Take a good look at the photo above. Does anything seem unusual about the house on the right, 23 Leinster Gardens, compared to the one on the left, number 22?

Something definitely looks a bit odd about the windows in number 23:

And the front door appears a bit suspect as well:

This isn’t like the door of 10 Downing Street, which can only be opened from the inside.

This is a door through which, to paraphrase Flanders and Swann, no-one departs and no-one arrives. For this door belongs to a house that does not exist.

Like Dolly Parton, Blackpool and extreme political organisations of both left and right, it is all front. And the reason is the London Underground – or, as it would have been pronounced when this elaborate facade was constructed, London’s Under-Ground.

The trains that first ran along the railway line that passes below Leinster Gardens were steam-powered. The locomotives needed somewhere to vent the fumes that built up inside the engines. But where to do this, in a neighbourhood jostling with upmarket residences for whom a large gap in the ground would appear both unsightly and undignified?

The answer, as with most tricks of the eye, can be found round the back:

Number 23 Leinster Gardens, and also its neighbour number 24, were erected as frontispieces, not houses.

Behind them, what once were steam-driven trains on the Metropolitan Railway, and which are now Circle and District line services, rumble directly below what otherwise would be dining rooms, pantries and sculleries:

It’s a typically British compromise between the aspirational and the functional. What’s out of sight to the residents of and visitors to the expensive flats and hotels on Leinster Gardens can also be put out of mind, unless you happen to glance out of a back window. Which, back in the 1860s, nobody of “sound” upbringing would ever have thought of doing.

Meanwhile the exposed tracks are hidden from ground level by a brick wall. Only the mildly curious, and the obsessive chronicler, would think to peek above it.

Mind the gap:

47. The arcade at South Kensington

5 September 2012

Architecture, Circle line, District line, Numbers 26-50, Piccadilly line, Zone 1

2 Comments

There are very few station entrances on the Underground through which you want not to walk, but to saunter, or even sashay.

South Kensington has one of them:

Everything about this entrance, the layout, the lettering, the curve of the pillars, the curl of the brackets, screams – or rather sighs – breezy elegance.

This isn’t somewhere to slope or sidle. It’s a place to step jauntily, or to mooch enigmatically, or even to promenade wistfully.

Given its proximity to the Royal Albert Hall, the last of these traits seems particularly fitting.

If all of this seems rather fanciful, then that’s because the arcade that garnishes South Kensington like ribbons on a teacosy is itself fanciful.

It is shamelessly Victorian in both pretence and purpose. It is anti-modern, in that it tries to mask rather than celebrate the real purpose of its existence. Thanks to the arcade, the Underground at South Kensington can feel a bit like an undignified sideshow: the equivalent of someone coughing during the performance of a light opera.

It’s a delight in spite of rather than because of its role as part of a public transport utility, and that makes it rather an anachronism on this blog. I don’t think, however, that such a distinction diminishes its status as a great thing about the Underground. On the contrary, it sparkles with a personality that is simply different from, not necessarily inferior to, the parade of stylistic icons that march up the Piccadilly and Jubilee lines.

Plus it also looks gorgeous in the sunshine. Fancy a stroll?

46. The uplighters at Southgate

3 September 2012

Numbers 26-50, Objects, Piccadilly line, Zone 4

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I was chased out of Southgate station for taking this picture.

It’s bemusing how arbitrary the “rules” about photography inside the Underground are implemented. In most locations staff turn a blind eye. In some they even look on with encouragement, especially at the station I’ve earmarked for number 50 (spoilers!).

But there have been a few – and only a few – where stern gazes have been topped with stern words, and on one occasion, here at Southgate, stern actions. I was followed back up the escalator and off the premises, my behaviour judged disruptive enough to merit the kind of treatment I’d expect to see meted out to a bottle-wielding stoner than a camera-wielding loner.

The whole episode rather spoiled my appreciation of the uplighters at Southgate, which only now, several months later, I realise are utterly gorgeous.

They are originals – survivors of the inter-war years, stoical and mute, speaking volumes but saying nothing. They radiate history as well as illumination. They inject a dose of the exotic into the otherwise pedestrian business of moving between daylight and the deep.

They are also products of the delicious imagination of Charles Holden, the man who dreamed up the station’s brave, eternally-beguiling exterior.

An exterior I got to know rather better than the interior.

—150 great things about the Underground

An unofficial birthday salute to a public transport titan

48. The ‘houses’ in Leinster Gardens

47. The arcade at South Kensington

46. The uplighters at Southgate