112. Tooting Bec

Saturday 12 December 11.45am

Finally a station that is a bit different - this one is on a crossroads so as well as the main station entrance there's one on the opposite site of the road which is basically stairs to a subway and a small newsagents, all housed in a far grander building than you'd expect, with three big glass roundels letting light down the stairs (which stupidly I forgot to photograph).

Wikipedia entry here.

111. Tooting Broadway

Saturday 12th December 11.30am

More nightmarish double-height lettering!

This is very similar to the other stations on this bit of the line as they were all designed by the same man. I can see the benefit of making them all the same - less work, identifiable brand, familiarity makes them easier to navigate - but it also makes them a bit samey and easier to pass through without noticing anything interesting in them. Shame.

Wikipedia entry here.

110. Morden

Friday 11th December 5.35pm

The southern end of the Northern line and also the most southerly station on the Tube network. I kind of feel that in some way that ought to mean the station is more spectacular, but it's just another building in a row of shops. The only weird thing about it is that there are platforms either side of the train so the doors open on both sides at the same time, although quite why I'm not sure. Just because they can I guess.

Wikipedia entry here.

109. South Wimbledon

Friday 11th December 5.30pm

I walked to this in the dark and came at it around a corner so I didn't get to see the impressive front at all. Inside it's very much like most of the other stations along this stretch of the underground: short escalators down to platform level with impressive up-lighters (which one day I'll take a picture of) then either a right of left turn to the north- or south-bound platforms.

I really don't like what they've done with the roundel though - it's not just that it's on two lines so it makes the central bar too wide, they haven't kept the circle the same size so you see less of the central white bit - they've just made it the same as all the other roundels so it's not actually a proper circle! Oh dear, oh dear.

Wikipedia entry here.

108. Colliers Wood

Friday 11th December 5.15pm

That horrid wooden framing around the name really grates on me and yet it keeps turning up in so many different stations south of the river! At some point I'm going to buy some wood and make a copy of it just to prove how home-made it looks!

Elsewhere in the station there's still some old signs:

I'm guessing at some point the colour of the Northern line was brown rather than black, or perhaps they just weren't bothered about these things?

Wikipedia entry here.

108 station means I've now covered 40% of the Tube stations. This is what that looks like on a map coloured in with a cheap highlighting pen:

As with all of these milestones it's simultaneously brilliant but also makes me realise how much is left to do - it's taken three years to get this far, and that's just the easy (central) bits!

107. Canada Water

Saturday 28th November 7pm

This is another one of those enormous Jubilee line stations that looks a bit oversized for the area and probably makes more sense when it's busy. There are big underground spaces, then the escalators go up into a huge cylinder which forms the surface building and lets the light in - it's all very impressive. The only problem I had with it is that it's relentlessly grey - there is no other colour, apart from the people, and it begins to look a bit drab.

This station has the distinction of being the only one that has taken sponsorship money to change its name: on the day of the London Marathon it became Buxton Water (one of the sponsors of the marathon) for the day, and as I was in the city that day I went and took a photograph:

I can't imagine what other stations that would work at, which is a relief as it's a trend I don't think I'd like.

Wikipedia entry here.

106. Barons Court

Thursday 12th November 7.40pm

First things first: it really does look like it needs an apostrophe doesn't it, but apparently there's a good reason why it hasn't (have a look on Wikipedia).

There's some nice extra signage on the platform seating:

The ticket office is tiled with gorgeous green tiles but there were staff loitering an I didn't want to look like some mad tile fetishist so I didn't get a picture. Really lovely they were too.

Wikipedia entry here.

105. Ravenscourt Park

Thursday 12th November 7.30pm

This is the next stop along from Stamford Brook and is unsurprisingly very similar. The only difference is that this has a much larger building at ground level although weirdly it's an empty space with an extra exit, so I'm not sure what purpose that serves.

Up on the platforms there are signs for the Piccadilly line but the electronic train indicators tell you that Piccadilly line trains don't actually stop there, which is frustrating when you're waiting for a disrupted District line service and one flies straight past you.

Wikipedia entry here.

104. Stamford Brook

Thursday 12th November 6.15pm

This is one of those stations where the track is actually elevated and looks down over the houses, and the platforms are open air with white wooden roofs, with the ends of the wooden strips cut to triangles (like a picket fence but upside down). Then you walk down stairs to get to the ticket office, which is plain and practical - just brickwork. There's something about these kind of stations I like, which is weird as they're the exact opposite of underground - I think it's something to do with the fact that they're more "everyday" stations, which people use for commuting rather than pleasure, so they're functional and useful

Wikipedia entry here.

103. Notting Hill Gate

Saturday 7th November 10.30am

This is an entirely underground station with no surface buildings, just stairs to the ticket level and platforms, and other than that it's quite an unremarkable station.

Wikipedia entry here.

That is also the last station in Zone 1 ticked off my list. It's good to final complete a sub-set of the whole Tube thing, instead of just percentages. I thought I'd probably get a line finished first, probably the Victoria line as it's the shortest, but my travels haven't been that organised. But while it's good to achieve a goal it also makes me realise that it's taken me almost three years to do what was basically the easiest bit of the challenge. Goodness knows how long it'll take me to get to Chesham!

102.High Street Kensington

Saturday 7th November 10.10am

I'm not sure I really like the big fat strip of blue across the middle to accommodate the name of the station - it messes with the proportions. 

This is one of those stations where the train randomly stops and you have to switch to another service on the opposite platform which then doesn't seem to go anywhere very quickly. That's the charm of the District and Circle lines for you!

I liked this old labelling over a noticeboard:

Above ground you exit the station through a shopping arcade, which has a fancy domed roof over a cross-shaped layout, which is all as fancy as you'd expect from Kensington.

Wikipedia entry here.

101. Archway

Saturday 31st October 6.25pm

I nearly couldn't find this station as the building it's part of was covered in scaffolding and also next to a big junction on a busy road that turns out to be the start of the A1. Any interesting surface buildings have long since been replaced so it's a fairly unremarkable station withjust an escalator down to platforms serving a single line. Even the nice tiling (like Highgate) has been taken away.

Wikipedia entry here.

100. Highgate

Saturday 31st October 6.05pm

I liked this as soon as I got off the train as it's got interesting tiling:

The station itself seems to be built into the side of a hill with several exits, and inevitably I picked the least interesting but most confusing one, which led out into a car park and immediately disoriented me. You can tell I'm getting further away from zone 1 and moving into suburbia as the station actually has a car park. It's a pity I hadn't visited in the daylight as the station seems to have been an interesting part of an abandoned line, some of which is still visible and which sounds really interesting. I think I'll have to visit again.

Wikipedia entry here.

99. Clapham South

Thursday 15th October 5.45pm

Another one of those roundels with the wooden edging the looks like my Dad might have made it! At some point I'm going to have to buy some wood and prove my point. I wish someone could explain who this is came about.

This has got quite an impressive entrance that fronts onto a busy street but which leaves you in no doubt as to what it is, with the great big roundel on the building itself. I wish there were more like that.

Wikipedia entry here.

98. Clapham Common

Thursday 15th October 3.50pm

This is another of those station with a very narrow island platform between the tracks (Clapham North is the same), which explains the wonky angle of the picture - anything else would involve getting dangerously close to the track and I'm not that stupid. Above ground the station has a nice dome over the small entrance, which makes it look grander than it actually is.

Wikipedia entry here.

97. Balham

Thursday 15th October 3.40pm

Shamefully I didn't pay much attention to the station as I was with a friend and we were chattering away as we headed down to the platform level - possibly down just a short escalator with those big metal up-lighters that some stations have, which I really like - and the train was already on the platform so I snapped the picture and got on the train just as the door-closing beeps started, much to the relief of my friend.

Wikipedia entry here.

96. Finsbury Park

Saturday 8th August 11.55am

I did the stations either side of this early in the year but avoided this one as the memory of the Christmas overcrowding fiasco was still fresh in my mind, which left this rather out on a limb so it was nice to have a legitimate reason to be there. It turns out to be one of those stations that's too big to love - as well as the Tube there's the Overground and National rail trains, and there's a bush station nearby as well - you can't serve all those people with any charm, and it doesn't. The front entrance looks modern and impressive so inevitably I left by a side entrance which was less crowded and older.

Wikipedia entry here.

95. Turnpike Lane

Saturday 8th August 11.50am

This is another 1930s station, built, along with the remaining stations to the end of the line, at the time of an extension to the Piccadilly line, and while I can see that the curvier ones are beautiful this big box of a place made me go "wow!". It's a big cube, partly submerged, so the ticket office area is huge and open - the ceiling and most of the walls aren't cluttered with stuff so it's quite plain but all the more impressive for it. I wish I'd taken pictures, but I'm still shy about being the man taking pictures of Tube stations.

There's a pair of short escalators to the platforms which has up-lighters between them, which you occasionally see elsewhere but not often, and at the bottom of the escalators there's two more up-lighters. It's really quite beautiful and I need to go back and take some pictures.

Wikipedia entry here.

94. Wood Green

Saturday 8th August 11.40am

Before I went here I had no idea where Wood Green is - if pushed I might have thought it was at the end of the Central Line in Essex, or confused it with Wood Lane in West London. Turns out it's near Alexandra Palace in that bit of London that I would probably think of as Hertfordshire (but clearly I'd be wrong).

It's one of those 1930s stations that has maintained pretty much all of its original features and character, like this rather beautiful sign on the platform:

And this air vent:

The ticket office is nicely curved as it's on a corner site, and it looks great from the outside too although it's slightly overshadowed by all the other stuff around it now - I imagined it looked quite striking when it was first built. It's a pity it's on a crossroads and is difficult to photograph from the outside.

Wikipedia entry here.

93. Chalk Farm

Friday 17th July 6.20pm

I've actually been through this station a couple of times but not since I started counting. I always find it a bit weird how you go down a short flight of stair to the bit where you get the lift from - it's a long station so I wonder why there wasn't room to put them on the same level?

There's some nice green tiling around the ticket hall and down on the platform the name is spelt out in tiles, which is always nice to see:

Wikipedia entry here.

92. Belsize Park

Friday 17th July 6.00pm

I was going to save this until I happened to be at a gig at the Roundhouse but that's looking increasingly unlikely, and as I had time to tick off a couple of stations near King's Cross I figured I might as well just do it anyway.

I'd been intrigued by it since I read a novel about a murder that takes places on the stairs of the station. It even included a map:

I promised myself when I went I'd look and see if it was the same, but of course as I got off the train I couldn't remember, although looking at it now I realise it's unchanged. I wish I'd arrived at the station on foot so I could have taken the steps to platform level, but there are 219 of them so there was no way I was doing it the other way round!

And the station? Oh it was your usual Northern line station of that period - low building covered in those lovely ox-blood red tiles, tiled platforms. What surprised me was how busy it was - I expected very few people to get off but tons did.

Wikipedia entry here.

91. Marble Arch

Saturday 4th July 3.50pm

I wanted this station to be grander. Despite being at the tale end of Oxford Street, the tattier end, it is obviously near Marble Arch which is of course a great big arch and I somehow thought it might reflect that. But no - its got a tiny entrance next to a Bureau de Change and near a MacDonalds. It -couldn't be less glamorous.

Down on the platform bits of the walls are clad with metal rather than tiles onto which are painted representations of arches. They look dated and cluttered, but as they were fitted in the 80s they're now thirty years old and have acquired value through age and survived a recent refit, which is a pity.

Wikipedia entry here.

90. Queensway

Saturday 4th July 12.10pm

There's something very familiar about this although I've never been to it before, mostly I think because it has lifts and is opposite a park so just reminds me of Lancaster Gate, which is the next station to it on the Central Line. There are lifts to the street level, but even when you get out of the lift there's an odd maze like passage to follow to get to the ticket office which makes no sense at all.

Wikipedia entry here.

89. Canary Wharf

Saturday 6th June 9.50am

I've actually been here before, two years ago, but drunkenly deleted the picture so couldn't count it. This time I actually had a legitimate reason to be here rather than just making up a reason, and thankfully it was on a Saturday morning when this part of the city is deserted because nobody works round there at the weekends.

It's one of those stations that makes everyone go "wow!" although I have to admit that as I left it, heading up the escalator I felt a bit underwhelmed by it. Yes it's big, but I can't help thinking that since it was built a lot of other big stuff has been built in London and somehow this doesn't impress as much as it did. Like the new Crossrail station which they've built round the corner, which I was there to visit and which has its own roof garden. Now that's a proper "wow!"

Wikipedia entry here.

88. Kentish Town

Saturday 16th May 5.55pm

Another gorgeous ox-blood tiled station, this one is also a National Rail station although apart from the entrance they're obviously in different places - one above ground, one deep below it. At the moment the down escalator is closed for replacement so you have to climb down a spiral staircase with 121 steps - so they say, I didn't count them - to get to the platform, which was actually quite fun

Wikipedia entry here.

87. Tufnell Park

Saturday 16th May 5.45pm

It only took three goes to get the spelling of that name right, despite having a picture I could have looked at!

I have a friend who lived close to this station years ago so this wasn't my first time through it, and I doubt it's changed since then. It's your standard Northern line station really: lifts to the deep level platforms, tiled platforms, ox-blood red surface building. It's only a small station with a tiny ticketing area, and when I came through it there was hardly anyone there. It felt oddly nostalgic though.

Wikipedia entry here.

86. Brixton

Sunday 26th April 11.15am

If, like me, you grew up in the 80s then your abiding memory of Brixton is probably the riots in the early 80s. I hope that isn't why I've so rarely visited the place. There's a market there which I can't be sure I've ever been to although I definitely went to a gig in the Brixton Academy in the early 90s and came out to find there were police on horses to control the crowds. Goodness knows why as it's not a huge venue and it wasn't that kind of gig. 

Twenty years later it looks less like a battleground and more like every high street in the country, although the day before there'd been trouble at a protest against the gentrification of the area and an estate agent's window got broken. I could see what they mean - as I walked from Clapham, through rows of nice Victorian terraces, you could see them slowly being done up, the windows painted and the gardens tidied, expensive cars in the street outside.

As for the station itself, well it has one of the biggest roundels you're likely to see on the front of it:

I like that, and think they should do it more often.

The station itself is at the end of the Victoria line, but it still has two platforms despite the fact they go in the same direction - the fact that this surprises me shows just how little I know about trains - which does make things simpler.

Wikipedia entry here.

85. Clapham North

Sunday 26th April 10.55am

Firstly an explanation of the wonky photograph - the station has an island platform (the trains run either side of it), which is quite unusual underground - you mostly get them at above ground stations which are less busy - and this one is particularly narrow, so if you stood directly in front of the roundel you wouldn't get the whole thing in (and you might in fact be tempted to take a step back and end up on the track, which would be very bad). I quite liked walking along the platform with it's older signs and generally older feeling, then up the stairs and one end to get out, although I have no recollection of the surface building at all.

Wikipedia entry here.

84. Moorgate

Sunday 26th April 10.40am

I'm not sure I'd have been able to find this part of London before I started obsessively looking at the Tube map as there's nothing there to tempt me to visit. Perhaps that's why I found the station so unmemorable. The surface buildings are overwhelmed by the offices built beside and on top of them, and inside it's all tiled - there's nothing really old or really new about it to distinguish it at all. It's one of those stations whose history (and therefore Wikipedia entry) is more interesting than the station itself.

Wikipedia entry here.

83. Old Street

Sunday 26th April 10.25am

I'd been through this station a few times before I started this blog, enough times to develop a dislike for it. It's one of those that is built under a roundabout so you exit it from all manner of subways, which are confusingly signposted. There are shops down there too and the whole thing just looks run down. Admittedly they've been trying to spruce it up a bit since the area became the place to start up your IT business but they've got a long way to go - the signs on the stairs certainly help but it still looks like it needs a good wash.

I always felt it more accurately reflected the area than the things I was in the area to see - the fancy White Cube Gallery, and the swish Hoxton hotel - whereas the reality of that road is large blocks of flats and fried chicken shops. I like that mix - it's what makes London interesting. What I don't like is this station.

Wikipedia entry here.

82. Heathrow Terminals 1, 2, 3

Thursday 9th April 10.40am

I'm not sure I like the plane symbol in front of the name - it's not like there's another station of the same name but without an airport that you'd mistake it for! It's the reason the station is there in the first place, and it's hard to believe anyone needs a picture of a plane to reassure them.

This is older than terminal 5 (where I'd come from) but I can't say I paid too much attention to it as I passed through it as I'd been travelling for hours and was keen to get home. There was a lift to station level to stop people cluttering up the escalator with suitcases, and then you were through the barriers and into the airport itself. I think there might be another entrance/exit that's more impressive but I couldn't find it.

Wikipedia entry here.

81. Heathrow Terminal 5

Thursday 9th April 10.30am

This was literally one of the last stations I thought I'd get to, mostly because it's been a long time since I needed to be in a big airport and I thought those days were gone, and it's also miles out of London (zone 6!) so it's not like I was ever going to be just passing by. But then I went to New York and flew back to this terminal and needed to get back to terminal 3 where the car was parked - perfect excuse for the Tube!

As you'd probably expect it's all steel and glass, and a touch impersonal with it, but I guess that's only to be expected from something designed to carry enormous amounts of people. Except it doesn't really - the carriage I was in had two people in it.

Wikipedia entry here.

So that's station number 81, which means that I've now been to 30% of the network. Here's what that looks like:

It's just going to get more difficult from now on and I'm going to have to think of reasons to go to places I normally wouldn't venture to - day trip to Morden anyone?

80.Regent's Park

Saturday 14th February 6.40pm

I don't think I really even knew this station existed, for several reasons really: it's on the Bakerloo line, which I've never really got to grips with; it has no surface buildings so if I'd walked past I'd have assumed it was something to do with Great Portland Street station which is just up the road; and anyway, if I wanted to go to Regent's Park I'd walk from King's Cross. But no, there it is.

It's one of those stations with the name spelt out in tiles on the wall, which always looks great, although clearly they were put up before the apostrophe was invented:

Wikipedia entry here.

79. Kew Gardens

Saturday 14th February 5.00pm

This is one of those stations that seems to exist to serve just one purpose (unless of course you live there). I've only been to Kew Gardens once, and so I remembered the station and I especially remembered that the area outside it is ridiculously twee, with those ridiculous shops that sell lovely gorgeous but completely pointless things. It must be the only underground station with a garden centre outside it. It's also an Overground station, which causes me no end of confusion, despite them being completely different services.

Wikipedia entry here.

78. Royal Oak

Saturday 14th February 10.00am

This was another one of those one-stop-from-where-I-needed-to-be stations, and as I had time to kill and because it was a sunny day -which is why the top half of the sign is in the shade - I decided to take a detour.

There's not much to it - just an island platform with wooden stairs to a small ticket office, which was unmanned and so underused on a Saturday morning that the barriers were open. It's built onto a bridge and as you come out there's a big barrier stopping you wandering into the traffic, but also stopping you getting a good look at the station itself.

Disappointingly it's not named after a great big tree that was cut down to make way for the railway, but after a pub.

Wikipedia entry here.