93. The mosaics at Finsbury Park
In the March 2013 edition of Creative Review – an issue distinguished by some very notable contributors indeed – the artist Annabel Grey talks about the challenges she faced in realising her ambitious concept for the walls of the southbound Piccadilly line platform at Finsbury Park:
“It got very complicated and mathematical, as there’s an ellipse of a landscape running behind the balloons, and I realised that when you added the spaces between the trackside panels, the landscape would have been about 360 feet high!”
Much annotation of the tunnel wall ensued, which by the sound of it involved protractors, balls of string and those enormo-sized bits of chalk you now see only in possibly inaccurate recreations of Victorian classrooms.
Grey’s plan was to have the balloons ascend, drift then descend in sequence all the way along the platform – and it works, brilliantly. Starting at the far end, her six magnificent flying machines rise, glide then fall in a perfect union of trigonometry and transportation. It’s a wonderfully uplifting and elevating spectacle for so deep and otherwise lumpen an Underground station.
I wonder how many people actually a) notice them at all, and b) perceive of each balloon as being part of a bigger design, running the full length of a platform hardly anybody runs the full length of.
But I rather like the fact that the concept is there for you to spot. The balloons flatter you as they flutter past. Their mathematical caper is there to be solved by the witty, not sold to the unwitting. If you miss it, the secret is safe with those who have already resolved the puzzle.
As an afterthought, I was intrigued to read that the designs date from what remains, in my head, a barren time for publicly-funded urban transport: the 1980s. Grey and her team were commissioned by London Transport in 1983. They were even allowed to buy up to £15,000 worth of gold mosaic, which represented just one of a whopping 52 different coloured tiles shipped in from Vincenza.
But then I remembered London Transport was still run by the GLC at that point, which itself was run by someone who used and still uses the Underground every day of his life*.
*As opposed to riding a bicycle to and from work, thereby never having to meet, mingle with or let alone speak to anyone else.
150 great things about the Underground 
It’s odd that there seemed to be a fashion for mosaics in public architecture in the 70s and 80s. Are there still the 1977 Jubilee mosaics in those hellish subway tunnels under Park Lane and Marble Arch? (They’re the only place in London that rivals the Barbican for absolute inhuman un-navigability). The little glints of gold and silver shining through the filth and decay are quite eloquent about Britain in the late 70s… economic crisis mixed with a surprisingly persistent myth of social cohesion.
I’ve always wondered why the balloon mosaics also includes ones of Cornish Pasties…
Laurence Price – I take your Barbican and raise you Bank/ Monument; that labyrinth of tunnels needs to have signs every few metres that say “quickest way to open air this way’
I have a huge soft spot for the Barbican and don’t mind getting lost there (so long as I don’t have to be anywhere in a hurry!). The Bank/Monument complex, while efficiently signposted, I just find incredibly wearing – and, yes, a bit suffocating.
Suffocating is the perfect description; I usually seem to arrive into the DLR platforms at Bank and my guess is that, in terms of time, it must be the longest journey from platform to street level.
Anyway the blog is fantastic and much appreciated by this exiled Londoner.