Archive

Numbers 101-125

113. The station at Roding Valley

7 July 2013
Central line, Numbers 101-125, Sensations, Zone 4
2 Comments

Peace in the 'Valley

A bit of an atypical choice, this. I’ve included it not because of something, but despite.

What’s great about Roding Valley is that despite being the least-used station on the entire Underground, it continues to exist. Moreover, it does so – to paraphrase the Bluetones, another outer-London treasure – with a little charm and a lot of style.

Don’t come here looking for architectural wonder or lashings of imaginative design. Give Roding Valley a miss if you’re out to sample the Underground at its aesthetic finest. Do come here, however, if you want a sense of the network going about its business modestly, extremely quietly, and in the absence of arithmetical tumescence.

Build a station and they will come

Build a station and they will come. Even if it’s around 220,000 people a year. That’s an average of 602 a day – roughly the number who move through Victoria Underground station every 90 seconds.

Compared to central London, every time is off-peak time at Roding Valley. But pass this way in the dead of morning, or in the hollow of an afternoon, and you might not see another soul during the 20 minutes you can spend waiting for a train. I didn’t. And I rather enjoyed it.

You can also, if you want, pretend the place belongs to you. I did. And I rather enjoyed it. Though it’s impossible to ever completely relax and, say, start dancing along the platform. Cameras are in evidence, connected to a location miles away where people are present, watching for unfamiliar faces cutting some rug or loitering to take pictures.

If you’re after that certain kind of stillness that only dwells in barely-breathing stations that are best known for making footnotes rather than headlines, there can be fewer more pleasant locations.

And even if you never have cause to visit, it’s awfully nice to know that Roding Valley is there. Despite… well, despite pretty much everything.

112. The romance of the Underground

2 July 2013
Numbers 101-125, Sensations
6 Comments

Maybe this timeThe arteries of the Underground can pull tight around your heart.

The crescendo roar of a train as it rattles through a tunnel towards the platform plays with your emotions in much the same way as that of an impending public declaration of feelings.

It finds parallels in the steeling of nerve and numbness of limbs that always comes before a moment of intimate confession or personal commitment. I love you. I don’t love you. I can’t bear it. I can’t live without it.

The train charges at you with a force that jars and jangles both physically and psychologically. And you are reminded of other times in your life when every bone and sinew was a-flutter with the advent of something of equal provocation: a hello, a goodbye, a negotiation, a termination.

The possibility of unbeatable joy. The probability of unbearable sorrow.

It is one of the most bittersweet sensations there is, for just as that probability will always turn into a reality, so the train always arrives. There is always a resolution.

You’ll either get together with that person, or you won’t.

There’ll either be a happy ending, or there won’t.

It’s life reduced to its most bitter, binary form. It is also the romance of the Underground.

Standing on a silent platform, then hearing the first tiny stirring of sound, feeling a wisp of warm air brush against you, noticing the rails below your feet starting to purr, bracing yourself for the fusillade of power that is but seconds away…

This is a very raw, primal experience. More so if you are alone, and it is just you and the steadily increasing proximity of something very very big and very very loud.

As the train arrives, so you’re filled with tingling anticipation. Here we go, you think. This is it: the start of something. A beginning. A departure. I am about to let something happen.

Even if you’re only travelling a couple of stops, it can still feel like you’re embarking on an adventure.

Then off into the darkness, tracing a deep, sentimental geography. Conceiving encounters, reliving experiences, creating futures, revolving memories.

Or, more than likely, burying those memories. The mixture of anonymity and noise is the ideal crucible into which to drop regrets, estrangements, farewells.

To brood on what may have been, and whether it still can be. To nurse bereavements and doctor fantasies.

To dream and dream and sometimes hope never to wake up.

The Underground is the greatest matchmaker of the imagination. It’s the ideal sanctuary for romantics, from John Betjeman’s Cockney Amorist to Saint Etienne’s Girl VII.

It’s emotion and motion combined. It’s electrical balm for the mind.

Almost anything is possible…

…until the next station arrives, and your train exhales itself of another cargo of laughter and loss.

Swallow your pain. Sigh no more. Wipe away the sweat, the tears, the make-believe years.

This romance is over for now. It’s time to renew your affair with the sky.

111. The platform tiles at Hatton Cross

1 July 2013
Designs, Numbers 101-125, Piccadilly line, Zone 5, Zone 6
2 Comments

Hatton patternFor a long time I was baffled by the opening line of the Beatles’ Back in the USSR. “Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC.” What did those letters mean? Were they some kind of code? A bit of 1960s polari?

I decided it was an in-joke of the era, a teasingly exotic hangover from a time of impenetrably trendy goings-on, but one that added a potent twist to what I still think is one of the most exciting opening 30 seconds to any song on any album ever.

Many years later I realised it was a reference to the British Overseas Airways Corporation. But this just made the song even better. Then later still I realised I’d been oblivious to a second salute to the BOAC, in an equally unexpected place:

Cross purposesIt is the old British Overseas Airways Corporation logo, and it is gorgeous.

Speedbird, to give it its thrillingly imagine-what-the-future-will-be-like name, used to be emblazoned all over aeroplanes until British Airways was privatised in the early 1980s (coincidentally, around the same time I would have first heard Back in the USSR).

Since then it’s been revised and adapted and generally messed around with so as to become virtually unrecognisable. Not that I’d ever be close enough to spot it, given my fear of flying. Indeed, even being at Hatton Cross, one stop along from the first of the Heathrow stations, gave me the jitters. Although this might have been more down to the questioning looks I was getting from waiting passengers.

You’re encouraged to change trains at Hatton Cross to get your desired connection to terminals 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. As such the platforms play host to much anxious watch-checking and ticket-consulting. Maybe these bold and colourful streaks of futurism provide a welcome distraction. They can certainly calm the nerves of the most aerophobic of souls.

Planes: perfectly fine when turned into a two-tone mosaic on a pillar. Just don’t send me up inside one, or there’ll be more than a paper bag on my knee.

Hatton: Lust for Glory