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.
