Archive

Piccadilly line

44. The platforms at Ickenham

23 August 2012
Metropolitan line, Numbers 26-50, Piccadilly line, Sensations, Zone 6
4 Comments

Country-spiedMetro-land is not quite a thing of the past.

That vast sales pitch-cum-sunlit upland of the early 20th century hasn’t completely disappeared into the margins of a Betjeman anthology or the back room of a transport museum. If you look for it with keen eyes, or listen hard enough, you’ll find the traces.

All along the farthest western reaches of the Metropolitan line the conceit still lingers. Someone threw an idea across Middlesex so profound as to resonate over a 100 years later.

It’s there in the rustle of leaves, the sigh of a sash window, the creak of a set of points, the song of a bird whose location you can’t quite place… All common sensations, but all somehow elevated by virtue of geography to become both part-mundane and part-magical.

The entrance to Ickenham station can make you shudder with despair:

*shudder*But its platforms can make you shiver with delight:

The joy of MiddlesexHere is where Metro-land can, if you so desire, be wished back into all-consuming existence.

Sit by these trees and imagine yourself surrounded by roads bordered with the softest of soft suburban grass, patronised by neatly turned-out vehicles peopled by neatly turned-out passengers, and lined with the most stylish of provincial amenities: a world that, if it ever really existed, fired just as many useful imaginations as it did useless realities.

This, at least, is realDon’t linger too long, however, for the fantasy can only ever be a fleeting one – especially if you’re heading westbound and the next station is the grisly Hillingdon.

Metro-land was once promoted seriously if rather loftily as “a country with elastic borders that each visitor can draw for himself”. That country might have long passed from the lexicon of poets and advertisers alike, but its borders can still be drawn, even though – like anything this old and worn – the elastic’s almost gone.

42. The ticket hall at Rayners Lane

16 August 2012
Architecture, Metropolitan line, Numbers 26-50, Piccadilly line, Zone 5
9 Comments

Life in the vast LaneI’ve already praised the views within Rayners Lane. The views without are a different kind of treat:

A fresh pair of RaynersThe ticket hall resembles a ginormous cube, studded with dozens of neatly aligned rectangular windows running up each side. The building reaches to what could be described as a preposterously unnecessary height. I’m describing it as a preposterous necessity.

Not only is it stylish, trim and full of character. It also possesses Tardis-like qualities – and I mean that in the true sense of the word, family sci-fi fans.

In other words, when the ticket hall is viewed externally and then internally, it seems to exist in two different places at the same time. So much light pours in through what must number over a hundred individual window panes that, once you’ve stepped through the entrance, your surroundings seem more capacious than when you inspected them from the outside.

Relative dimensionsThe grids within grids and cascades of quadrilaterals make it feel a bit like you’ve stumbled into a multi-dimensional sheet of graph paper.

Step back outside, and you wonder again how what you experienced a few seconds ago matches what you are seeing now.

Next stop, SkaroIf only Doctor Who had a spaceship that looked like this.

37. The world clock at Piccadilly Circus

16 July 2012
Bakerloo line, Numbers 26-50, Objects, Piccadilly line, Zone 1
3 Comments

Minute minutesIt was the middle of the rush hour when I took this picture, yet the crowds of people passing around me didn’t give this object the time of day.

Which was a pity, as it was doing the very same back at them, and with considerably more style.

The world, clockedThe linear clock at Piccadilly Circus is an overlooked gem. It sits snugly within the inner wall of the station’s circular entrance hall at almost the furthest point possible from the main escalators, so perhaps its failure to grab attention isn’t that surprising.

But even the people who were brushing against it barely cast it a tiny glance. Perhaps they’d seen it before, twice daily, as regular as, ooh, clockwork. Or perhaps they just didn’t have – I should stop this – enough time.

Still, their unwillingness to pause and stare did afford me an almost clear shot of the installation, save for one gentleman who, having seen what I was up to, made a point of remaining stubbornly motionless, my fierce glares bouncing off him like platitudinous ping-pong balls.

Time, gentleman, pleaseThe clock dates from the station’s redesign in the late 1920s. The central strip scrolls imperceptibly across the map of the world at the same speed as the planet’s rotation. As such it is possible to see, roughly, what the time is anywhere around the globe at any point of the day or night. Wonderfully simple and simply wonderful.

Responsibility for such a suavely elegant and restful timepiece lies with architect Charles Holden and builder John Mowlem and Co, who collaborated on the whole of the station.

Piccadilly Circus entrance hall can feel a bit like a spinning top at its busiest moments, with passengers whirling in, up, round, down and out. You have to fight against the flow of people to even stand still. No wonder the clock doesn’t get much of an audience.

Its time in the sun was probably in its infancy, when people strolled rather than stormed around the station. But fortunately, even if nobody is looking, somewhere the sun is always shining for this antique watchman, and hopefully always will.

Where the sun never sets...