Archive

Numbers 76-100

79. The exterior of Tooting Broadway

26 January 2013
Architecture, Northern line, Numbers 76-100, Zone 3
3 Comments

My kind of BroadwaySubject of one of the saddest songs ever written about the Underground, Tooting Broadway station is a location ripe for emotional statements. So here’s one. It is a thrillingly modernist smear across an otherwise unremarkable palette of suburban London. Judge it by colour, shape, size or purpose, it’s everything the surrounding area is not.

The building, completed in 1926, is bold and stylish, blessed with both grand gestures and subtle delights. In the former category belongs the enormous curved facade, built like so many of Charles Holden’s creations out of his beloved concrete, and looking dapper in its neatly-lined, nicely-hued finery:

Holden his ownIn the other category sit the illuminations that usefully pick out some of the building’s features during the day, but really come into their own at night, when the place turns the charm up even further and poses as a beautiful glittering palace. Yes, the lights are always bright on Broadway.

Broadway lightsA member of the German royal family stands guard by the entrance. He turned up a good 15 years before the station did, having just had his nine years interloping on the British throne curtailed through death. You might remember him from such titles as First Emperor of India and the Man Who Brought You The Edwardian Era:

Saxe-Coburg and Gotha not picturedI’m uneasy about royals having anything to do with the Underground. The two institutions are mutually exclusive. One values splendid isolation; the other, glorious diversity. Whenever a royal is shoved on to the Underground for some official opening or other, they look desperately discomfited or unhappy. The same goes for all the commoners playing host. Better to keep these two worlds well apart.

I know the statue predates the Northern line’s arrival, but I’m far more comfortable associating  Tooting Broadway with Patrick Fitzgerald‘s “John of Arc” than Edward VII.

(PS: Here’s a fine, five-minute snapshot of a day in the life of the station, minus all weeping/sleeping songwriters.)

78. The water tower at Chesham

23 January 2013
Architecture, Metropolitan line, Numbers 76-100, Zone 9
1 Comment

Snow place like itLike dangling an arm out the window of a hot car, the Underground occasionally swaps its default environment for one that is far fresher, if fleeting.

It does this by throwing a tentacle so far from the centre of London that it unfurls not only to the municipal boundary but beyond. Welcome to Buckinghamshire, home of red-faced anti-HS2 brigands, a stand-in for the headquarters of the United Nations, and this: Chesham station, Grade II-listed Victoriana a-go-go, and the most distant point on the network from the King Charles statue at Charing Cross.

Highlight of the place for me is the water tower, a relic from the 1880s. It’s wonderfully uncompromising, sitting like a sentry at the far end of the platform. A squat wodge of nostalgia:

Water way to have a good timeAnother relic of the 1880s is the body of opinion that values this piece of public transport infrastructure, but hates another. I adore them both. It’s great that this water tower survives, but it’s just as great that, while Chesham’s links with Greater London are continually revised and improved, so the same is happening with the south-east and the rest of the UK. Or will do, providing reason prevails over nonsense.

There’s plenty of time to mull these things over when you come to Chesham station. You can’t treat this place like you would the rest of the Underground. There’s no point turning up expecting a train to arrive in the next two or three minutes. Carriages trundle up the single branch line from Chalfont and Latimer every half hour, resting in the platform for a good 10 minutes or so before returning whence they came.

But like Bob Monkhouse and his ever-wonderful Full House, their doors are always open for you, which is extra fortunate if you happen to find yourself in the middle of a snow storm.

The best kind of shelterI’ll return to this corner of the Underground map again, for there’s much to enjoy, even if you have to endure a long ride through lesser parts (Harrow-on-the-Hill, I’m looking at you) to reach it.

Best of all, the Metropolitan line being now wholly-served by a squad of brand-new, uber-slick,  all-in-one bendy trains, the journey is more comfortable than it’s ever been.

If certain attitudes stand still in places like these, at least time doesn’t.

Winter wonderland

77. The travelator at Bank

13 January 2013
Numbers 76-100, Objects, Waterloo & City line, Zone 1
5 Comments

Down the drainI always feared this blog would go down the drain once I’d passed the halfway mark. So I thought I’d embrace the inevitable, and celebrate the finest drain of them all.

In the words of Pathe News, it’s a big welcome to the travelator!

Pathway to the futureIt’s Britain’s oldest, and – by virtue of its location and purpose – its best.

Moving walkways belong in the same category as jet packs, hot plates and those pneumatic plastic tubes used for whizzing documents around a large building. They are stabs at everyday futurism. They are snapshots of what the world of yesterday thought the world of tomorrow ought to look like. And they are uniformly fantastic.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more rousing gesture towards mass public conveyance than the travelator. Just listen to the optimism with which its arrival was greeted. It replaced “that dreadful old tunnel” through which passengers had to trudge to reach the Waterloo & City railway. Thanks to its inclination towards modernity, not to mention its actual inclination, commuters could cheer “at long last, it’s the end of the drain.”

They can still cheer. This moving walkway is still a persuasive feat of imagination and innovation. And its status has been enriched with the passing of time, for what was once spoken of as becoming universal has ended up a rarity. Consequently it is of even more value than when it was first opened to the public in September 1960.

Step onA ride on the travelator at Bank is to step, or rather to glide, back to a time when mechanisation was the great leap forward. When it was thought people would be impressed by talk of “488 segments of special aluminum”. When it was dazzling to contemplate something able to move “more than 13,000 passengers… in the peak hour”.

Yet this is no relic that has outlived its usefulness or been neglected as the decades have fallen by. It is as relevant and as robust as it appeared to look in 1960. Plus it still feels futuristic, and therefore exciting, because it remains an oddity in a world in which, by now, they were meant to be commonplace.

Walk this way…

All aboard