Northern Line Section One:Mill East to Edgware, Chalk Farm, To Warren Street and Waterloo.

After half an hour of trying to divide the Northern Line into 3 reasonably equal, digestible chunks, which didn’t involve passing through a station I’d already visited while doing this line, it struck me that this might be a suitable task to test Mensa applicants with. Then I remembered that I am actually a member of Mensa already, so I stopped whinging and got on with it.  

The problems were really caused by the line having two northern arms, and a loop through central London. Loops cause problems. With arms it’s relatively simple, work your way to the end of the arm and then walk to the nearest convenient other end of an arm. Which is why I decided to begin at Mill Hill East, and hike from there to Edgware. Now, that’s by far the longest hike so far on any trip, but it greatly simplified the task ahead of me. From Edgware I could work my way to Chalk Farm, a mere step of about half an hour, and then finish off by working my way around the loop to finish at Waterloo. This promised to be the longest day of any of my trips, with 13 stations, interspersed with 2 hours of walking. It would require a very early start, but, if I could do it, then I would avoid crossing my own Northern Line tracks, as per the rash rule I made at the start.

I stand outside Mill Hill East station at 6 am, humming to myself the Jam’s “Down in a Tube Station at Midnight”, although to be honest, ‘outside a tube station too early in the morning feeling cold and a bit peed off’ would be rather more appropriate. I store away the fleeting thought that it might be possible to compose a play list of songs about the underground for the long walk to Edgware, and instead concentrate on the station in front of me. Thankfully it’s worth looking at, although a couple of windows which have been bricked up suggests that it has seen better days. It’s a former national railways station and it looks like it, probably 19^th century. Alas, the colour of the brick does remind me slightly of some public lavatories, which is a shame because this is otherwise a nice looking station, and I have a slight pang as I remember that I’m not here to catch a train.

As I walk, I expend a bit of mental energy by trying to make up my tube play list. Warwick Avenue, by Welsh chanteuse Duffy is an obvious choice, and perennial favourites Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty, Waterloo by Abba and Waterloo Sunset come fairly quickly. After that though I’m struggling, and coming up with rubbish like Poisoned ‘Arrow (on the Hill) by ABC and even Hainault, Hainault Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House. I consider resorting to my limited knowledge of music hall songs such as ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow (Road)” and “If you’ll pay me fare you can take me up the Arsenal” (which I may well have made up.). But as we all know, resorting to Music Hall is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Trying to think of other joke titles – and failing – sends my mind off on a tangent and I think about an old Two Ronnies sketch where the two old codgers play a pair of London Underground guards, or drivers, who keep peppering their everyday conversation with the names of stations – “Just got some fertiliser to put on me dahlias – Yeah, turn ‘em green, that will (Turnham Green). Well, it made me laugh anyway. It’s funny the places your mind will drift off to when all it has to concentrate on is keeping your legs moving.

Eventually Edgware Station hoves into view, and I realise that I am now looking at the work of Stanley Heaps, in his own distinctive style before Frank Pick became quite so taken with the work of Charles Holden. I’m not quick to form an opinion about this particular mish mash of styles. I have nothing about columns per se, but using classical columns here just seems to me to be writing a cheque that the rest of the building can’t cash. Okay, there is a fairly appropriate cornice running the length of the building above the columns, but then above that, an ordinary raked tiled roof. There’s nothing the least bit classical about this, and it’s a shame because it dominates the building, and it means you have to look carefully before you start to notice that there are actually some rather nice details in the entranceway below the roof. The actual entrance is set back, several feet behind the columns, and this forms a nice shaded colonnade. It does overshadow the windows somewhat, but I do like the ornamental pilasters set into the wall, and the metal gates. Shame about that roof, though. Thinking about it, I believe I understand why Pick would look to Holden, who was designing stations at the southern end of the line, rather than Heaps. Essentially, Holden’s designs looked forwards, while this station harks backwards.

Hmm, I think to myself, that’s quite a serious observation. But then, to me, the Northern is quite a serious line. I’m not entirely sure why I have this feeling about the Northern, but suspect it may have something to do with the fact that the Northern line is black on the map. Colours are important. Whenever I’m teaching children about imagery in texts, the ‘language’ of colours isn’t a bad place at all to start. Now, here’s a thing you may already be aware of. The colours of the different lines on the tube map haven’t always been the same. On Frank Pick’s original map, for example, the Bakerloo Line was red, while the Central Line was orange, although not quite the bright ginger of the overground lines on the modern map. However, to the best of my knowledge, the Northern line has always been black.

In an effort to lighten all of this Northern line seriousness, I promise myself that I will try to improvise a limerick based on the next station name. Thankfully the map informs me that this will be Burnt Oak, and while waiting on the Edgware platform I rattle off

“A rather intelligent bloke

Is waiting to go to Burnt Oak.

While limericks making

His feet won’t stop aching

But long for an old fashioned soak.”

Yeah, not particularly funny, is it, although I do allow myself a wry smile as I realise that the phrase ‘an old fashioned soak’ is a pretty good description of my late father. But my smile soon fades and I blame Northern line seriousness for this. A stray thought reminds me that the nickname of the Northern line is ‘the Misery line’, and again, I come back to the unfortunate choice of mourning black for the colour of the line on the map.

 I have another go at lightening my mood, by letting my mind wander over the name, “Burnt Oak”. Does it, I wonder, hark back to the days of strange druidic rituals? Well, no. As I emerge from the station entrance, Wikipedia informs me that the earliest reference to the area by the name Burnt Oak occurred in 1754, and there is nothing to suggest that it ever referred to anything other than a field with a burnt oak tree within it. How down to earth. How serious. How Northern line. Well, at least the appearance of the station itself lightens the mood a little. I may have mentioned once or twice that I’m from Ealing, and parts of Ealing have some large and expensive looking housing from the first half of the 20^th century. This is exactly what the station reminds me of, and the entrances look like twin garages. It’s the sort of tube station you might have made out of lego during your childhood.

With the prosaic nature of the name of the previous station, I half expect to find that Colindale is named after a man called Colin Dale. Then I have a brief flight of fancy as I imagine Colin Dale as a dim witted cousin of Alan A Dale, who would have been the least merry of Robin Hood’s merry men, always wearing his codpiece around the wrong way, and taking from the poor to give to the rich. Hoping, but not expecting this to be the case when I engage google as I leave the station I find out that Colindale does actually take its name from people, but from the Colindale family who owned land in these parts a few centuries ago. Ho hum. The station itself, well I remember visiting it quite a while ago, when visiting the Colindale Newspaper Archives to see if I could find any local news papers reports concerning the suicide of my 3x great grandfather in 1888. Now, that’s an activity strangely befitting the Northern Line, if you want my opinion. The research, that is, not the suicide. Back then it was a typical 60s entrance in a row of shops. Ugh, 60s architecture. Why is it that a decade which was celebrated for its fashion, films and music produced such awful buildings? That’s gone though, and a, well, a box has replaced it. It’s neat and tidy, and looks very new, and there’s a bit of glass and stainless steel on the roof to catch the eye. I just can’t help being reminded of the kind of shops that you get in airport departure lounges, though. It looks plasticky.

This is not an accusation that can be levelled at Hendon Central Station. As I exit I’m struck by the classical columns, and think back to Edgware Road. Not without reason either, since this station, like that, was designed by Stanley Heaps. I think that the classical portico works a lot better here. It projects forward from the contemporary block it joins onto, which means that the cornice isn’t topped by an inappropriate tiled roof, but by rather elegant metalwork, similar to the gates at Edgware. This station, while it still harks back to the past, at least has a sense of confidence about it. With its elegant colonnade, it is unashamedly what it is, and I can appreciate that, even if it is rather out of character with the 1930s block it is part of. I’m not surprised when google informs me that the building is grade II listed.

Here's something else that Google confirms. It has occurred to me that I’m pretty sure that none of the other underground railway systems I’ve used actually uses black for the colour of a line. I check them all, Tyne and Wear, Athens, Paris, Barcelona, Glasgow, Prague, Budapest, Berlin, Madrid, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Vienna and find that although, with the exception of Glasgow they all use a map based on the London one, none of them colour a line black. Glasgow’s of necessity looks different, because the Glasgow Subway is one continuous loop, but it’s a fetching mixture of orange and grey. I make a mental note to suggest to the powers that be that they consider changing the colour of the Northern Line on the map in line with current European practice. Which brings about its own spectroscopic flight of fancy while I consider what colour it could actually be instead. All of the primaries are taken already, as are secondaries purple and green. Since the East London line passed over to the Overground, orange is not currently used for an Underground line. However, it is used for the Overground, which features in the map, and so is out of contention. Maybe a lime green which would be sufficiently lighter than District line green would work, in the way that the contrasting blues of Piccadilly and Victoria lines work.

Such thoughts are abruptly ended as the train pulls into the grade II listed Brent Cross station. The name Brent Cross may irresistibly conjure up a view of bright and shiny retail outlets, but the station is another expression of Stanley Heap’s preferred ‘suburban classical’, and I have to say that it’s a station which rather highlights the schizophrenic nature of this particular medium. The entrance itself is a nice interpretation of a stripped back neo classical style, with a fine colonnade which is, if anything even more impressive than Hendon’s, but oh, that suburban 1920s thing with the tiled roof going on behind it just jars completely. Google throws up one interesting fact about the station. When it was originally planned before the outbreak of World War One, the planned name for the station was Woodstock. No idea why, but it certainly wouldn’t fit with the Northern line’s staid and serious image now.

I have never been to Golders Green before, and to be honest my only knowledge of it is as the site of a famous crematorium, and also for being home to a large Jewish community. Not that I think this has any bearing on the station. Up until the opening of the station at Brent Cross in 1923, Golders Green was the end of the line, and the station building, I believe, dates back to 1907. There’s a difference between seriousness and importance, and Golders Green station looks important. The station reminds me a little of some of the older stations at the Eastern end of the District line. The layout is completely different, but the orange brickwork and some of the ornamentation is similar. Apparently the station was built as part of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, back in the days when railway companies believed that you had to put the name of every station in the name of the company. This railway was one of the ones bought by the UERL before World War One.

The Underground is home to a number of ghost stations, that is, stations which were closed down. A significant number of station buildings of these do still exist, while others still have traces that can be seen from the tunnels. As far as I know, though, there’s only the one ghost station that was never actually opened in the first place. Between Golders Green and Hampstead there was originally supposed to be another station, which would have been called either North End or Bull and Bush. I believe that platforms were built, and the remains can be seen.

Hampstead does exist, though, and glory be, it’s our first Leslie Green station of the day. You know where you are with Leslie Green. Which is a funny thing to say since there are Leslie Green stations all over Central London, but you know what I mean. Even the Northern Line’s natural serious mien cannot stop the spirits rising with my first glance of ox-blood terracotta tiling. As Leslie Green stations go this is a relatively modest affair, with just the two semi circular windows on either side, and another over the entrance. I have no idea if counting the semi circular windows is the official way of assessing Leslie Green stations, but hey, it works for me. Google chucks up a plethora of facts about this station, not the least of which is that the tunnels are the deepest on the network. One thing I was surprised about as the train pulled into the station was that the tiling on the wall actually spells out the station name as Heath Street. Wikipedia tells me that the station was originally going to be called this, but the name was changed to Highgate before opening, but after the tiling had been completed.

The next station we visit, Belsize Park, is also a Leslie Green station. This one has a façade with 5 windows, and the whole thing looks beautifully proportioned. Which goes quite nicely when you think about it, since the name ‘Belsize’ is taken from bel assis in French, which translates as well situated. Which sends a thought racing across my mind that there is a Belsize Avenue in Ealing, very close to Northfields tube station. Why it was named that, I have no idea. Coming back to Belsize Park, as with pretty much all of the Leslie Green stations I’ve yet encountered it’s well kept, and attractive. Suddenly a second rogue thought forces itself to the front of my brain. The song “Kayleigh” by Marillion, which was playing when Mrs. C. and I went on our first ever date in 1985, contains the line “Loving on the floor in Belsize Park”. One can only hope that it wasn’t the floor of the station. Mind you, this being the Tube, had it actually been the station, nobody would have probably said anything unless Kayleigh and her beau had lit up for a post coital ciggie.

I’ll be honest, Chalk Farm, as a name, is one of the more inscrutable on the network. After all, what is a chalk farm? It conjures up mental pictures of an honest son of the toil scratching his head, wondering why all of those chalk sticks he’d planted and watered had failed to grow into chalk trees. I briefly consider the possibility that it’s named after a farm owned by a Mr. Chalk. Actually, research suggests that this is by no means as silly as it sounds, since the area seems to be named after a land owning family, the Chalcots, and one of their properties. The station itself is well worth looking at, a beautiful Leslie Green construction boasting no fewer than 8 semi circular arched windows on its ox blood tiled façade, beating our previous record holder, Caledonian Road, which only had 6. What is particularly striking is that its built on a corner which forms quite an acute angle, and so the two sides angle towards us, in a way that recalls the famous Flatiron Building in New York City. It’s a tremendous piece of work, probably my favourite Leslie Green station so far. Chalk Farm is, of course, the station in front of which Madness pose on the cover of Absolutely. The story goes that they wanted to be photographed in front of Camden Town – as in the song – but there were too many people around.

I don’t hang around much longer, though, because it’s time to strike out cross country to Warren Street. It’s only noon, but that mean’s I’ve been going for 6 hours. To be fair, a lot of this time has been spent standing outside stations, googling details and noting them down in my little book. The sun is only just over the yardarm, but I don’t care, it’s sandwich time. I use the fact that I’m eating as an excuse for the fact that my pace rarely rises above that of an amble, but I’ve already broken the back of today’s trip, so I don’t mind. Although there’s still 7 stations to go today, 3 of them have already been sketched on previous trips.

By the time I arrive outside Warren Street station I feel as if I’m back in Central London. The current station was built in 1933, at a time when escalators were installed, and it was designed by – be still my beating heart – Charles Holden. The ground level entrance is unassuming, but the semi-circular block above it is very striking. I don’t know if this was a later addition, but I doubt it since the design of the block seems contemporary with the station.  As I stand on the platform waiting for the next train, I can’t help noticing that this is another of those stations which displays a certain uncertainty about naming. The station has been called Warren Street for all bar one year of its existence, but for the first year it was called Euston Road, and that’s still what the platform tiling says. That's not necessarily such a problem, however if this was repeated in the next station, then I think that this might cause some weapons grade confusion.

Yes, it would cause real problems if Goodge Street station still had its original name on the platform. For a little while after the opening, the station was actually called Tottenham Court Road, while what is now called Tottenham Court Road was called Oxford Street. Well, Goodge Street it became, and this name ultimately derives from a Mr. John Goodge who owned land in these parts back in the early 18^th century. To be honest, Goodge is a name which could have stepped straight out of the pages of Charles Dickens – maybe it might have been what Scrooge changed his family name to after he reformed. The station building is another little Leslie Green gem. The two semi circular windows top the two entrances, and give the building a pleasing symmetry. The block on top of it is of a similar style, although not faced with ox-blood tiles, and the fact that the buildings on either side of the station are shorter just adds to its appeal.

Tottenham Court Road station is a short walk away, but walking doesn’t even enter my head, bearing in mind that I’ve already sketched the station on a Central Line trip. So the next time we stop its at Charing Cross. When I first started at Uni, I always used to take the East London Line from New Cross or New Cross Gate, but I soon discovered that National Rail from either of these stations was far quicker and more convenient, and thus Charing Cross became my station of choice. Well, a lot of water has flown under the bridge at Charing Cross station since then. As I stand outside the mainline station by the reconstructed Cross, Google starts to churn out chapter and verse about the complicated history of this station. The biggest change that I notice about it since the mid 80s is that the Jubilee Line don’t stop here any more. The much repeated truism about this station is that it’s quicker to walk from here to Embankment than to take the train, and certainly the Underground station here is a station of long corridors and walkways. Well, there we are, tube stations at mainline termini aren’t often much to write home about.

We’ve already bagged Embankment, and so it’s straight on to the last station of this trip, Waterloo. The entrance that I’ve sketched really caught my eye as it is so clearly inspired by the work of Leslie Green, although carried out in modern materials. I like it as an act of homage, although I’m not saying I’d want to see every station rebuilt in this fashion. But hey, it’s mid afternoon, and my work for the day is done. Yes, when you get right down to it I’ve only bagged another 13 stations, but today wasn’t so much about quantity. Today is about taking care of every station on the trailing arms, and on the Waterloo branch, which I’ve. This means that the 33 stations that remain form one continuous line. When you go on the trains themselves, the lines are usually represented as horizontal lines, and so far my inclination has been to travel from left to right, so that pretty much concludes that the next trip will start from High Barnet.

Coming back to this trip, though, one of the reasons for my excitement at reaching Waterloo is that I’ve as well as completing this trip, I’ve also just completed a bonus line, the Waterloo and City. Alright, it only has two stops, Bank and Waterloo, but I don’t care, it’s done. I first used the ‘Drain’ in the 70s, when it was actually run by British Rail, and had trains which looked like tube trains, but yet were different from those running on other lines. Completing a bonus line should happen again with the Circle Line, but I should be a lot closer to completing the whole challenge when this happens.