170. Mile End

Wednesday 3rd October 4.25pm

Part of this station is an island platform with pillars in between which are benches. The benches are crying out for roundels on them, like lots of other places on the Tube but there aren't any - I walked the length of the platform hoping to find some but no, so we're left with modern metal ones which somehow feel a bit disappointing.

It has a surface building but it's really just an opening in a row of shops. It did have a pair of roundels sticking out from it, one with "underground" on it and the other with the name of the station on it. I'd have liked to get a picture of them but it didn't feel like the kind of street where you could stop and do that.

Wikipedia entry here.

169. Bethnal Green

Wednesday 3rd October 3.50pm

This has got the older yellowy tiles that you see elsewhere on the Tube and as a bonus has nice lettering above it, which proved too difficult to photograph in any useful way. The whole station is below ground, most of it probably under the crossroads you come up to. It was really quite when I was there and after months of failing to get there it felt like a bit of an anticlimax.

Wikipedia entry here.

168. Canon's Park

Saturday 17th February 10.50am

This station does the surprisingly common but still confusing thing of being at a different height to the one next to it - whereas Stanmore, where I'd just come from, involved stairs to ground level, this station is under a railway bridge and you have to climbs stairs to the platforms. The ticket hall bit is probably about as small as you can get but it's so quiet that one set of barriers are permanently closed. I do like these kind of stations, even if the fact they're elevated means they're the exact opposite of what the Tube is about!

Wikipedia entry here.

So that completes the Jubilee line, making it the third one to be completed. It's not really the most useful line for me and I felt like I had to go to most of the stations just to tick them off rather than having a legitimate reason to use them. And it really is a line of two halves - the north-western end of it, which was previously Bakerloo line and Metropolitan line feels exactly like that, but the new bits feel like the future even after all these year: all that metal and raw concrete, all those big spaces! Westminster was bound to impress as it was so close to Parliament, as was Canary Wharf as it's literally all about the money, but it's two of the smaller stations that really impress me most: Bermondsey, when you turn off the platform to the escalators and above it is a great big box of light, and Southwark, with the big cylinder over the ticket hall, the big blue wall, the curved openings to the escalators and the corridor between the platforms that somehow feels Russian. Both stations in areas with no obvious need for such great stations, which is the beauty of public transport surely? I'm hoping these sort of stations will be a template for Crossrail although I suspect that concrete is a bit last century and they'll be softened with tiling. Shame.

167. Stanmore

Saturday 17th February 10.25am

The end of the Jubilee line! There's a different feeling about these end of the line stations - the trains just waiting there, not poised to leave at any second take a bit of getting used to, and because it's in the middle of nowhere (relatively) it's not busy, and there's no need to run for a train. The sunny day made it feel more relaxed too.

There's parking beside it for lots of trains so I imagine that looks impressive when it's full. The station itself is up an unexpectedly long flight of stairs from the platform and the building itself looks like the houses in the surrounding area, which makes sense as it started life as a Metropolitan line station, before switching to the Bakerloo line and finally the Jubilee line.

Wikipedia entry here.

166. Kingsbury

Thursday 18th January 1.20pm

I approached this one on foot and nearly missed it as I'd convinced myself it would be on the right-hand side of the road and it wasn't. This wasn't some map-reading stupidity - I just felt that's where it ought to be. Instead it's on the other side of the road in a row of shops, and you'd easily miss it anyway.

Wikipedia entry here.

165. Queensbury

Thursday 18th January 1.00pm

For a suburban station you have to walk along quite a long corridor to get from the platform to the actual station building, or perhaps it just felt it as I was sharing the corridor with someone having a tedious conversation on their mobile. The station itself has toilets, which is something you almost never see although I didn't venture in.

Outside there's a roundabout with a roundel in it:

Although there's a footpath on the roundabout I'm not sure how you'd get to it as it's a roundabout and the inner lane is also a taxi rank. It's interesting to see they've put solar panels on it.

Wikipedia entry here.

164. Wembley Park

Thursday 18th January 12.55pm

This is the nearest station to Wembley Stadium but also to Wembley Arena, which means I must have been through it on my way to gigs at the latter but I not really sure I remember it as it is. At some point this century it's had improvements to help cope with the huge amount of people going to the new stadium,hence the fancy new front:

That lettering on the top looks like something they do on the Overground and really should have been blue so it stands out more. And those steps are a bit of a hazard. I can see how they're needed to get lots of people in and out quickly but they're steep and if someone fell it would be like dominoes. On the other hand they'd be great for a line of dancing girls to high-kick their way down.

Wikipedia entry here.

163. Preston Road

Thursday 18th January 12.30pm

This is one of those stations that I'd never heard of before and if you'd told me the name I'd have guessed it was some little stop on a branch line in the middle of suburbia, which I suppose it is only it happens to be on the Tube. Who even knew there was an area of London called Preston? (Although it is basically Wembley.) It's one of those stations that you don't quite notice in a row of shops, which seems practical and appropriate.

Wikipedia entry here.