton.

And so to the end of the line: Morden.

For so many people, both Londoners and tourists, Morden must only ever exist as a name on a loudspeaker, flatly declaring "this train terminates at Morden". As such it's easily better known than any of its near neighbours on the Northern Line, yet is probably the least visited. It's an incredible edifice, originally built by Holden on open farmland and intended to form part of a larger complex of local shops and businesses. Suffice to say you'd need to head a good deal further south than this - already the southernmost station on the entire Underground - to find farmland now.

Despite the unexpected quirks and unanticipated delights encountered on this first line of my tour, my attitude towards the Northern Line hasn't changed from the outset. It still frustrates me as much as inspires. Apparently the endless engineering work will ultimately result in a new signalling system allowing for, I think, an 18% faster service, whatever that means.

To be honest, I'd settle for one that runs the same speed it does now but is slightly cooler than the inside of an incensed potter's kiln.

Northern Line: Camden Town - Kennington (via Bank)

2007-05-25T21:01:00.001+01:00

Apparently there were plans in the late 1980s to run this part of the Northern Line, together with the High Barnet branch, as a completely separate Underground service. Maps were even produced for London Transport perusal, with the "new" line coloured a disgusting bile green.

Expediency probably overruled such a plan ever becoming reality, but there's something to be said for avoiding all the congestion created by having one line with so many branches and intersections. The Bank branch takes longer to get to Kennington than the Charing Cross branch, though it's not clear on the Underground map. Things appear to get off to a good start with trains bypassing Mornington Crescent and heading straight for...

Euston. It's then less than a minute to get to King's Cross St Pancras.

That's less than one minute to get to the King's Cross St Pancras Underground platforms. Not the station ticket hall. Nor the two titular mainline stations. Embroiled in seemingly never-ending renovation, to get from St Pancras Underground station to St Pancras mainline station you currently have to walk ages to get into the open air, whereupon you find yourself next to King's Cross mainline station, meaning you then have to walk ages to get to St Pancras and so on. This visitor-unfriendly arrangement is, however, going to be at least partly curtailed in November this year when the pompous sounding St Pancras International opens for business.

Anyhow, what you can see of the Underground station looks very nice indeed, as you'd expect for a completely redone interchange. It's topped in terms of excellence, though, by Angel.

It's undoubtedly one of my favourite stations to date, chiefly by virtue of being so cool. The air conditioning is incredible. On the (as usual) boiling hot day I was travelling this stretch of the Northern line, I was more than happy to loiter a few minutes on Angel's platforms. Or rather, The Angel. It's never been called this officially, but colloquially the extra article has been around for decades, cemented in the popular consciousness by that edition of Forty Minutes from the late 80s, The Heart Of The Angel.

Back then the station, built in 1901, was one of the worst in the land: grotty, falling apart and plagued by lifts that never worked and a rather blinkered, flippant staff (at least, this was how they were depicted on camera). Shortly afterwards, however, it was shut, completely rebuilt and now represents surely one of the best stations on the network: clean, fresh and with the longest escalators in Western Europe.

Old Street, also built in 1901, is a complete contrast: it lives under a roundabout, with no buildings on surface level at all.

There's another abandoned station just before Old Street: City Road, closed in 1922 and all building work, including the platforms, subsequently removed.

Bits of Moorgate date back to 1865, but the whole place was done over in the 1960s to better incorporate that other bit of the Northern Line which doesn't exist anymore, but at the same time does: the bit from Moorgate to Finsbury Park. Now run by First Capital Connect, I don't know why this line isn't more used or better promoted. Maybe the answer's in the question: namely, it's run by First Capital Connect. There are about seven different entrances to Moorgate from the street. This isn't strictly one of them, but it's the nicest.

Bank station, or The Bank as train drivers stubbornly call it, is lacking a proper surface entrance like Old Street. But then it is right next to the Bank of England and Royal Exchange buildings. And it's part of that sprawling, complicated jumble of tunnels that joins it and Monument station into one uber-interchange the length of an entire street. And one of the exits is *inside* the Bank of England itself. To be honest, it's quicker to walk from one to the other above ground.

London Bridge is a bad interchange if you're trying to hop from the Northern to the Jubilee Line. There's no hopping involved, more like a long schlepp. Albeit in part along one of those magical moving walkways. The Jubilee platforms are way nicer than the stuffy, skanky Northern ones, but then since they were only built a decade or so ago that's no surprise. London Bridge itself is the oldest station in the city, dating back to 1838. It's got a really imperial entrance.

Borough, on the other hand, has a tiny front door and no escalators.

Apparently things used to be far worse, with - until recently - precious little having been done by way of renovation since 1890. It looks great outside, though, with that concrete roundel on the roof.

And so to Elephant & Castle, a right roustabout of a station with, if you choose to leave by one of the two entrances, no particularly striking buildingwork at all. Typically, this was the one I went for. The other entrance is your familiar Leslie Green-styled affair, of the kind I've already encountered at Kentish Town and Mornington Crescent. No photos of that, I'm afraid. Just this glum atrium.

The end was in sight. Here's Kennington again, this time with that classic dome in shot.

Northern Line: Camden Town - Kennington (via Charing Cross)

2007-05-07T15:38:00.001+01:00

After coming together in rather disjointed union at Camden Town, almost immediately the Northern Line splits again, one route heading south through the West End, the other heading south via the City. The former, seemingly forever referred to as the Charing Cross Branch, appears to get you south of the river faster than the other one, but as with anything to do with the Northern Line, appearances have nothing to do with reality. The City branch, for instance, gets you to Euston quicker than the Charing Cross branch, thanks to the latter making its first stop at...

Opened in 1907, it's always been one of the lesser-used Underground stations, so much so that when it closed for six years in the 1990s nobody really noticed. Fittingly its re-opening was attended by the surviving practioners of the eponymous I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue game. There's a plaque to Willie Rushton somewhere or other. I've never seen anyone get off at Mornington Crescent. Fact.

After Euston, gateway to the north...

...with its ludicrously overheated Underground tunnels and statue of the London-Birmingham Railway founder Robert Stephenson, it's but a particularly aeronautical stone's throw to...

Warren Street. Many's the time I've got off a train early or walked on to Euston rather than plunge into the humid depths of this dank, dark station. Its platforms are badly-lit and like an oven, even in winter. It's another 1907 vintage, ditto Goodge Street:

As is suggested by the fact it looks like it's squatting in an otherwise unexceptional block of flats, the station has no room for escalators, only four worryingly tatty lifts. It's another station that has a World War 2 deep-level air-raid shelter underneath it - the one, in fact, from which Eisenhower broadcast the announcement of the invasion of France on 6th June 1944.

To be honest, if you're travelling along any part of this branch of the Northern Line, it's quicker to walk. From Warren Street to Embankment you get stations every five-10 minutes on foot. Tottenham Court Road is even less of a stone's throw from Goodge Street.

Another manky station, befitting the clatter and grime that gets whipped up on Oxford Street, I don't think I've ever used this station and not felt myself physically getting dirtier and sweatier the further down I go. The infrastructure dates back to 1900. The smells do too. Perhaps if the long-mooted Crossrail service ever gets built, the whole station will get totally rebuilt.

Leicester Square is far better, though I'm probably speaking more out of familiarity with the station I used for a year or so to get to work.

Leslie Green was the architect of the original 1906 building; Charles Holden gave it a spring clean. There used to be a busker in this station who played the harp. The story of Charing Cross is a melee of name-changes, station-mergers and pretend-connections. The present day station is actually two combined: Trafalgar Square, originally on the Bakerloo Line, and Charing Cross, solely on the Northern Line. There was soon another station to the north, Charing Cross (Strand), which quickly lost its first two names, and Charing Cross (Embankment), which lost its last name. Then when the Jubilee Line was extended through to the area in the 1970s, everything was rolled up into one. Except Embankment, as it was now called, which still exists - less than 60 seconds walking distance from its parent, ten times as far if you use the Underground, and quicker to reach than the end of this paragraph. Under the river it's Waterloo... ...and then on to Kennington: Newly refurbished, it still bears traces of its construction in 1890 as part of London's first deep-level line, the City & South London Railway. It's also a pleasantly leafy and lazy rendezvous where the Northern Line becomes one again.

Northern Line: High Barnet - Camden Town

2007-04-22T17:42:00.001+01:00

It was unseasonably hot when I tackled the other, nicer, longer "side" of what were once somewhat mystically called the Northern Heights. It was also very quiet all the way down the line. The latter helped offset the former, as well as helping to render the net-curtained realms of Finchley, Mrs Thatcher's old stamping ground, unashamedly appealing.

High Barnet, the terminus, sets the tone for the whole of the branch: unassuming, leafy, serene.

10 miles from Charing Cross and teetering on the edge of Hertfordshire, the building dates back to 1872 when it was the last stop on a line that ran from Finsbury Park to Edgware via Highgate. You're in no doubt you've come to the end of the line.

The otherwise simple business of leaving the station to head south is defiantly confusing. While I was there, three trains sat for ages at different platforms with their doors open. Fortunately I gambled correctly and selected the one that left first. Others did not. I suspect all termini tend to operate in a similar fashion.

The line sweeps down the valley of the Dollis Brook with pretty spectacular views across the surrounding countryside. Totteridge & Whetstone station looks and feels like a village corner shop.

Woodside Park is even more pastoral, with trees, flowerbeds and greenery lining both platforms, and a large piece of ground outside once used for storing coal.

Like its predecessors it was established in 1872, deep in rural Middlesex, and has its entrance at the end of a deafeningly quiet cul-de-sac. Walking into West Finchley, meanwhile, is like entering a scout hut or oversized garden shed.

Apparently it's one of the least used stations on the whole line. Built in 1933, it's still got ancient signage a-plenty.

Finchley Central is a much grander affair, and even older, dating back to 1867.

There's another entrance behind this one, up above the other side of the tracks, which, amusingly - or frustratingly depending on your circumstances - seems to require you to cross back over the lines and go through the ticket barriers (from the wrong side) to get to any ticket machines.

The whole station also resembles the deck of a ship, with a walkway running from one side to the other and the platforms below. Of course, there's another opportunity for erroneous carriage chicanery at Finchley Central, thanks to the short stub of a line which shoots off westwards towards...

Mill Hill East. And no further.

Services to and from this lonely outpost have been scaled back severely in the last year or so, meaning it's now impossible to travel from Mill Hill East direct to central London except in peak hours on weekdays. The rest of the time you have to change at Finchley Central.

When it was opened in 1867 it was part of the same line that went from Finsbury Park to Edgware, linking the two northern branches of the, er, Northern Line together into one. Tracks began to be laid to allow for electric Underground trains to run a similar service...only for World War Two to intervene. Work never progressed beyond Mill Hill East - hence the present lowly circumstances. A driver now has to go back and forth between Mill Hill East and Finchley Central hour after thankless hour.

Still, it's a spectacular journey, almost entirely above roof level, with epic views in all directions.

Back to Finchley Central, it was on down the line to East Finchley: an absolutely fantastic building, rebuilt after the 1867 original was demolished when the line was converted from steam to London Underground trains.

The present station was conceived by Charles Holden - perhaps the Underground's greatest ever designer, responsible for the dozens of iconic Art Deco stations that dot north and west London, plus Bristol Central library and the soaring, sensational Senate House in Bloomsbury.

On top of the station is a superb 10-foot tall statue by Eric Aumonier of a kneeling archer, shown as if having just released an arrow along the line towards central London. It seems totally out-of-place, and is probably ignored by 99% of passers-by. Seeing it for the first time, though, was a revelation.

I took these two photos last year, on a wet day in early July (I know: rain, in London; it can happen). It was the same day I went to Highgate:

This marks the point where the line disappears underground for the first time since High Barnet. It's another of Holden's stations, but only half-finished because the money ran out (it was originally intended to be a junction between the main line and yet another branch running off to Alexander Palace via Muswell Hill). It sits on the side of a hill with a 'low' entrance at the end of a tranquil cul-de-sac and a 'high' one up on the main road. To get from one to the other involves a ludicrously giant escalator ride.

From art to artlessness: Archway was my first disappointment of the day.

In contrast to just about everything on the line up till now, it's a dirty, ugly building hailing from 1907 which, despite benefiting from some Charles Holden tinkering in the 30s, now squats beneath a giant tower block by a menacingly busy road filled with poky shops.

Tufnell Park, another 1907 vintage, at least has a bit of Edwardian flare still intact.

While Kentish Town, its exterior soldiering on since 1868, has much more swagger and grandeur:

South Kentish Town was built in 1907, was shut down during a strike at a nearby power station in 1924, and for some reason never opened again. Apparently it was never really used in the first place. John Betjeman later wrote a short story called, appropriately, South Kentish Town, about a passenger who became trapped in the disused sation when a train stopped there by mistake.

And so to Camden Town, the point where both Northern Line branches collide, and the end of this - largely - tranquil excursion. The lift still wasn't working.