32. The miniature roundels at Gants Hill
Like a film camera slowly pulling back and building up for the big reveal, I am holding off from celebrating the full glory of Charles Holden’s Gants Hill for a just a bit longer.
Instead, after first concentrating on the platform clocks, I have zoomed out a little more, to bring into view the dainty Underground logos that sporadically line the walls of the station’s concourse:
lgnore, if you can, the plastic bag lying on the floor and focus your gaze on those tiny Underground symbols embedded within the tiles on each of the pillars. They deserve their own moment of glory. For I imagine they are barely glimpsed, at least knowingly, and let alone acknowledged.
Granted, these petite designs can’t really complete with what else is going on by way of architecture inside Gants Hill (of which more another time). Yet in their own way they are discreetly charming and rather becoming: attributes to which all the very finest parts of the Underground successfully aspire.
They’re also cute, in a statutory kind of way. Apologies if that sounds vaguely perverse. But I do love Gants Hill station. It’s the Muscovite modernist monolith that keeps on giving.
150 great things about the Underground 
You could do 150 entries just on Gants Hill.
“Muscovite” – the urban myth / truth that the Moscow U-G stations were modelled on this one – even though it did not open until after being used as part of Plessey’s secert aircraft-components factory ….