It began, the germ of the idea, on getting out at Kentish Town to go to a Bauhaus gig - coz I'm a saggy old trad goth - and realising I was not where I thought I was. I was totally disorientated, expecting to find a pub that didn't exist because I was thinking it was here when it was somewhere else, most likely Chalk Farm or Tufnell Park, and realising that in all my years in London I had actually never been in Kentish Town before. This sense of disassociation sparked the enquiry of just how many of the tube stations had I been to in twenty years as a Londoner...and in the same thread of enquiry just how many tube stations were there? The idea wouldn't let me go...what began as a puzzlement became A Mission. What other secret places and traditional haunts had I managed to miss over the years? Like the Tower of London or Tussauds. Conversely what strange wilds had a life of temping sent me out to where most people had never ventured; Stonebridge Park seemed to qualify on that score. How far can you get on the tube? All the way to Watford it would seem.

...the tube is such a part of London living, something we assimilate and learn to forget to see, and suddenly, intensely I wanted to really see it again. It seems so much the daily fabric of life and yet we blur it all out.

And then the question, of all the tube stations, how many of them have I actually been too - not just traveled through, but actually popped out in? What percentage of the network could I tick off this imaginary list...and if you set out to do it, how long would it take to complete the set...especially if you decide to set on on said pointless task when you don't actually live in London anymore.

( obsessive compulsive behaviour )

The idea morphed - firstly a suggestion of getting a photograph of oneself a platform at every station. The photo must feature the station name as 'proof' that one's feet did actually land on the platform, but this seemed to easy - a case of pull in, jump off train, snap, and jump back in before the train set off again...you could do a whole line in one frantic afternoon...no, it must involve seeing the station.

A large part of the drive behind the project is to see these places that exist only as names on a map, and to see the difference between one's expectation of them and the reality - are there smouldering trees at Burnt Oak? Nothing but tennis at Wimbledon? London names have a magical potency to a girl brought up in rural Cornwall - they have evocations, they have the weight of expectation and imagination and history...time to explore that.

Traveling, living in London, means a fraught relationship with the public transport system, a tube map in one's head, an interlinked web of buses and trains overlaid, the misery and entertainment of having to travel with thousands of others all at the same time - all this complex interaction, all that swearing and frustration when it doesn't work, and the thankful prayers to the bus gods when a 432 arrives just as you've got to the bus stop after a trip down the Victoria line. The stories, evenings out, job interviews, that are connected to trips to unfamiliar stations. Popping out in new spaces, ascending from the underworld...will it be different when the journey is the only object, and traveling loses it's timetabled meaning? Will this way of traveling change how I use the tube?

A plan emerges; a set of Rules and Aims:

1) I must pass through the ticket barrier to properly collect a station.

2) I must get a picture at every station, both on the platform and exterior, featuring myself and the station name to act as proof that I really have visited each station.

3) To make 274 pieces of art to represent the total number of actual tube stations. There won't be a piece of art for every station as some are just beyond my capacity to find inspiration, and conversely some stations are too exciting to limit to just one piece, but eventually 274 pieces there will be...


Beginning here and now, tonight, at Kentish Town...

...reading from a free London Transport tube map, I can be positive above having used 103 of the 275 stations in my life already - plus at least one of the Acton's but I don't remember which, but that still leaves well over half the network a mystery...what adventures lie ahead? What memories will returning to places long unvisited bring back, my history of twenty years in London. I realise that perhaps only I will care - I am but one of thousands of economic in-comers, who then choose to leave again...but hey, it gives me something to do...