Central Line: Hanger Lane - West Ruislip

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

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

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

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

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.