...so Willesden Green...having skipped back to adventures on the DLR in March, I return regular readers to my more recent travels last week to complete the last few stations on the Jubilee line.

First stop, the fabled Willesden Green...


  ... then up to Dollis Hill.

Back in the summer, I picked up a leaflet on Dollis Hill House at the Kensal Green Cemetery Open Day.  The house itself, weekend retreat of Gladstone for many years, was badly damaged by fire in the late 1990's but there's a campaign for its restoration for local use for people using the park.  The park was part of the grounds of the estate and was bought out by the council to preserve some open green space when the area was becoming rapidly urbanised from the previously completely rural farmlands of Gladstone's time, that had once supplied London with milk and hay.  Mark Twain stayed in the house too in 1900, and described is as as close to Paradise as one could get here on earth.  Don't think he'd think the same now, but we didn't really stray past the tube station itself as there was plenty to see there.

If I tell people I use my free time to visit tube stations the way some people visit stately homes, they get this look on their face as though they are talking to someone who has conversations with the pixies, or even more socially unacceptable; a trainspotter.  I understand their misgivings -  I like to walk around the odd National Trust property myself, but the lives of the people who lived in these places are very remote from mine.  Corbusier called houses 'machines for living in' and these grand piles are 'machines for displaying social power', oh which I have none.  Plus I'm aware that given my social background I would likely to have been dead by 30 worked to an early grave as  with most peasants. 

Visiting tube stations though, I appreciate their function, the meaning they have to Londoners, even if for the most part it has become invisible through familairty.  It was the coming of the railways that pushed the speed of conversion of this land from pasture to housing estate, with populations going from under 3,000 inhabitants in the parish of Willesden in 1841,  to over 15,000 1871, in 1891 over 60,000, and by 1905 over 100,000;  Willesden Green tube, opening in 1879.  Without cheap fast travel into London, working people just could not have been able to escape inners slums to better housing.  The railways have shaped this landscape, shaped human usage of it. When scanning accommodation ads, how often is it that what you look for first is how close to a tube you are, and what line it's on.

...anyway, musings on land-usage aside, we don't have to stray far from Dollis Hill for our fill of culture because the exit tunnel walls are decorated with murals of OS maps and star charts - just fantastic stuff.  It might not be Canelletos or Titains painted on grand ceilings, but it's something to be enjoyed by any traveller anyday.