From Finchley Road on Sunday, we'd zoomed down the Metropolitan to Baker Street to pick up the Bakerloo over to Paddington.  On the platform was an archway - probably load bearing, or something else highly important to stop the roof falling on us, but it seemed an unnecessary portal...I like finding these odd details...naturally I walked through it, just in case it was interdimensional.

 
Again low light made taking pictures with my little camera difficult. 

In small type on the wall. Lovely burnt orange tiling...


Down the stairs to the Bakerloo line:

eThanks to the weather, and trees falling over, midnightxpress  was late into KX. The objective for the day was to collect as many stations as possible within Zone 2, and try to get as many of the ones suggested as possible. These were: St John's Wood, Bank/Monument, Pudding Mill Lane, & Kensignton (Olympia).

It was midnightxpress  that suggested St John's Wood so G and I head there first via the Hammersmith & City that allows us to knock out Euston Square and Great Portland Street on the way. GPS has beautiful brick arches that have weathered over the years of water dripping through them. ( the weather is not our friend )

the globe lights floating in the Great Portland Street ticket Hall remind me of the communication globes that the Ood use in Docty Who..


from Baker Street, marvellous creaky, old fashioned Baker Street of tunnels and pillars, we switch to the Jubilee Line northbound...



St John's Wood is much more 30's after the Victorian tunnelling we've just been wandering through at Baker Street. There are glowing roundels at the base of the escalators, and the escalators themselves have bronze uplighters in the shpe of Doric colomuns with searchlights attached. it's very Age of the Cinema...these are uplighters to sweep the skies in front the Chinese Theatre...Busby Berkeley could set up dance routines with girls in spangles dancing down the central stairs.




Outside it's raining. The municipal planting is being lashed flat...we get the exterior shot as best we can, and dive back underground


There follows a debate of where to go next...and after considerable discussion we chose towards Shepherd's Bush as I need a manicure before I start new job and we can take up a few stations on the Central Line in the process, beginning with Bond Street which doesn't have a surface station so we can stay warm and dry.

A plan emerges. There are slides posing as art rather than just carnival silliness over at the Tate. Plan is to met up early and go whizzy whizz as much as possible. We decide that walking to the Tate from St Pauls will both collect St Pauls and allow us to play at Cybermen along St Paul's Vista. Sadly this second objective scotched by the inconsiderate building of a bridge, so scenes like this:


are gone forever. But then, after the recent reboot to the series, Cybermen aren't Cybermen anymore. If they ain't from Mondas they just don't count, she says, nailing her nerd colours to the mast. Dejected I hum the Tomb of the Cybermen theme as we cross the bridge..."brr buh buh brr, buuuh buh buuh", lovely creepy brass.

Sigh...



( a digression into lost memories )
At the Tate there is text to explain the art of going down the slides:

"For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend."

In other words, it's fun to slide down the tude yelling 'wheeee', but you also feel a little queasy. T'was also a little bumpy, and I feared actually puking on the biggest one, but comforted myself with the thought that being in head-to-toe pvc and rubber at least I was easily wipe-clean.

After some too-ing and froo-ing, our party then headed to Baker Street via the Jubliee line at Southwark in the gathering gloom:



to be proper tourists and visit the surprisingly entertaining Sherlock Holmes Museum . Much giggling and trying on of hats.

( Baker Street )