114. The interior of Chiswick Park

13 July 2013
Architecture, District line, Numbers 101-125, Zone 3
1 Comment

Park and recreationThis is my idea of parks and recreation.

A turn around the cool, sighing interior of this station is more than a match for a ramble across one of London’s postal districts packed like squares of wheat.

You can breathe deeply in a place like this. The sense of height and empty space is liberating, and you can’t help but draw it down deep into your lungs.

Some of that feeling is done by sleight-of-hand: a deft architectural trick, a delicious equation (always the best kind) of artificial light and geometry.

But some of it is by design, and literally so. Circles and straight lines might be the everyday fundamentals of engineering, but applied with a dab of genius, they can be fundamentally marvellous every day:

Drum majorIt’s another of Charles Holden’s buildings that was inspired, like Arnos Grove, by the mouthwatering modernism of the wheelbarrows-full-of-money Weimar-era Germany.

I’d love it to survive for a millennium: the ultimate cold dish of revenge to serve upon the “1000-year Reich” that stamped Weimar out of existence, just around the time Chiswick Park was built.

I was late getting awayEven in rush hour this station would still feel empty. For every circulating throng of people, there’s four times as much air doing the same thing. Not that you’d have much time, or cause, to notice it when you’re rushing for a train.

It will leave its tingling imprint, however, somewhere in the back of your mind as you try to adjust to the suddenly compact and stuffy confines of a carriage.

That, and the thought of high windows, the sun-comprehending glass, and the deep blue air.

High windows

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.