Bakerloo Line: Baker Street - Elephant and Castle

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a few months, however, the line had already been extended south to Elephant and Castle, so the name was technically out of date...but nobody cared.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

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.

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

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

"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: Baker Street - London Bridge

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

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.