59. Vauxhall

Tuesday 1st October, 2.45pm

I've been to Vauxhall a few times but always on foot, which is unexpected as it's a bit of a transport hub with Tube, railway and buses all converging on one place, right beside a busy road over the bridge. The Tube station is probably the least interest bit of it with no interchange and as I was with a friend I didn't really pay much attention to it as we walked through it.

Wikipedia entry here.

58. Mansion House

Saturday 20th September 11.45am

This is one of those stations in a part of the city that seems a bit overrun with stations, but I guess those business types don't like to walk too far to the office. The beauty of those business stations is that they're absolutely deserted at weekends and I was the only person on the platform waiting for the train. The platform had lots of pillars along it which would have been great for a game of hide-and-seek.

It's also got one of those labyrinth artworks. I've not really understood or being paying attention to them. Apparently there's on at every station and people are collecting the whole set. If only I'd known about them when I started this nonsense I might have done the same, but I'm not going back to the beginning now!

Wikipedia entry here.

57. Westminster

Saturday 20th September 11.00am

I do like these roundels that stand up on their own, it's nice to see them in three dimensions, and I guess there's no other way of doing it with all the glass (although I did see one in Hammersmith which was on the glass, but I forgot to photograph it).

So this is one of those stations on the fancy Jubilee line, all concrete, steel and glass. But I was coming into it on the District line and I didn't know if there was still some remnants of an old station for that line. But no, the whole this has been rebuilt although you don't get the scale of it from this line, just coming up one flight of stairs to the ticket hall and out onto the street. Rather disappointingly there isn't a big bold building above ground, just lots of entrances that give you no idea of what lies beneath.

Wikipedia entry here.

56. West Brompton

Saturday 20th September 10.45am

This was another of those next-stop-from-where-I-needed-to-be stations and turned out to be quite informative as well - I'd have expected it to be a bit further north than it was, a bit nearer Kensington, a bit posher perhaps. And I wasn't expecting Chelsea football club to be just round the corner either. I was also surprised to see the Earls Court Exhibition Centre just over the road - when I went there two years ago it was chaos on the trains at Earls Court afterwards, which it turns out could have easily been avoided by taking a side exit from the building and using this station instead. I'd remember that for another time but they're probably going to knock down the centre so that knowledge is a bit too late.

The station shares platforms with the Overground and they're all open air, which gives it something of a country feel, which is a bit unexpected in the heart of the city.

Wikipedia entry here.

55. Borough

Friday 12th September 1.15pm

The main thing to note about this station is that it isn't as close to Borough Market as its name would suggest - that's right next door to London Bridge, in fact the track runs over the top of it - but I've already been there and actually don't like it so I gave it a miss. 

It's also on the trickier half of the Northern Line, the Bank branch which comes through King's Cross but actually is no use to me as it doesn't go anywhere I want to go. There's talk of splitting the Northern Line in two at some point when it gets extended south to Battersea, but it seems like it will be fairly cosmetic and won't make any difference to the way you actually use the line.

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:

53. Earls Court

Friday 12th September 9.15am

The outside of this is rather lovely, with the name of the railway company across the top of the front of the older part of the station, but there was roadworks going on which made it tricky to photograph. There was also an old-fashioned police box outside the front which is how this picture came about:

Inside it's rather lovely - you walk up some stairs to a sort of mezzanine level which looks over the track, down the station and in the distance you can see the Earl's Court concert hall/exhibition centre through the end of the platform. Stupidly I didn't get a picture of it, which is a shame as there's a lot of talk of knocking that building down. Apparently there's a much more modern station building at that end, but I've only used it once and didn't notice as it was so crowded.

The Piccadilly line platforms are only accessible by lifts and they're your standard tiled platform, just as you'd expect to find on this part of the line.

Wikipedia entry here.