130. Holland Park

Saturday 24th September 10.10am

This has been shut for a while for refurbishment otherwise I might have visited sooner. Quite what the refurbishment was is hard to tell, although the bit of the tunnel facing the platform does have some bare plaster on it. I expect it was lifts, because it's always lifts if it's not escalators (and this has no escalators). It does have some nice old signage in it though:

The station itself is small and quiet, and is situated in possibly the fanciest row of shops I've seen, including a champagne shop. It's very posh round there.

Wikipedia entry here.

129. Hammersmith

Tuesday 23rd August 6.30pm

Hammersmith has frustrated me - I've been through it twice since I started doing this and both times forgot to take pictures. In my defence I was on my way to gigs - Kate Bush, John Grant - so I had other things on my mind. But that doesn't stop me disliking this station, because you have to leave it through a shopping centre which is just about the most stupid idea ever! Except it turns out you don't have to - when I came out of it this time it was just a very short walk before I found myself in front of a statue of three naked men. As you do. Then on the return journey I was straight through the barriers and onto a train. But that was using different lines, which confuses me further - the District and Piccadilly lines come out through the shopping centre, the Hammersmith & City line is across the road in an older, more civilised building. There's no below ground connection between them - you have to go outside and cross the road, which to my mind makes them two separate stations, just like Edgware Road, but on the map they only count as one. It's mystifying. Which is a shame as there are a lot of reasons to like Hammersmith itself.

Wikipedia entry here and here - see, they think it's two stations as well!

128. Osterley

Tuesday 23rd August 1.25pm

I don't know if the blue bit across the middle of the roundel is wider than usual, or if the number of letters just makes it look like that, but there's something big and bold about that.

The station itself was once modern but now looks run down as you'd expect from something right next door to the A4. There's a tower which probably serves no purposes - there doesn't seem to be a lift - with an odd thing on top of it, but it didn't wow me enough to take a picture of it.

Wikipedia entry here.

127. Kensal Green

Thursday2nd June 3.30pm

This station would have been easier to find if I hadn't been muddling it up with Kensal Rise, which isn't even a Tube station. It was easy to miss - the station building is tiny, perched on top of a bridge over the rail tracks, and because it's also an Overground station it doesn't even have a Tube sign outside. As I walked down to the platform I got a bit panicky that there might not be a roundel but thankfully there was. Interestingly I didn't even care that the train was cancelled.

I like the way the new Mayor of London sneaked into the picture too.

Wikipedia entry here.

126. Queen's Park

Thursday 2nd June 3.15pm

I'd heard of the football team that take their name from the area but if you'd asked me to find it on a map I'd be clueless. Turns out it in north-west London!

The odd thing about the platform was that all the roundels were small and above head height, which explains the slightly weird picture. There might have been platform sharing going on, or perhaps someone just went mad when they put them up? The station itself is so unremarkable I remember nothing about it!

Wikipedia entry here.

125. Bounds Green

Saturday 21st May 6.15pm

This is one of those stations that's built into a row of shops and on a corner, so you don't notice it until you're right on top of it, and then forget to step back and take a look at what it looks like on the outside.

It's got a nice pair of escalators in a curved tunnel going down to the platforms, and as it was really quiet, and I was confused about which platform I wanted, I managed to take a picture of it:

Wikipedia entry here.

124. Arnos Grove

Saturday 21st May 5.50pm

I like that picture because it's not often I've taken one with a train in it, let alone one that's moving.

I knew of the area this station is in as it gets a mention in a song by Saint Etienne, which makes me think it has a faded glamour about it but the reality is a residential area on the North Circular of which the Tube station is a high point. It's on the extension to the Picadilly line, which is where things got architecturally more interesting as they were less constricted by space than in the centre of the city, so the above ground part of this station is a huge, beautiful cylinder, although the pictures hardly do it justice:

Wikipedia entry here.