I've been sulking about these stations since my return from London in mid-December.  Stupidly I forgot my camera on my recent trip, and then the battery gave out on B's digital after the assault on the East London Line...so in order to continue the project was forced into getting a cheapee disposable at Knightsbridge before my trip to Cambs to deliver a rather fine banyan to midnightxpress. 

How quickly one adjusts to the instant playback and gratification of the digital age.  However there was a pleasant sense of tension and anticipation to have to put the film in for development and wait...the frisson of expectation when the envelope of pictures arrived, but oh! the crushing disappointment - most of the shots are rubbish.  Not rubbish in that they are poor composition but worse in that they are mostly blank - dark, grainy and unreadable rubbish.  Some shots I remember taking are missing altogether - presumably because they are just blank grey exposed film with no visible image as such present.

So 64 stations in. The tippex map now looks like this:


there's a pleasing blank space in the middle that is slowly spreading outwards. Bayswater and New Cross Still irk me though. Especially going through Bayswater on the train to Paddington and just knowing there wasn't enough time or willpower to drag all the baggage up and out and down again just to get that one station. Next time...I swear next time...

211 to go.

Behind the pointlessness of this project, the 'doing-it-because-I-can'-ness of the thing, there is also the drive to produce art from it.  Art based on ideas of our own psychogeography, of the stories embedded in the journeys of our lives.  Oh, that sounds so grand and high falutin'...

...Anyway, I want to produce a series of embroideries to represent the tube journeys people take regularily or that have meant something, going out, meeting people, job interviews, visiting friends, going shopping...all the minutia of life in London...

These embroideries will be done to the same scale on semi-transparent fabric so that they can be displayed together in layers, eith major interchange stations matching up across the layers,  so that people and journeys are overlaid across each other.

We all share this space and yet often go out of our way to avoid contact with our fellow travellers, all in our individual layers. So representing this post would involve an embroidery beginning with London Bridge to Bank to Queensway...with small details of story embroidered in a cartouche like old maps and images of London Bridge and Westbourne Grove perhaps painted in, or silk screened underneath...

With this in mind, and to my astonishment discovering that there are a considerable number of people reading this journal who I don't know who are following my progress, I'd ask you to  tell me your tube stories, of favourite journeys, or  journeys you have to make, or ones that have stuck in your head. Please leave a comment if you'd like a journey added to the project; all commets to be screened unless you state othewise.