Piccadilly Line: Cockfosters - Manor House

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

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

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

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

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.