Zone 2

It stretches over two football pitches in length and is deeper than a six-storey house. It plays host to over 40 million pairs of feet every year. It took only nine months to design. It is the jaw-dropping jewel of the modern Underground.

I would add it needs no introduction, but I see I’ve already given it one.

Canary Wharf station doesn’t have any equals. It is its own reference point. You can make objective comparisons of an empirical kind, as I did above. But you can only grasp at subjective ones, and even then words never quite suffice. The nearest sensation to descending into the very pit of this colossal trench is probably that experienced further round the Jubilee line at Westminster, although that doesn’t boast Canary Wharf’s vast panoramas or cascades of natural light.

The whole interior feels wider than a mile. And yes, it is impossible not to cross in style.

This is the London Underground at its most courageous and its most imaginative. The scale and ambition was deliberately pitched so as to anticipate what has indeed come to pass: that the station would eventually have to serve far more people than the 50,000 a day estimated at its opening in 1999.

And that number keeps on rising. Perhaps a point will be reached when there are too many people – too many, at least, to allow the visitor to fully appreciate the attention to detail lavished on both the mighty and the miniature.

Until then, Canary Wharf station remains just as much a statement of London’s swagger and personality as Tower Bridge or the Olympic stadium or the King’s Road.

Passage through it, beginning at the mighty west entrance, demands to be soundtracked with something like Henry Mancini’s title music for Arabesque, or Temptation by New Order, or Marvin Hamlisch’s Bond 77 theme. Just make sure you time the latter so you hit the escalator at 0:27.

40. The exterior of Mornington Crescent

31 July 2012

Architecture, Northern line, Numbers 26-50, Zone 2

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In previous entries I’ve been a bit down on the efforts of the architect Leslie Green, and not without cause. When you’ve seen one of his two dozen or so creations, there’s little point seeing any more. But I’m prepared to make an exception for Mornington Crescent.

[Cue enormously intrusive cheer from an over-enthusiastic Radio 4 quiz show audience.]

The reason I’m making an exception is because of its location.

The station is not boxed in on all sides by other buildings, thereby rendering its uniform design and texture all the more joyless. It is not undermined by its own limited aspirations, as so many of Green’s buildings seem to be. And it is not cowed by its surroundings, in the process diminishing its personality still further.

Instead it sits grandly at the bottom of Camden High Street, straddling a junction that allows it not one but two grand facades, which the sun flatters and to which your eye is drawn no matter from what direction you approach.

Mornington Crescent station is great in spite of, not because of, its architecture. It also, unlike its architect’s work elsewhere on the Underground, and the panel game to which it has given its name, makes perfect sense.