Tubewhore (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tubewhore) wrote,@ 2008-01-16 11:51:00 |
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| Entry tags: | clapham junction, nostalgia trips, the state of the map |
Clapham Junction...
Much to my surprise, Clapham Junction is on the new tube map; a darting spur to the south east as part of the London Overground.
I have a long history of catching trains, or changing lines up the Junction, having lived in South London for most of my adult life, but even so it never ceases to surprise me just where you can get to from there. One thinks of it only as a nexus for commuter lines into London from all over the south, and I've certainly done the usual thing of commuting to various jobs, weekends away in Brighton, and even changing to Waterloo for the one time I've used the Eurostar to Paris for a surprise weekend away...but you can also get to less logical places like Watford to change for trains Northward, or Olympia for exhibitions with my mother, and even once, I clearly remember the utter surprise of waiting for a train into Waterloo and hearing all stations to Penzance annouced on the neighbouring platform. While I'm waiting for my train to Brighton on Friday evening, I check that this wasn't just imagination, and yes, there's only one train a week going to Cornwall, but the fact remains that you can do it, and take your bicycle if you ask nicely first. One day I'll do it - takes forever, but in the strange world inside my head it has a Famous Five on a Daring Adventure feel to it, a train ride for I Spy books and cheese sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, of girls in green blazers and pigtails carrying leather satchels, watching the city give way to fields as they head off for summer holidays foiling smugglers on the Atlantic coast. 
Clapham was also the scene of many meetings on Platform 15 as I came in from my job at Waterloo or Victoria and B came in from his in Putney to converge on the train home to Gipsy Hill, flurries of texts to co-ordinate the complexity of domestic life in London, of timetables and the buying of supper at the Sainsburys in the station at speed to be on the platform in time to make the last leg of the journey home together; all that ended now...
...and my first proper flat in London was on Lavender Hill, to which Clapham Junction is the nearest station. Hours and hours and hours of my journeying about London has been spent rushing from one platform to the other here, missing trains, making trains and pacing the platforms.
I've been through here on the way to work with two chaps dressed as, respectively, an Orc and a Rider in a floor length black cloak, both if them fully armoured and carrying large scary weapons, all of which was completely ignored by a pair of British Transport Police. You'd think in these days of heigtened security a bloke with a seven foot sword would provoke some form of response beyond the swivelling of heads and a raised eyebrow. Cynically I wonder if it would have been different if all three of us hadn't been white.
My favourite journeys would take me close to Battersea Power Station, that marvellous brick monstrosity squatting near the tracks, the largest brick building in Europe, being allowed to decay, looking for all the world like the corpse of a giant grand piano that's been shot and lies where it fell, with legs in the air.
Today I'm off to Brighton to visit friends, to meet the new baby and to find solace in my current state of melancholy. Over and over, over the years I've gone past a sign that annouces Clapham Junction as the busiest station in Britain. I am sure that once it said it was the busiest station in Europe, but that could be faulty memory dating back to the 80s when I lived on Lavender Hill, but I want to find the board for my signage shot. It takes a spot of hunting to get to the right platform, but I manage to grab two chaps waiting there to walk to the furthest end to take the picture for me.
Having grown up on images of London gleaned from Ealing Comedies, living off Lavender Hill made me feel like I was properly living in the city I'd dreamed of, the fiction being more real to me that the truth of it being just another random street on the A-Z.
For a station that sees so much traffic, Clapham Junction is distinctly unglamourous - no sweeping arches of filigreed steel like Paddington, no grand entrance hall. Instead, in today's heavy rain, there are leaking underpasses puddled with grimy water, crammed with hurrying people; everything resolutely stripped back to bare functionality. There's nothing of the romance of travel here, instead it's about the wholesale shifting of people on a bulk scale; ship them in, ship them out. This is a place to get you to work, not to pleasure.
A transport policeman asks me if I need directions. I'm wandering about from platform to platform so I must look lost, so I trouble him to take one more picture under the hanging baskets of plastic flowers.
...and of course you can't have a post about Clapham Junction without mentioning Squeeze.
