We had the train to ourselves all the way from Kensal Green to Marylebone, despite other carriages being partially full.  We took the opportunity to muck about and swing from the handrails...arsing about for all the world like naughty school-children.

Anyway, as we rollocked along we noticed that between (IIRC) Kensal Green and Queen's Park there was this odd 'almost station', a stretch of covered track where the train slowed but didn't stop - almost like an awning for rolling stock to be stored;  naturally it was graffitied.   I'd love to know its real purpose.

Bad reflections from the carriage windows sadly...



We returned to the pretense that we were sensible adults at Marylebone, and then hopped out at the newly refurbished Regent's Park.  The station opened again in mid-June after being closed a little under a year for renovation.  It's closure just before tubewhore began has made it a nagging hole on the Bakerloo Line, impossible to resolve until now.      



It's marvellously shiny. To the best of my knowledge the tiling is a reproduction of the originals rather than the old stuff cleaned up - I will research this more.  But it gives an idea of what the whole line must have looked like when it was first opened - it's all so clean, so dazzling...look how the light bounces around.  How long, eh?  How long before the thin veneer of daily grime defeats the shiny...I was told once that the tunnel walls are coated with human skin cells.  The debris of the thousand upon thousand of people pasing through the tunnels, shedding, and the fine dust blown into every crevice, over every surface...    



Regent's Park is the traditional stop for London Zoo.  The very words 'Regent's Park station' evocative of a style of Londonness filled with Paddington Bears, Beefeaters, Mary Poppins and Peter Pan (yes I know it was Kensington, but it's the same feeling). All these names are the ones that created a sense of what London was for me as a child.  A place of parks cleaned by wombles, museums with dinosaurs that went missing,  feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and taking tea with the queen.  Even after living there for over 20 years, and growing disillusioned with the dirt, the noise and the impersonal crush, the cost and the grind of it, there's still a magic to the word London. It's a collective spell we all speak and dream...




I find zoos distressing though, so the only lions today are stone ones from Kensal Green.  There's no time for strolling the park, so we head northwards back up to Paddington, and an early evening train back to Bodmin.