141. Southgate

Saturday 1st October 6.05pm

There are some brilliant pictures of this station lit up at night looking like a spaceship and that's how I wanted to see it, but as my 'rules' more of less dictate me arriving or departing on foot, which would mean stumbling around suburbia in the dark, I've avoided it. I just remember getting lost after leaving Kennington station late one evening and that's enough to put me off.

It looks less impressive in the daylight as it's on a roundabout and therefore surrounded by cars:

It is another lovely circular building though:

And I've not seen anything like this before:

The escalators down to the platform have some lovely up-lighters between them but it was too busy to get a good picture of them.

It was nice to see some old signage on the platform:

Wikipedia entry here.

140. Oakwood

Saturday 1st October 5.40pm

This end of the Piccadilly line has been high on my list to visit as there's some very interesting stations here, and as it's not far from King's Cross (my 'home' station) it really ought not to have taken so long. I got there in the end.

The station building itself is a huge box, although as always they're hard to photograph than books and the internet suggest, partly because I'm focused on my onward journey and forget. So here's a view of the station from the platform:

And here are two views from inside which give a better idea of the scale of it:

I imagine that when there's nobody there and the building is flooded with light that it's really quite beautiful.

It was also my first station in zone 5, which I'll obviously be spending a lot more time in as this challenge continues.

Wikipedia entry here.

137. Turnham Green

Saturday 24th September 4.00pm

My first trips to London after leaving school were to visit friends who were at college in West London. We had to pass into this station on our way into the city, and without fail someone would exclaim, "Turnham Green with envy!" We though we were funny. We weren't.

This is one of those stations where the track is elevated so the entrance and ticket office are at ground level and you have to go upstairs to catch the train. It feels the complete wrong way round for the underground but it does mean you get a great view down the tracks and over the green itself.

Wikipedia entry here.

135. North Ealing

Saturday 24th September 3.20pm

This is one of those stations on bits of track that existed before the Underground, which is why the station doesn't look more modern, and it fact looks a bit like a house that has been adapted into a station:

There's a bridge over the tracks, and as I crossed it a train - not one I needed - pulled into the station:

Wikipedia entry here.

135 stations is exactly halfway through this task. If I'd thought more carefully about it perhaps I'd have made the 135th somewhere historic and significant, but I guess it's more appropriate that it's an every day suburban station. Here's what my map looks like now:

133. Ealing Common

Saturday 24th September 2.50pm

This is one of those stations whose ticket office is built on a bridge over the tracks with stairs going down either side to the platform. An entirely practical if slightly unmemorable arrangement.

Wikipedia entry here.

132. Acton Town

Saturday 24th September 11.00am.

This is one of those stations that has nothing interesting going on at platform level because all the good stuff is on top - above the ticket office is a huge box with loads of windows in it so on a sunny autumn day it was flooded with light in quite a beautiful way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

77. Caledonian Road

Saturday 17th January 5.05pm

I had absolutely no reason to be here but I had 55 minutes to spare before my train home and knew I could tick this off my list in 25 minutes. I'd been intrigued by a glimpse of some tiling I got when I went through this station the previous weekend:

It's not in keeping with the station's other tiling and I'm guessing from that green colour that it's a 70s/80s addition. It's right next to the lifts and I wonder if it's a local landmark, but as I left the station I couldn't see anything like it. They probably knocked it down to build flats.

Here's the name on the wall in tiling, which I love:

And because I was standing outside the station for a bit waiting to cross the road I took a picture of the front:

Wikipedia entry here.

75. Arsenal

Saturday 10th January 11.20am

I had absolutely no reason to be in this station, but over the Christmas holidays I'd been talking to friends about it and it sounded so interesting I wanted it to be one of the next ones I ticked off my list. I've got a 1958 Tube map on which it is referred to as Arsenal (Highbury Hill) but it actually began life as Gillespie Road and that name is still on the tiling on the walls:

I really like the front of the station too, with the huge roundel:

They should do that more often, and I think one of the modern or refurbished stations has got something similar on the glass front but I cant remember which one it is now.

It's got a long ramp down to the platforms rather than stairs, and because it's busiest when there's football on, when the majority of people will go the same way at the same time, the corridor is divided with metal railings that almost look like a cage to separate football supporters from other travellers. What a really interesting station.

Wikipedia entry here.

74. Manor House

Saturday 10th January 11am

I didn't even know this existed until I was looking for a station near enough to Arsenal to walk from, and didn't fancy Finsbury Park after all the rail chaos they've had there lately. Turns out it's at the other end of Finsbury Park, so I had a nice walk.

It does have a surface building but it seems to be built under a crossroads so it's got lots of exits and I came out of it from a subway rather than the building itself, so I've no idea if that was interesting or not. I find those multi-exit stations a bit baffling because although each exit is always labelled with a road or a local landmark it does rather rely on you knowing where you're going, or knowing north from south, and there are never any maps handy near the exits.

Wikipedia entry here.

54. Hyde Park Corner

Friday September 12th 11.30am

This is one of those stations with no surface buildings, that you get to through a slightly confusing subway under the busy junction at Hyde Park Corner. Once you get into it the station itself the platforms still have some of the old tiling, which is always lovely to see:

There was also some rather lovely tiling on the other platform too, but I only noticed that as the train pulled away and I was too slow to get my phone out to take a picture.

Wikipedia entry here.

So, 54 stations, that's 20% of them done then. Not bad going for 21 months, especially as I don't live in London and haven't really gone out of my way to visit stations that I wasn't near anyway. It has made me realise though just how hard this task is going to be to complete - I'm going to have no reason to be at the ends of the Central line other than to visit the stations, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet. In the meantime I had to address the problem of how to keep track of where I've been. Yes I realise that's what this is for, but I also needed something more practical, that I could hold in my hand so I could see what I needed to do next. Basically what I needed was an A3 copy of the Tube map and a highlighting pen: