“Watson!”
It was an ejaculation I had come to know well over the course of the last few years, but one delivered rarely with such intense potency and urgent inquiry.
I abandoned the correspondence to which I had been attending with, I admit, only a cursory interest, and hastened downstairs from my room.
“Oh really, this is too much. Too much!”
That familiar voice bore traces, I surmised, of an unexpected quality with which I had only fleeting acquaintance. Looking back I realise it could best be described as personal slight.
With studied detachment I surveyed the scene.
Sherlock Holmes lay prostrate upon a chair at least one size too small for his commanding frame. His arms hung by his sides limply and his face was turned, not toward me or one of the room’s broad windows, but to the ceiling, upon which his hooded eyes gazed with equivocation.
My unease was deepened as I took in the appalling ensemble gathered at the man’s feet.
At first glance it appeared as if a spring tide of discarded newsprint had washed up on the carpet. But on closer inspection I saw that the sheets of paper bore traces of human intervention, probably ripped and torn by the hands of the person around whose slippers they coalesced implausibly.
Without waiting for admission I waded through the detritus and opened one of the windows, in an effort to dilute the thick atmosphere of smoke and contempt already assailing my senses.
“I have failed to keep a count,” I began, “of the number of occasions I have cautioned you as to a purposeful ignorance of the benefits of fresh air.”
A snort came from the prone figure on the chair.
I flung open the window, through which a reassuring cavalcade of noise from Baker Street tumbled.
“Did I give you permission to sanction such an undignified intrusion?” Holmes snapped, his face continuing its now somewhat stubborn disavowal of my presence.
‘I’m sorry?”
“The window! My dear Watson, today has already witnessed more than an average assault by the lumpen forces of the common man upon these chambers. Must you insist on compounding this malady with the cries of a discomfited fruit-seller or a passing hurdy-gurdy?”
Holmes let out another snort and, before I could respond, extended a sinewy arm in the direction of one of the pieces of newsprint that lay upon the floor.
“I hold you responsible for this, Watson!” he cried, and lurched in his chair as if the fresh air that was now making an overdue ingress into the room had punched him in the stomach.
I picked up the paper towards which he gestured, then sat down to study its contents.
I let out a gasp, then fell quiet.

“Watson, your propensity for knowing silences has exceeded itself,” laughed Holmes, as he jumped to his feet and strode over to the window.
It was true that I had been rendered temporarily unable to speak, yet my mind was akin to a cacophony of confusion.
“Ha! Just as I thought!” Holmes exclaimed.
I glanced up to find him peering through the window and along the street.
“But it is of little consequence,” he added, before reeling around to face me, slamming the window shut in the process.
It was the first time he had looked at me directly since I had entered the room.
His face was creased into the expression of a man assailed by a great blasphemy, yet leavened with a trace of the absurd.
“What do you make of it, Watson?”
I forced out a sentence.
“Holmes, let me say first of all that I had no knowledge of this, none whatsoever.”
“That much I had already deduced.”
“I find that I cannot comprehend the motive.”
“Watson, you are nothing if not dependably predictable.”
He strode over to the doorway and called out, in no particular direction: “Mrs Hudson! We have visitors!”
I swung round to address him, still clutching the newspaper cutting.
“Nor do I find your countenance particularly agreeable,” I declared.
Holmes fell silent. His shoulders sagged. A sigh escaped his lips and he began fumbling in the pockets of his house coat.
“I had, it must be said, expected such an eventuality. I curse myself for not anticipating it quite so soon.”
I stared down at the piece of paper, from which my own face stared straight back.

The likenesses of both myself and Holmes set in motion a vague rankling. And yet I could not deny within me a rising feeling of satisfaction, even pride.
Holmes arranged himself tartly within an armchair and worked on his pipe.
“I trust you noticed that it is always I who am depicted experiencing a moment of great epiphany, while you, dear fellow, forever discharge the role of the hapless, nay irrelevant, bystander.”
“Now wait a moment,” I began, rising to Holmes’s calculated slight. “Were it not for my accounts of your activities, such illustrations would not even exist.”
“And if only it were so!” he shouted. “These trivial etchings further poison my already maligned profession, one which your literary forays have eroded with insipid regularity.”
“I refuse to accept that you believe that,” I stated, calmly.
Holmes leaped to his feet.
“Oh, the debasement!” he wailed. “That such advancements in my field should end up rendered in such ordinary a fashion.”
“Nonsense,” I replied. “These caricatures, though lacking in artistic ambition, I find to be rather appealing.”
Holmes fired me a glare infused with accommodating contempt.
There was a knock on the door.
“As expected,” Holmes boomed.
Mrs Hudson entered, then Inspector Lestrade, his face looking more pinched than usual.
They were followed by a figure whom I did not recognise, but whose deportment struck me as somehow familiar.
“Good afternoon gentlemen,” recited Lestrade, “and how flattered I am to be in such honoured presence.”
“Dry humour does not befit you,” said Holmes. “But I see you have brought company, and if I have appraised correctly, a senior employee of one of this city’s growing number of railways.”
“Why, the Metropolitan!” I exclaimed, spying the man’s familiar livery. “I’m surprised you missed that detail, Holmes.”
Holmes’s eyes darted not unkindly in my direction, then settled upon the guest.
“Sir, you need not waste time in outlining the reason for your visit. Pray, supply us with the end to which you have contrived these means. My good friend Dr Watson would be most interested to hear them, and I confess it would bring me not a little amusement.”

The man, who Lestrade introduced as a senior figure within the management of the Metropolitan Railway, adopted a stance of contrition.
“Sirs, I must apologise. A sequence of events is under way about which you both should have been given advance notice. I had intended this to be a gesture conceived in respect. I fear, now, it has been taken as one of grotesque impertinence. I am truly sorry. I will withdraw the illustrations from circulation forthwith.”
“Your bearing does you credit,” began Holmes, “but your proposal does not. I have no objection in principle on these… entertainments being used by you and your organisation. My hesitations are purely subjective and therefore irrelevant in this matter. I’m sure my friend Dr Watson bears you no fundamental ill-will other than residual disquiet that no prior communication was given. I am not certain that this initiative will endure, in fact I am positive it will be of no interest to the people of this city beyond, say, the next 10 years. However please thank the illustrator for his efforts and keep me informed of the success or otherwise of this trivial venture.”
His soliloquy over, Holmes rose and moved once again to the window, his eyes searching for a fresh matter upon which to reflect.
Our visitor turned in my direction. “Dr Watson, my appreciation. Perhaps you would do me the courtesy of attending a dinner that is being organised in honour of your good self and Mr Holmes? It is but round the corner, at Baker Street station.”
“I would be delighted, though I cannot answer on behalf of Holmes.”
“I will also be in attendance,” Lestrade announced, to little purpose.
The visitor seemed keen suddenly to leave our premises as quickly as possible. “Very well, all the appropriate arrangements will be made and – this time – you will be properly informed. But goodness me, the day is getting on and the demands of the railway are never sated!”
Chuckling with private amusement, he left the room escorted by Mrs Hudson, followed by Lestrade, who exited exhibiting the same indifference with which he arrived.
Holmes and I were alone again.
I let out a quiet whistle.
“Well, well. That was a turn-up!”
Holmes remained silent.
“I had expected you to cast this man from our house,” I continued, “and instead I find you letting him go with barely a reprimand.”
Holmes turned to face me. He bore the look of a man suddenly weary from a legacy yet to come.
“My dear friend. You and I have but only a score of years left. I suspect, and at times fear, aspects of our endeavours will persist somewhat longer. Perhaps these illustrations may endure 100 years or more – the Metropolitan Railway also. We can no more condemn the course of the future as we can regret the follies of the past. Now come: pass me that sole intact edition of this morning’s Times, for I surmise there is a development in the case of Cadogan West and the missing submarine plans.”

100. The exterior of Arnos Grove

6 May 2013

Architecture, Piccadilly line, Zone 4

4 Comments

Peter York calls them “embassies of modernism”. Michael Gove calls them “prison houses of the soul”. I call the Piccadilly stations designed by Charles Holden one of the finest ensembles in the land. A bracing, lustrous orchestra of sensations. Their massed ranks of roundels, passimeters, turrets and Dalek stalks deployed in shimmering harmony, resonating up and down north London. A bit of bombast here, a bit of delicacy there, the odd cheeky homage thrown in for good measure.

It’s an ensemble that can fizz as well as flutter, that whirls as well as soothes. And in the centre, keeping everyone else in time and in line, the thunderous, glorious magic drum that is Arnos Grove.

Apologies for the more-fanciful-than-usual wittering, but I don’t feel too steady on my feet. Because I’ve already bowed my head long and low to the wonder that is the interior of this station. How to pay equal tribute to the equally wondrous exterior? What more is there to say about Charles Holden, about whom I’ve been banging a drum for a good portion of the last 100 posts?

Well, one mark of Holden’s genius is that he always does have something new to say, and another mark is that he does so with such visually self-evident swagger. The only thing he can really apologise for is trying. And that’s more than can be said for most of us.

Arnos Grove looks like it has just tunnelled its way up from some kind of subterranean concrete Eldorado. It is like nothing on Earth (well, almost) yet somehow intensely familiar. The distinctiveness of the place attracts, rather than repels. You feel almost propelled towards it, like bathwater skipping its way down a plughole. It’s the opposite of being flung outwards by a centrifuge. It is this poster made real.

There are many, many Underground stations that can cheer, amuse and sometimes thrill me when I step inside. There are a few that go further – stations that bewitch and flatter. But there’s only one that revives me. That picks me up, no matter how deep I’ve sunk. That actually, in a very clumsy, reserved, hope-nobody’s-looking, British kind of way, lifts my heart.

Beyond that, there’s really not much more I can say about Arnos Grove.

For when Charles Holden bangs the drum, there are no words to describe the way I feel.

99. The platform tiles at St John’s Wood

25 April 2013

Designs, Jubilee line, Zone 2

1 Comment

When searching online for solid information on Harold Stabler to inject into my otherwise flabby tribute to his efforts at Aldgate East, I’d learned that he hadn’t confined his creations just to one station. More of his ceramic whimsy could be found on the Jubilee line, at both St John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage.

At the time I presumed it was merely more of the same. As charming as Stabler’s tiles are, I didn’t think it worth bothering with a trip to see an identical batch in simply a different location. I’d had my fill of vexing heraldry and monstrous apparitions – or more accurately, monstrous heraldry and vexing apparitions.

Well, not for the first time on this blog, my presumption has now given way to contrition. For there is an entirely fresh selection of tiles on the Jubilee line, just as delightful and possibly more intriguing than their cousins over in the East End.

Who, I wondered, was Thomas Lord? Being a poor sportsman, and an even poorer lateral thinker, it wasn’t until I did more online searching that I discovered his local significance. I’m sure you can make the connection faster than me. Suffice to say I was, ahem, bowled over by my own ignorance.

The five birds pictured at the top of this post remain more of a mystery – as does this further quintet:

They look like representations of a young monarch, perhaps hailing from the Plantagenet dynasty. Another local connection, perhaps? Did Henry II once strike camp at what is now the Central School of Speech and Drama?

At both St John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage you can find a few duplicates of the tiles at Aldgate East; the Underground roundel, for instance, and the relief of the headquarters at 55 Broadway.

But these are the exceptions. Stabler treats you to a largely new and, for me, wholly unexpected spread of caricatures and motifs. The way they are laced along the platforms positively encourages you to wander up and down while waiting for your train, rather than observe the convention and remain sullenly rooted to a spot. This might not be very practical at rush hour. At all other times it’s a positive boon.

These are palaces of curiosity. Their walls turn the mundane into the magical. And their wares are as delicate as crystal.

98. The station at West Finchley

21 April 2013

Architecture, Northern line, Objects, Sensations, Zone 4

4 Comments

He adored West Finchley station.

He idolised it all out of proportion.

No, make that, he romanticised it all out of proportion.

To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a place that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of something by Dennis Potter involving trains and tragedy, and which allowed him shamelessly to reference one of the finest opening sequences in cinema history, despite not having anywhere near the same style, wit or imagination.

Yes, he was too romantic about West Finchley. Yes, to him it was also a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. And yet, in its own restrained, sparse, under-used, over-played, half-arsed, romanticised, metaphorical way, West Finchley was his station… and always would be.

I’d like to think everyone in London has special feelings towards their local Underground station. I’d like to think those feelings are mostly good-natured, though I’ll readily concede that’s not easy when your local station is Gunnersbury, Seven Sisters, or anywhere on the Bakerloo line north of Kilburn Park.

At the time of writing, my local station for five years has been West Finchley. I make no bones about the fact it was one of the reasons I chose to live in this area of north London. And I retain the same gushing affection towards it as I did the first time I ever had cause to pass along its platforms.

It’s not a very busy place. It’s staffed for only two hours on weekday mornings. At off-peak times, I’ll often find myself the only person waiting to get on a train, or the only person to get off. In both instances a part of my brain buried deep from any passing relationship with reality pretends it is me and only me for whom the station exists.

Fruit grows on the platforms of West Finchley. In summer, roses caress the barbed wire. In winter, robins perch on branches a few feet from your face.

All the functional furniture of an overground Underground station – trackside cables, wires for the loudspeakers – is tucked out of sight behind bushes and trees. The automated announcements are turned down low out of respect for the residents of nearby houses. There are waiting rooms on both platforms, with electric fires. And there are toilets and pocket maps and guides for continuing your journey and benches and buttons to press for help in an emergency and a lovely great big old iron bridge that used to have a lovely great bit old iron sign above it:

There’s also – shush! – a secret entrance. Transport for London describes West Finchley station as step-free, but unless you’re aware of the narrow passageway from an adjacent street that lets you on to the southbound platform, it’s the bridge or nothing.

To make this secret entrance even more of a secret, it’s only open for a couple of hours each morning. The rest of the time you need a special key to unlock the gates that guard the entrance. Such an arrangement could only exist, or rather only exist unnoticed, in a place like this, where things crossfade quietly between the quaint and the eccentric.

I’ve published this photo on the blog before, but I’m giving it another outing as I think it sums up for me what is the ultimate appeal of West Finchley station: its homeliness. Even in as extreme a concoction of weather, season and hour as this, the place still feels welcoming. It is safe and reassuring. It is somewhere you know you can trust. And, of course, for me it means just that: home.

I hope other people share similar sentiments about their own local station. West Finchley isn’t particularly special in the way most of the things on this blog are, in the sense of boasting great architecture or locations or even sensations. But it has the ability to be special to me. I might romanticise it out of all proportion, but that doesn’t harm anyone except myself. Which is what, ultimately, makes it so great.

97. The platforms at Holloway Road

15 April 2013

Designs, Piccadilly line, Signs, Zone 2

96. The memorial at Canning Town

11 April 2013

Designs, Jubilee line, Objects, Zone 3

3 Comments

Here’s an example of how great the Underground can be at commemorating not just its own past accomplishments, but those of other, equally influential giants on whose shoulders London once stood.

In one corner of Canning Town station rises a memorial that’s vast in both size and significance. Hewn from the iron hull of HMS Warrior, then clad in dozens of concrete panels, each in turn covered with a cascade of calligraphic prose, it is an elegy to an organisation, a trio of industries, and a way of life long gone.

The Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company lived for almost 100 years and died two years before Britain went to war (in part thanks to the threat from someone else’s ironworks and shipbuilding). The First Lord of the Admiralty, a certain Mr W Churchill, refused to step in to save the company in 1912 when work dried up.

But the football club established for the works’ employees, Thames Ironworks FC, did survive and still does, under the name it adopted to allow it to hire professional players. And it was the management and supporters of that club who, many decades later, helped commission and fund the creation of this memorial. Fittingly, they get a special mention:

By my count that’s at least two lasting contributions West Ham United have made to the culture of the nation; the other being their popularisation of this beautiful song.

As for the memorial, the designer Jamie Troughton and engraver Richard Kindersley must take the main honours for realising West Ham’s dream and turning an idea into something so defiantly solid. The concrete panels were apparently so expensive that Kindersley and his helpers could not, or more accurately weren’t allowed to, make a single mistake. And they didn’t, even if it meant it took three weeks for the inscriptions to be completed.

Their collective effort is stunning and soaring. Its calligraphy whirls and shimmies around three flights of steps, not merely bringing but whipping and rocketing the past back to life.

My only regret is its location. It’s tucked away at the far end of the concourse, on the way to Canning Town bus station, and very easy to miss. I speak from experience: I only found it on my third visit. But Iif I’d been a bit more patient I probably would have worked out what to do – for example, ask someone where it was.

Rather wonderfully, the very latest chapter in the evolution of London’s public transport – the magnificent Crossrail – has resulted in some of the Ironworks’ remains being uncovered. Slices of old London do have this habit of poking through into the here and now; at Canning Town one of them has achieved permanence at last.

The official history of the Jubilee line extension notes that the memorial drew a lot of local interest on its opening in 1999. It also reveals that former Archbishop of Canterbury and now full-time reactionary George Carey did the unveiling. He was born nearby, so his involvement was not entirely spurious.

I wonder if he ever passes this way nowadays, and if so what he makes of the memorial’s sparkling reams of inclusive, enlightened sentiments.

95. The trimmings at Baker Street

5 April 2013

Bakerloo line, Circle line, Designs, Hammersmith and City line, Jubilee line, Metropolitan line, Objects, Zone 1

4 Comments

A part of me likes the idea of living directly above an Underground station. There’s a cafe in Liverpool that I used to always enjoy visiting, in which you could sometimes feel the rumble of Merseyrail trains passing underneath. When I first saw the film Seven, I was mildly jealous of Mr and Mrs Brad Pitt getting to live in a flat that shook evocatively thanks to a nearby mass transit system. And how many times I’ve eyed those flats in Chiltern Court astride Baker Street station, envious of the residents, all of whom are naturally pursuing a lifestyle that is part Kenneth Williams, part John Betjeman.

A different part of me knows all of this is fantasy and that living directly above the Underground is possibly the path to physical and emotional wreckage. But a third part of me (yes, I have many) wonders if the reality is somewhere in between, and that a place like Chiltern Court has to be lived in before it can be truly loved or loathed. It is the most elaborate of what are best described as the “trimmings” of Baker Street, all of which date from the remodelling of 1911-13, conceived to turn the place into a brand-encrusted hulk of the Metropolitan line, where getting on a train was but one of the riches on offer.

Chiltern Court might be beyond the reach (and budget) of most of us, but other more modest, less swaggering trimmings are not. Like the MR insignia embroided within the grilles over the porthole windows, and the WH Smiths & Son sign above what is now a ticket office. The tiles were given a sympathetic scrub-up in 1985, the same time the old platforms were so touchingly restored. The sign must have appeared something of a charming curio in the mid-80s, when WH Smiths was at the peak of its pocket money-absorbing powers. Nowadays, with the chain such an aesthetic calamity, the lettering is both enchanting and deeply depressing.

There’s a “Luncheon and Tearoom” sign that’s equally wistful, leading not to the tantalising prospect of a London Underground-manufactured hot beverage, the tea leaves allowed to drip through roundel-shaped strainers, but instead to absolutely nowhere at all. The entrance is bricked in, and now houses automatic ticket machines. Meanwhile biscuit-coloured arches and panels in the ceiling, timber handrails, iron balustrades and over-the-top 1912 timestamps add to this bran tub of post-Edwardian-era fancies:

I vowed to myself I would get through this entry without any reference to Sherlock Holmes, and it looks like I might have made it. The trimmings that adorn Baker Street share with their gastronomical namesake an ability to enhance something that is already of substance. We might not make it into the sumptuous kitchenettes of Chiltern Court, let alone dine in the long-vanished restaurant visited by Betjeman in 1972. But to push this desperate simile even further, these are trimmings that linger on the palate and even, if you’re in the mood, bring a lump to the throat. Alimentary, you might say.

—150 great things about the Underground

An unofficial birthday salute to a public transport titan

101. The illustrations at Baker Street

100. The exterior of Arnos Grove

99. The platform tiles at St John’s Wood

98. The station at West Finchley

97. The platforms at Holloway Road

96. The memorial at Canning Town

95. The trimmings at Baker Street