Going underground … the electrified bowels of London. Photograph: Linda Nylind
I don't know if I'm going to be able to convey – surely the apposite word – the full extent of my love of the London tube. It's a love that exists prior to any sense I have of an estrangement from the world – I suppose if I were inclined to all that Freudian malarkey I'd say that the tube is not "other" to me, for it – or possibly she – is no mere transitional object, but my very internalisation of Mother London herself. Let me expand: I grew up about 10 minutes' walk from East Finchley tube station, and I cannot properly remember a time when I didn't travel by tube. That said, the first regular journeys I clearly remember were when, aged about eight, I began going to school in Hampstead. My older brother and I would travel the five stops to Camden Town, change to the northbound Edgware platform, and go the further three stops to Hampstead. A more direct route was to take the 102 bus to Golders Green, but while I liked the 102 well enough – and especially the breakneck plunge from the back platform as the Routemaster caromed on to the station forecourt – I loved the tube.
I loved its foody-dusty-breathy warmth – a zephyr that seemed to be expiring from the bowels of the earth once the trains had sunk below Highgate Hill. I loved the frowsty look of my fellow-passengers, their faces creased by the ivory light, their clothes lying dishevelled on the dark red moquette. I loved the acrid stench of the smoking carriages – soon enough I was puffing along in them – and I adored the huge and creaky old lifts that winched you up the deep shaft at Hampstead, and which, with their brassy levers, wooden-slatted benches and concertina doors, were undoubtedly steampunk avant la letter. (Although, actually when you come to think of it, London's entire multi-layered infrastructure is, was, and always will be steampunk to the core. I remember seeing Terry Gilliam's Brazil for the first time in Leicester Square, then descending into the tube to be confronted by the same monstrous spaghetti of flaking ducts, and a convoluted mechanism made out of beige metal miniature Venetian blinds that had a small Bakelite sign attached to it which read "SPEAK HERE". I collapsed, helpless with laughter.)
Full review at The Guardian
I loved its foody-dusty-breathy warmth – a zephyr that seemed to be expiring from the bowels of the earth once the trains had sunk below Highgate Hill. I loved the frowsty look of my fellow-passengers, their faces creased by the ivory light, their clothes lying dishevelled on the dark red moquette. I loved the acrid stench of the smoking carriages – soon enough I was puffing along in them – and I adored the huge and creaky old lifts that winched you up the deep shaft at Hampstead, and which, with their brassy levers, wooden-slatted benches and concertina doors, were undoubtedly steampunk avant la letter. (Although, actually when you come to think of it, London's entire multi-layered infrastructure is, was, and always will be steampunk to the core. I remember seeing Terry Gilliam's Brazil for the first time in Leicester Square, then descending into the tube to be confronted by the same monstrous spaghetti of flaking ducts, and a convoluted mechanism made out of beige metal miniature Venetian blinds that had a small Bakelite sign attached to it which read "SPEAK HERE". I collapsed, helpless with laughter.)Full review at The Guardian
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