...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.

One of the  ideas for Sunday was to go up the Jubilee Line and visit the Hindu temple that's about equidistant from either Neasden tube station, and Stonebridge Park on the Bakerloo, but a series of transport delays eat up time.  Firstly, I can't get into the bathroom because Lemmy is doing his ablutions:



Any attempts to brush my teeth in the sink are meant with baleful stares and a mean left hook...

Eventually, after a negotiation on bathroom space and a  fine breakfast fromvelvetdahlia I'm trundling down the road to find somewhere to buy a travelcard.  I pick a newsagent at random and am flabberghasted to find the person behind the counter is someone I used to work with at the cinema in Fulham.  There's one of those 'staring open-mouthed in disbelief 'moments as she also can't believe I've just walked into her shop in Boston Manor far west on the Piccadilly Line.  There's much squealing and hugging across the counter as we just repeat each others names as though we've summoned each other by incantation - especially ironic is that I am going to metmidnightxpress this morning who is also an ex-Fulham UGC compatriot.   She's so flustered by my materialisation that she nearly stamps my travelcard the 14th November 2006.

London is supposedly this vast metropolis where everyone is a stranger, and yet I regularly bump into old friends and acquaintances - school-friends from Cornwall, people I worked with decades ago, people I know who don't live in London...even vodex of this parish (IIRC) was in a tube carriage with me an overheard my conversation about this art project before he found this blog...life is a series of astonishing co-incidences. I suppose that given the size of London and all the variations on chance encounter that are made possible by the sheer number of people sloshing around the city that we shouldn't be surprised at the frequency of bumping into people we know on the street, but it is still an ever-amazing occurence when you crash into someone you know from Bodmin on St Martin's Lane, or find yourself in a train carriage with an ex-boss.

Still slightly dazed, I then spend the next 40 minutes waiting for a bus, and wonderment has time to settle into annoyance at the morning slipping past.  Transport woes increase when I realise that my planned route is impossible due to engineering works taking out the whole Circle line and the Edgware Road branch of the District line.  Further hopes of a clever alternative are quoshed at Hammersmith when the PA system reminds us that there's no service on the H&C from Hammersmith today - so effectively any direct route into Paddington from West London is frelled.  I travel all the way into Piccadilly Circus and back on myself via the Bakerloo to eventually arrive at Paddington nearly an hour late. I'm more than a little fractious, so after leaving baggage at left luggage G and I settle for a soothing cup of tea to imporve my disposition before renegotiating today's plans now that we are behind schedule and I'm in a bad mood.  Tea helps...time with my friend to chat about frivolity helps even more.  We hatch a new plan and set off underground to conquer a few more stations.  I leave you this clue to deduce where we emerged:

We start this leg of the tour from North Greenwich. I am amazed to see the Millenium Dome is right outside the station, flanked by soaring aerofoils and concrete flags, for no explainable reason other than they look cool against the blue winter sky. They fascinate me; they should be generating electricity. It is as surprising to see the Dome really is right there as it is to see how close Stonehenge is to the road. However, there's a fight going on aesthetically between the vaguely fascist 'tomorrow belongs to us' exhuberant brutalist architecture and the mundane world of bus stations and carparks, vast tarmaced vista stretching to the horizon, the British way of not being quite finished yet, all chipboard hoardings and hazard tape. All very 1984 as staged by the Beeb with Peter Cushing in the lead. As much as I love the Edwardian sections of the tube, I can't help but love the clean lines and open spaces on the Jubilee; the proud grandeur they were striving for in being overtly modernist in design - to be as 'of the time' as much as the early tube stations were of theirs, the acres of reflective, toughened glass, brushed steel and superstructure on view. Nothing softened by anything organic or green. However, it's gleaming and shiny now, and pleasantly deserted at two in the afternoon. Will it retain the sharpness and futurist beauty after twenty years of foot-traffic and budgeted maintenance? The noise of the now pentrates the open station...(oh yes, I have a degree from Goldsmith's and I'm not afraid to use it)


blue glass mosiac tiling on the support beams...

Still, the expanses of glass and chrome, are shiny shiny surfaces to play with. Having someone with you to take pics, rather than accosting a random stranger who might nick yer camera, and in front of whom you'd feel stupid clambering about on street furniture pulling silly poses, means we can muck about. No staff are about to tell us off either.


Needless to say, pvc has little friction and is very grabby; I get stuck on the post...bet that doesn't happen to Catwoman. We are giggling like fools as G extricates me. Blimey - my arse is so shiny I can actually see people reflected in it. Sadly angle wrong to reflect the station name...


Up in the ticket hall, we spot the perfect location for General Bamford to survey her domain...