Jubilee Line

Please note: All of these sketching trips on the London Underground were made well before any Corona virus restrictions were introduced.

When it first opened in 1979, I think that the full extent of new tunnels for the line totalled something in the area of two and a half miles. Which makes it a little surprising that the line took 8 years to build. There was some extensive remodelling to combine the old Strand and Trafalgar Stations into Charing Cross station, which also meant that the existing Charing Cross Station was renamed Embankment. In terms of length, though, by far the majority of the original Jubilee Line ran on existing tracks, which had previously served the Bakerloo line, and before that, the Metropolitan. So it’s little surprise when I arrive at Stanmore station early doors to see that this 1930s Charles Clark station resembles his stations on the Watford branch of the Met. 7 Years after the station opened this part of the Metropolitan was transferred to the Bakerloo. I don’t really know what prompts me to say this, but I can’t help seeing being transferred to the Bakerloo line as something of a demotion in terms of importance.

I’m determined to get my walking in early while I’m still fresh, or at least less stale than I might be later on. It’s an almost straight walk of about 20 minutes to Canons Park, and since it’s not raining this time and I don’t therefore have to control an umbrella, I take the opportunity to google this next station. Apparently it’s the least used station on the Jubilee Line, which isn’t bad going since at this point I can’t help thinking it’s probably up against some pretty stiff competition. The station itself looks old and tired enough to be the original, and I’m afraid it’s a bit of a sad brick box, which is not enhanced by the concrete panels above the entrance. Nor is it really helped by being built onto the side of a viaduct either. Due to the small number of people ever buying tickets from the station, the ticket office has been closed for over a decade.

A glance at the Jubilee Line Map brings the thought that this stretch of the Jubilee Line lends itself peculiarly well to a mental diversion which I like to think of as the Personfication Game ™. Basically you have to take a station’s name, and then describe the imaginary person who the station might have been named after.  So Stan Moore (Stanmore) turns out to have been named after the first used car salesman in Greater London. He is also credited with having been the first to affect the sheepskin coat/trilby hat/fake cockney patter combination.  Canon Spark, on the other hand, is named after a 19^th century cleric found in the pages of novels of Anthony Trollope’s lesser known novel “Can You Believe it’s Not Butter?”, a well meaning soul who falls into all manner of scrapes from agreeing to be the guarantor of a loan made to one of his less trustworthy parishioners.

I continue walking for another half hour or so, until I reach Queensbury Station. Queen Sperri, I decide, was the titular head of the tiny Pillock Islands protectorate, who would have made almost no impact whatsoever when she appeared in the procession of foreign monarchs and heads of state  for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, were it not for the fact that she fell out of her carriage due to over indulging on fermented coconut milk, her islands’ chief, indeed, only export. I can’t imagine that the Metropolitan’s chief architect, Charles Clark, wasted much midnight oil on this design, if indeed it is one of his, which I haven’t been able to find either confirmation or denial of in my research. It’s an original 30s station, but it’s little more than a hole in the wall. It’s like the street level of, say, Northfields or Acton Town, but just one small part of it, with no tower rising above it, just an uninspired commercial or residential block which I’m guessing was built at the same time.That’s enough walking for now. Back to the platform, and a ten minute wait for the next train.

King Sperri (Kingsbury) after whom our next station was named, was the previous title of Queen Sperri before the gender realignment procedures. Sorry, that one was too easy. My faithful phone connects me to Wikipedia, which doesn’t actually reveal whether this is a Charles Clark original, but if it isn’t, it’s very much in his suburban vernacular, as I hope you can see from the sketch. You could plonk this station between Watford and Croxey, and it would fit in perfectly, if there were any need of such a station, which there isn’t. Wikipedia does say that this station is actually further away from the Kingsbury district proper than Neasden station. Well, there’s a lot to say about Neasden when we get there, so I think I’ll leave that for later. As for our trip, well, the next station after Kingsbury is Wembley Park, and the first station of today’s trip that we’ve already bagged on a previous one. Don’t worry, there will be a few more of them before the day is out.

Neasden is an inversion of Den Knees, of course. He was a fourth rate stand up comedian from Bootle, who disgraced himself during his one and only appearance on the bill at the Royal Variety Performance by singing the ribald song “If you pay me fare you can take me . . . “ Sorry, I think I’ve flogged that particular old grey mare enough now. Speaking of which, apparently the Jubilee line was always planned to be grey on the map. Its proposed original name was the Fleet Line, and it was going to be a darker, battleship grey – sort of a pun on the word Fleet, which as we all know is also the name of one of London’s lost rivers. When the decision was made to go with the name the Jubilee Line, after the Queen’s 1977 silver jubilee, the decision was made to go with a lighter grey. ‘It represents silver’ spokespeople explained, thus giving us all a foretaste of the moment in Blackadder II when Percy invents green gold, only to be told “That’s the thing about Gold, Percy. It’s gold. What you have invented, if indeed it has a name, is some green.” They may have intended the line to be silver, but what they gave us was grey. Now, I don’t remember a grey jubilee. I do remember the silver one.

Thinking back, maybe it was because I was 13 at the time, but the Silver Jubilee seemed like a much bigger thing to me than the Golden Jubilee of 2002, or even the Diamond Jubilee of ten years later. Perhaps it was because even in 1977 people were a lot less cynical or critical about the Royals. Perhaps it was because it had been 42 years since the previous one, a period which encompassed a World War , and the prolonged economic aftermath. Whatever the case, I remember doing my paper round and milk round in the mean streets of Hanwell and West Ealing, and for months it seemed a lot of houses were decked out with red, white and blue bunting. By way of contrast, in 2002 I was living in Port Talbot, on the main road from the station to local publicly owned stately home Margam Park. As part of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee visit to the provinces, she was to be driven from the station to the Park in the late afternoon. When I left for work that morning, there was not a single piece of bunting or union flag to be seen in the street or on the houses. When I returned from school that day, the Council had been up and down the street, which was now festooned with bunting and flags. I think the one they put in my front garden is still in my garage. If they want it back they only have to ask. I’ve heard it said that the Queen thinks that the world smells of fresh paint, and I can understand why. About 50 yards after she drove past our house, her motorcade was brought to an unexpected stop when Port Talbot’s most famous prostitute jumped out in front of her car, and removed her coat to flash Her Majesty and His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh.

This display of lese-majeste wouldn’t have happened in 1977. Back then, the occupants of a house in Leighton Road had tastefully cut out letters of red, white and blue, with which they tastefully spelled out the message ‘Sod the Jubilee’ in  their front window. My Nan, by no means an ardent royalist, knocked on the door and calmly informed the residents that they deserved a brick through their window, merely expressing to their faces what most residents of the street were saying behind their backs.

Back in the present day, I’m tempted to take a wander, since Neasden is home to an absolutely wonderful Hindu Temple. London has been a truly multicultural city since well before my birth, and the Hindu community can be justifiably proud to have contributed such a building to our shared architectural heritage.

Less impressively, Neasden is also home to Private Eye’s fictional Neasden F.C. and their two biggest (for which read only) fans, Sid and Doris Bonkers. 

Dollis Hill takes its name from another performer, a contemporary of young, working class actors like Michael Caine and Terence Stamp (only nowhere near as good). He made his only film appearance in “Hey, Pretty Baby” in 1965, a half soaked story about a young fashion photographer’s adventures and misadventures in and around Swinging London, ending with his character, Mik, committing suicide by jumping to his death from the revolving restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower. The station named after him, then, is our first example of a Jubilee Line subterranean station, and the two entrances really are nothing worthy of note. It strikes me that if the majority of tube stations were subterranean like this, then there’s no likelihood that I would ever have embarked on this challenge, yet my experience of European underground railways is that this is the norm, rather than the exception that it is in London.

When Willesden Green station was first built in the late 1870s, named after a well known late Victorian thriller writer, it was part of the Metropolitan railway. Willesden Green was the pseudonym of Hilda Gusset, who is widely seen as an influence on the early works of Agatha Christie. Green’s most famous novels, “The Music Hall Murders”, “More Music Hall Murders”, and “Why Do These Idiots Keep Coming to the Music Hall when People Keep Getting Murdered There?” were later made into early British silent movies, which many believe were responsible for the start of the demise of the British film industry.

Okay, so back to reality. The current station was built in 1925, and its one of Charles Clark’s Edwardian throwback stations. If that comes across as an insult, it’s really not meant to be, bearing in mind that this period of his work also encompasses Paddington Praed Street and Great Portland Street stations. According to my research this one is a listed building not so much for the exterior, impressive though this is, as for the original green tiling inside. Personally I think the very art deco diamond shaped station clock on the exterior is worth the price of admission by itself, but then considering the fact that you don’t have to pay to walk through the entrance the station, then that’s maybe not so much of a boast.

Kilburn was named after ‘Mad Billy Kilburn’ a semi mythological highwayman who plied the roads leading to the capital from the North in the early 18^th century. A one time colleague of the more famous and successful Dick Turpin, Kilburn perished from exhaustion after making a drunken bet that he could run from London to York faster than Turpin could ride there on horseback. The station itself is a bit of a strange looking beast. Most of it seems to be from the 30s, but I’ve never yet seen a canopy which slants across the entrance like the one here, between the two bridges carrying the lines over the road in front. The canopy, and the two bridges, give the station a gloomy, wedged in feel, and it looks most uncomfortable. However I can forgive the station a lot because it has those art deco shelters on the platform, with large thin canopies and rounded, streamlined ends.

While I’m waiting on the platform I toy with reversing the name of the next station, West Hampstead, to give me Hampstead West, an 18^th century industrialist and philanthropist, but this is all becoming too contrived now, and so I give it up as a bad job.

When I alight at the station I notice that it too has the platform buildings that I like so much. However there is no similarity between Kilburn’s exterior, and this station’s. Wikipedia isn’t exactly clear, but it does say that when the platforms were rebuilt in 1939, the original station building was retained. Well, the original building dates from 1879. This could well be it, the whole thing has a kind of Arts and Crafts feel to it, which stylistically would be about right for it. Confusingly, there is also a West Hampstead Overground station, which, although stylistically quite distinct from the Underground one, appears to be of a similar age. Apparently there have been plans to link both stations for decades, but when I visited I couldn’t find any link between the stations which didn’t involve physically leaving one and walking to the other.

Between West Hampstead, and the next station I need to bag, there are no fewer than 8 other stops. This is not so much a trip through hyperspace, as a voyage through a wormhole now. Not only will we cross Central London from north to south, we will also cross the river again. I pick up my paper, and pretend to read the TV listings, which allows me to indulge in one of my favourite tube pastimes, earwigging other people’s conversations. This is not something you get to enjoy very often on the Tube. There’s an unwritten etiquette which I think all regular tube users pick up via osmosis at an early age, which can be boiled down to a few simple rules:-

*You do not talk about tube etiquette

*In fact, you don’t talk about anything on the tube

*You do not stare at your fellow passengers

*In fact you try to look at them as little as possible

*You should in no way, no matter how crowded, let any part of your body impinge on any body part belonging to anybody else

*Should anyone else around you break said rules, you must in no way acknowledge their transgression. Doing so only encourages them.

Alright, I’m maybe exaggerating a little, but not by much, I’d say. How this came to be, I don’t know, but it’s so engrained in me that when I moved to Wales, sitting on a bus where it was quite normal for complete strangers to try to strike up a conversation with you was quite a disconcerting experience.

I read in 2016 of an American chap called Jonathan Dunne. In 2016, after several years working in London, he still hadn’t really come to terms with the tight lipped nature of tube travel. He printed up leaflets, and created badges, with the roundel and the words ‘Tube chat?’ the point being to signal to other passengers that the wearer was open to having a conversation. The upshot? Well, this may come as a surprise, bearing in mind the usual calm and reasonable views regularly expressed by Twitter users, but there was some thing of a storm of negativity unleashed, and photos of various mock ups of similar badges saying “Wake me up if a dog gets on” and the like. I don’t know how Mr. Dunne fared in the long term, but I have to say that I haven’t yet seen a single one of these badges on any of my trips, which doesn’t suggest an overwhelming success rate.

But the two ladies of indeterminate age in front of me don’t seem to know any of this. Or they don’t care. They’re already in the middle of a conversation as I sit down, and I soon find myself engrossed in the darker one’s narrative, which seems to centre on her father’s recent funeral.

“Would’ve been alright,” she announces to the carriage,” if the wheel hadn’t come off the undertaker’s trolley getting the coffin out of the back of the hearse. “

“Oh no!” gasps her friend, “that must’ve been awful for you!”

“S’alright,” she sniffs, “Dad wouldn’t’ve minded. He always loved it when things went wrong. He told me that he spent two of the happiest hours of his life when he got stuck in a lift which broke down in John Lewis’s once.”

I’m all ears, but she doesn’t elaborate on exactly what made the time stuck in the lift so memorable for her father. However her friend comes out with a comment which I in no way pretend to understand the connotations of. “Well, he would, I suppose, what with him being in the Masons.”

Not being a member of the most templaresque of charitable organisations, I cannot even begin to explain why it is that she believes that a Freemason should derive more pleasure from being trapped in a lift than the rest of us hoi-polloi, but the dark haired lady seems to know what she means, as she nods in agreement. I wonder what conversational gems the rest of the journey to Southwark will yield, but am quite disappointed when the pair of them alight at Swiss Cottage.

From Green Park onwards we’re on the late 90s Jubilee Line extension. The former terminus, Charing Cross, is now completely bypassed. I remember watching a contemporary TV documentary at the time when the extension was being tunnelled, which expressed what was, at the time, a very genuine concern that the line passing through Westminster could undermine the Houses of Parliament. The extension line was created through a modern tunnelling technique which, if I understood it correctly, involved spraying the concrete lining of the tunnels as they went, made possible by freezing the tunnel walls during construction. Officially named the New Austrian Tunnelling Method, this was a controversial choice for the extension because critics believed it significantly increased the risks of collapse during construction. If I remember correctly the Elizabeth Tower, known as Big Ben after the clock bell, did develop a tiny lean during the construction.

If I’m correct, every station we pass through from Waterloo to West Ham, with the exception of London Bridge, is a new build specifically for the extension. This surprised me when I was doing my pre-research, since I thought I remembered passing a Southwark station once or twice when trying a different cycling route home to Ealing from New Cross in the mid 80s, but my 1985 tube map confirms that no such beast existed at the time. Heaven alone knows which station I’m thinking of.

Southwark turns out to be a very good place to start our contemplation of the new stations of the extension, though. When Frank Pick initiated the Northern Line extension in the 20s, and then the Piccadilly Line extension in the 30s, we’ve seen that he was inspired by following the most modern trends in architecture, principally by engaging the services of Charles Holden, and at the time these stations might well have appeared as something out of the future. Maybe they don’t appear to us in this way now, but to my eyes they have stood the test of time. Well, I can’t predict how we’ll view the Jubilee Line extension stations in 70 years time, but I can certainly say that although totally different in style to Holden’s work, the best of them too have an ultra modern appearance, and even though they’re already over 20 years old, most of them still appear fresh, and like something out of the future.

I’m not familiar with Sir Richard McCormack, the architect who designed Southwark station, but I like what he’s done here in a rather cramped site. As you’ve probably already figured out, I like curves, and this design uses them rather well to my opinion. If you must use concrete, then this is a pretty good way of doing it, and the light blue tiles of the canopy, curving gently upwards to the dark blue strip with the station name work very nicely in my opinion.

I wish I could feel as positive about Bermondsey station. This one was designed by Ian Ritchie Architects, and they can point to a very prestigious prize winning body of work throughout Europe. In fact when you look at the work they have produced in Europe, you can’t help wondering why they designed Bermondsey station in such a conventional, nondescript way. It’s a big, low, square shed basically, and it wouldn’t look out of place in any out of town retail park across the UK. It’s such a shame considering that I had high hopes for it after Southwark. The architects, to be fair, have done a good job of bringing natural light into the main building, but once you step outside it’s a real case of – oh, is that it, then? Its lack of imagination is highlighted by its proximity to St. James’ Church. I used to see this from the raised section of track outside London Bridge on my way back to New Cross, and it always struck me as a good thing that such a fine church could be standing in an area which was undergoing radical transformation at the time. It was built in 1829, but looks much older, a cousin of the sort of thing that Christopher Wren was churning out just over 100 years earlier.

Thankfully my sense of disappointment is completely dispelled by Canada Water Station. If I’m looking for a station which, in 80 years time, another sketcher might approach with the same sense of admiration with which I approached, for example, Holden’s Arnos Grove station, then I’ve found it. The comparison with Arnos Grove is deliberate. Now, I don’t know if Buro Happold, who designed it, were specifically inspired by Arnos Grove, or any other existing tube station, but the construction of the drum which forms the main part of the station buildings is inspired. Of course, Arnos Grove’s drum is brick, with glass panels, while Canada Water is completely glazed. This makes it a wonderfully light and airy construction, as impressive inside as it is outside. Arnos Grove’s entrance block is above ground, while Canada Water’s is below, and constructed with the strength to bear the building of a 9 storey block above it. I kind of hope this never happens. No building is perfect, but Canada Water comes pretty close as it is.

Waiting for the next train, I play the meaning of Liff game, and define Canada Water thus: ‘Canada Water (n. colloquial) Canada Water is a term used within the brewing industry to refer to any terrible beer which sells in inexplicable quantities, despite the fact that nobody actually seems to like it. Famous Canada Waters of the second half of the 20^th century include Kestrel Lager, Watneys Red Barrel and Ind Coope Double Diamond. ‘

I visited Canary Wharf Station a couple of years ago, when playing in the Brain of Mensa Final in the London Hilton. The best way to get there, I’d found, was tube to Canary Wharf, then ferry across to the hotel. Now, if Canada Water looks like the futuristic child of Arnos Grove, then it’s fair to say that Canary Wharf station looks like the futuristic child of Newbury Park. The gracefully arched entranceway isn’t on the same scale as the earlier Central Line Station, but it is reminiscent of it. I’m not all that surprised to read that Canary Wharf is the busiest station outside Travelcard Zone1. I’m rather more surprised to find that the station was actually built with this in mind, and that it usually copes admirably with the peak flow of passengers each day. Where the design aesthetic wins over Newbury Park is that there are actually two of these canopies, with a very agreeable green space in between them. The views across the river are great, and I have to say that this is one part of my home town which makes me feel more like a tourist than any other. Docklands was being developed in the mid 80s on the occasions I passed through on my way back to uni, but all of this was still in the future.

I’m tempted to try to walk as close to the Thames as I can on the way to North Greenwich, but it’s mid afternoon, and I’d like to finish with the Jubilee Line now while I’m feeling comfortably tired, before it develops into uncomfortable fatigue.

I did visit North Greenwich station some years back, when taking my youngest two daughters to the Treasures of Tutankhamen exhibition in the Dome, which would have been about 2007. Back in 1972 I was really disappointed not to be taken to the Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum, so there was no way I was going to miss this one. Very good it was too, apart from the absence of the famous death mask, and the incredibly expensive prices in the gift shop.

The Dome, or the O2 Arena, or whatever you wish to call it, is of course the main reason for the existence of North Greenwich station, indeed for the fact that the Jubilee line extension did actually get built. You see, the thing about Greenwich, especially the part where the Dome is, is that until the tube reached here, it was a bit of a bugger to get to. Not exactly difficult, but it could take ages. There was no way that the Dome could ever expect to attract the 12 million visitors it projected in 2000 without the Jubilee line. In the end, only about 6 million people visited the Dome. So this was either a crushing failure, or, considering the fact that this made it by far and away the UK’s most popular attraction in 2000, a huge success. I tend to recall that the Dome itself was originally given a shelf life of 10 years, after which it would need extensive work, or being pulled down. Fact is that it now looks to be as permanent an attraction as any other London landmark. I was intrigued to notice that it takes up almost exactly as much ground area as its Victorian predecessor, the Crystal Palace. We can only hope that it never suffers the same eventual fate.

With the nearby Dome to content with, North Greenwich station is always in danger of being overlooked in architectural terms. The station is another gleaming metal and glass job. I really like the canopy which curves around the back of the station, then undulates across the front in a series of graceful waves. This station was designed by Alsop, Lyall and Störmer, and I have to say that they have designed a modern station which sits comfortably alongside Southwark, Canada Water and Canary Wharf. As with those stations, it’s 20 years old but the design still seems fresh and inspiring.

The Jubilee line carries on all the way to Stratford, but my last unbagged station on the line is Canning Town, and so it’s where this trip officially ends. I have to say that the Northern entrance, which is the main entrance to the station, looks tired and uninspiring. Concrete panels rarely look inspiring, and once they’d had a few years to get dirty, as these have, they look even less appealing. Even the parts which make less conspicuous use of concrete and more use of glass and metal are flat and rectangular, and speak more of dull bus station than imaginative tube station design. Thankfully, though, the station also has a southern entrance, and this is the one I’ve sketched. Okay, this is little more than a lift entrance, but blimey, it displays more imagination than the rest of the station put together. Curves always play well with me, and circular structures even more so. The glazed panels around the top of the drum below the canopy are a lovely touch, and the sort of thing which lifts this little part of the station  and allows it into the ranks of those which have gone before.

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So ends my penultimate trip, and the last trip which involves concentrating on one specific line. Looking back, I’m agreeably surprised to find that the trip has given me a new found respect for the Jubilee which I didn’t have before. When it was originally opened, I felt that it was a little bit of a cheat, considering that it didn’t have one new station, and those which now belonged solely to the Jubilee had been taken without so much as a by your leave from the Bakerloo. Mind you, for many of those, they had originally been taken by the Bakerloo from the long suffering Metropolitan, so I suppose turn about is fair play. However with the extension to the line, the Jubilee seems to have come into its own, with a run of quite distinctive stations which approaches the Holden stations on the southern end of the northern line for impact. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that generally the south of the river punches far above its weight in terms of station quality. Granted, I have yet to bag the Victoria Line duo of Vauxhall and Brixton, but out of the 27 stations south of the river that I’ve already visited, I’d say that Kew Gardens, Richmond, Wimbledon Park, Southfields, East Putney, Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Clapham Common, Clapham South, Balham, Tooting Bec, Tooting Broadway, Colliers Wood, South Wimbledon, Southwark, Canary Wharf, North Greenwich and the southern entrance of Canning Town are all attractive stations which are worth going out of your way to see. That’s 18 a whopping 70%. Even if Vauxhall and Brixton turn out to be complete duds, that will still leave us in the high 60s. A less impressive fact, although no less significant, is that of the  other stations – London Bridge, Borough, Oval, Stockwell, Clapham North, Borough, Morden, the worst that you can say about them is that they’re a bit boring or nondescript.

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One more trip to do then, and I have half an idea that it may actually prove to be the trickiest of all. It isn’t the number of stations, although 8 Victoria Line stations and 7 Hammersmith and City Line Stations make a significant total of 15 to do in one day. No, it’s the logistical nightmare of not using the same stretch of line twice in the same day. This will require some thought.