Victoria Line: Green Park - Brixton

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

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.