( into the darkening world )
Behind the station another vast expanse of car park that serves the shopping centra and cinema. I used to live in a council high rise here just after I graduated and would walk from Surrey Quays to Greenwich to sign on. My neighbour once offered to give me the bus fare as he thought this trek was due to poverty rather than a willinness to walk that distance, just for the hell of it, to see what's out there. Londoner's just don't seem to walk much and have an exagerrated sense of distance between places.
Other memories of Surrey Quays:
It has a high Bangledeshi community, who make a real effort to live in cross-generational family groups. There seems to be a valuing of the older members of their community, something 'we' all too often fail in. Remember a knock on the door one evening, and found I was being canvassed by the BNP candidate for local elections talking about the erosion of British family values because 'all these interlopers were filling up the council flats with their grannies and kids, 17 to a house, pushing nice white folk out'. I came so very close to pushing him over the balcony, five stories up as a service to humanity - not simply because just standing for the BNP marks him down as a vile cretin, neither because what he was spouting was so blatantly contradictory in that the local Bangladeshi community seemed a living embodiment of the family values he placed so highly, but because of the look on his face when the door opened to reveal a white person, the look of relief to see 'one of his people' there, and that look tried to make me complicit in his racism. How dare he be pleased to see me. He was lucky to escape with nothing worse than a flea in his ear.
And of course, on a much lighter note, the last time I was here after moving out to Forest Hill was to see a late night screening of The Phantom Menace at Surrey Quays UCI cinema. Oh, a long story this is, a tale of walking through Lewisham town centre in head to toe black rubber with a Jedi in a cape with light sabre up his sleeve to the highly vocal marvellment of the crowd outside the pub. Later, actually getting to shout 'follow that cab', only to discover the driver is speeding while speeding leading to a white knuckle ride not always with all four wheels of the car on the ground.
No-one more amazed than ourselves to discover we made it alive to the cinema, only to find residents complaints have meant the cinema have had to cancel the performance, and it being two in the morning there's no transport out of there, and our cabs which as well as being terrifying cost us fifty quid have just screamed off into the night, so I go into 'aggrieved mode' and being dressed as a dominatrix certainly helped in getting the manager to agree to hold a private screening just for our group, at no charge, and including all the free icecream and popcorn we could carry; happy acid-fuelled enjoyment of pod racing of some of our party and hysterical giggling at unintentional hilarity of Qui-Gon Jinn's boots smoking on the funeral pyre, and staggering out into the brilliant dawn at five in the morning quite, quite baffled to be thrown back into the world again after possibly the world's first cinema lock-in.
...that was a good evening...Maria, being American and Good At Complaining, who at this point hadn't known me long, asked Anton whether I could do with help in raising the complaint with management, and Anton telling her to sit back and watch a master at work. Scott piping up 'I've come all the way from Ipswich!
But on to journey's end. We've done eleven stations in under three hours and are flagging. B's cold is plaguing him; drugs and a sit down are required. We are due in Forest Hill, and the siren call of a good curry can be felt. The tube god decides for us and as it's a New Cross Gate train that arrives first, we abandon original plan of going to New Cross and walking over to New Cross Gate. At NCG there is a Forest hill mainline BR train due in a mere four minutes - as it's a half hourly service on a Sunday evening the transport gos are indeed being generous, and the camera battery last outs just long enough to get the one shot.
No-where on the platform is there anything to tell you you have arrived by underground.
Whitechapel retains its dodgy reputation:
What caught the eye on the signage was not the fear of mugging, but the plaintive little 'why' added on? It's an official 'why?' as well, not a graffitied addition, as though in a lonely control room, some world weary copper rails against the unfeeling world, fist to sky crying 'why can't we all just be nice to each other?'.
( the darks waters closed over their heads )
Too dark for pictures of the Whitechapel Art Gallery facade, so we retreat back underground, sad to have missed out on Shoreditch:
The last day of operation for Shoreditch chronicled more ably on
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primitivepeople 's blog, for them that cares.From above ground at Whitechapel towards Shadwell we descend into the East London Line proper, under the Thames. The tunnels here are the oldest of the Underground, opening to train traffic in 1869, a full hundred years before I was born. The tunnels themselves were built by the Brunels in 1843 and were used by horse-drawn carriages and foot traffic - how marvellous to have seen crinolined ladies strolling through the bricklined tunnel under the Thames, although being near to the docks it was not a reputable area. For its day it had generous headroom and was an engineering marvel, the first tunnel of its kind under a navigable river. You have to love the Victorians daring - but then no H&S regulations so drowning a few navies in the name of progress was taken as inevitable risk.
I love the curved brick ceilings.
I left New Cross after graduation in '95 so wasn't there to see the tarting up of this the second shortest tube line. When I was using it, it was distinctly shabby, with constant arguments in the press about closing it down and fights to save the historic tunnels from destruction and neglect.
Since my time the stations have been cleaned up with shiny new metal fascias all sporting various artists interpretations of the area. Shadwell's art is of the splashy open modern style; not really my thing. Picked a piratical sailing ship for the pic as the least irritating:
However, heading up to street level was marvellous fun climbing up the metal gantry staircases.
Standing on the platfrom, right up against the 'no passengers further than this point or risk a grizzly death' signage, one could hear what sounded like a waterfall. Gave one a real sense of the mighty Thames being held in check by human ingenuity, of Victorian confidence, of really being under the water not merely under the ground. And of course a slight sense of nerves as should one be able to hear what sounds like and awful lot of water rushing past, just beyond sight?
On to Wapping. At least the art here is more draughtmanlike, being pseudo-Victorian copperplate engravings. The platforms themselves, though, incredibly narrow and all lit in an eerie golden glow.
And again, climbing from the deepest part of the Thames tunnel to the surface means going up gantry style staircases, perfect for clambering on to peer over the high mesh. All is industrial, utiltarian styling, but somehow warmed and humanist with the more organic brick surrounding. It is what it is, no frills, and yet not souless. Perfect place to film Blake's Seven episodes.
More of the same at Rotherhithe. Behind the station is the Brunel Mueum, a good companion museum to the Museum of the Docklands at West India Quays - something to look forward to visiting when I do the DLR. Inside, find signs of life in the dark:
We rattle on, towards the first new built station on the East London, the Jubilee Line extension at Canada Water. All the clambering about on filthy metal mesh has left me with interesting addition to the macillage...
