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Objects

72. The ventilation grilles on the Piccadilly line

17 December 2012
Designs, Numbers 51-75, Objects, Piccadilly line, Zone 2, Zone 3
6 Comments

Air apparentWe’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore most of what lines the platform walls of the Underground, largely because most of it is worth ignoring.

Promotions for someone’s new DVD; promotions for a “laugh-out-loud” comedy or “feelgood hit of the year” that boasts quotes only from reviews in the Daily Star; promotions for novels that begin with the phrase: “You’ve read Fifty Shades of Grey…”; promotions for anything to do with Peter Kay…

These are all, quite rightly, things we have taught ourselves to filter and reject from our list of subconscious concerns. We look at them but we don’t see them. We’ve other things to concentrate on – not least, making sure it doesn’t look like we’re concentrating on any passengers standing nearby.

Three station platforms at the northern end of the Piccadilly line buck this trend by offering up things to which attention is worth paying. But chances are most people don’t see them. And why should they?

Green gaugeThese ventilation grilles are originals: installed when the stations were built in the early 1930s, and designed by Harold Stabler whose charming if sometimes idiosyncratic work I’ve encountered elsewhere.

They can be found at Wood Green, Turnpike Lane and Manor House. Each one depicts a brazenly romanticised panorama of the neighbourhood. You can forgive the shamelessness, however, because of the wonderful attention to detail and – dammit! – their reassuring parochialism.

The grille at Wood Green appears to show two birds and a deer frolicking on the titular parkland. Trees, plants, even the sun’s rays are all neatly aligned and symmetrical. If only life were really like that.

Next comes Turnpike Lane:

In line for a grillingHere it looks like a brigand of courtly gentlefolk are about to engage in some business, possibly – judging by the rider’s deportment and dapper outfit – of a mercantile kind. Or maybe they’ve just come for a fight. Whoever is arriving from the right, however, has already got the upper hand by virtue of showing up with TWO horses not one.

Could do with a cleanThese particular grilles aren’t really helped by sitting within such shabby-looking walls. Someone needs to attend to those tiles with a cloth.

Finally we have Manor House:

Manor maketh manI’m not sure whether this is meant to be an idealised version of the interior of the eponymous building, someone’s back garden replete with a snoozing owl and pot plant, or maybe the grounds of the manor itself. That fine-looking portal on the far right suggests it could be the latter. Those aren’t your average garden gates.

House proudAs with the tiles at Aldgate East, an even-closer inspection of all three grilles reveals the artist has smuggled in a namecheck for himself:

Harold the greatAnd who would begrudge him that? For here are a trio of objects that are properly worth looking out for on Underground platforms – that is, looking out for not merely to avoid seeing.

70. The escalators at Angel

2 December 2012
Northern line, Numbers 51-75, Objects, Zone 1
2 Comments

Angel, angel, down we go togetherThey’re not quite the longest in western Europe; that honour goes to a station on the Stockholm metro.

They’re not even the longest in the UK, being just a single metre shorter than the wooden ones at the Tyne cyclist and pedestrian tunnel.

They are, however, the longest on the London Underground.

And they might have ended up even longer, were it not for the need to anticipate an interchange, at some point in the increasingly distant future, with the long-proposed Chelsea-Hackney line, hence the (for now) superfluous concourse that stops you being carried all the way down to the platforms in one go.

Nonetheless the escalators at Angel are still a feat to behold and a thrill on which to ascend…

Up-diddly-upand descend…

Down-diddly-downThe strip lighting that runs all the way along each side gives the place a touch of the-future-as-imagined-in-the-mid-1970s, despite being built in the early 1990s. This kind of sensation is always a good thing.

The length of the journey tends to promote good escalator etiquette. This is another boon. People seem to settle down when they realise they’re in for a longer-than-usual ride, and as a result there’s less jostling, prodding and (most heinous of all) STANDING ON THE LEFT.

Then there’s the angle of the escalators. They are so steep that you can’t see the top when you start from the bottom, and vice versa. While this can be exciting, I’m guessing it can also be a bit vertiginous. In which case I would suggest gazing off to the side, where a colourful supply of unchallenging reading matter shuffles by like an ailing rotoscope.

Commercial reignAngel, angel, down we go together.

69. The river over Sloane Square

28 November 2012
Circle line, District line, Numbers 51-75, Objects, Zone 1
5 Comments

Westbourne, ho!This is possibly the most inelegant object I’ve featured on the blog so far. Steady those trembling nerves – it’s a giant metal tube!

Inside, however, is one of a famously elusive and vaguely bewitching brood: London’s lost rivers.

Sloane Square station was opened, rather sweetly, on Christmas Eve 1868. Inaugural passengers, perhaps in search of a last-minute festive goose or clementine, would have had good cause to wonder as to the identity of the iron vessel hung in a decidedly non-festive fashion above their heads.

But this was no unexceptional strut or inert girder. Contained within was what remained of the River Westbourne, whose contents were en route from Hampstead Heath to the Thames.

The 'Bourne identityKnowledge of this particular waterway no doubt was and still is kept to a minimum. How much of the river still runs through the pipe is possibly of an equally small magnitude. But there it goes, trickling – or maybe pouring – over the heads of travellers, a minor but rather fascinating engineering marvel.

You can get a better idea of the route of the river (if not a clearer view of the pipe) by peering through some of the railings between the buildings that surround the station:

These pictures just keep getting betterI believe you used to be able to get a much clearer view from up here, before residents tired of a) the sight of trains b) the sight of people struggling to catch sight of trains c) the sight of anything except their own valuable homes. This is sad, because there are far more objectionable things in the Sloane Square neighbourhood than a grey conduit.

Such was the ingenuity of the Victorians, however, that a channel of water passing directly through the location of a proposed station became not a dilemma but an opportunity. And such was their fortitude that the opportunity survives to this day, inviting odd glances, sporadic frowns and the occasional knowing smile towards the taming of this ‘Bourne supremacy.