London Tube Stations

At Tube stations, when I put my Travelcard through the machine that lets me pass through, the doors open with a slam, and they shut with a slam. When there’s a crowd, this makes for a lot of crashing, slamming noise, almost to the point that I don’t hear anything else. But I also hear disembodied, echoing voices delivering announcements such as, “Please have your cards ready,” and talking about any delays or keeping track of possessions. And “Mind the Gap” is indeed important when you get to the platform. Sometimes the disembodied voice says, “Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.” According to Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, a smoky thing will drift out of the gap and get you if you don’t “mind the gap.”

I mentioned noise at the beginning of the first paragraph, and it’s no wonder. Sometimes there’s little point of trying to converse because of the noise in London generally, not just inside Tube stations and trains. If we’re walking on the sidewalk, our voices are drowned out by the traffic (except at, say, one in the morning). If we’re walking along a subway tunnel, the many clopping feet and the disembodied and echoing voices drown our voices out. If we’re standing or sitting on an underground train, it rattles away loudly, rattle, rattle, and rattle, while it shakes.

Standing on the platform and waiting for the subway train, we’ll hear it roaring before we can see it. I like to look at the entrance of the tunnel, and soon I see two lights approaching, from the two glowing white/yellow lights at the front of the train. The lights are like the eyes of a monster, a snorting jabberwocky. And the train approaches, with those glowing eyes, roaring away, moving swiftly like a dragon emerging from its cave. It gradually slows down, as many passengers clearly visible through the windows move past. When the train stops, there’s a half second when it just sits there and I anxiously wait for the doors to open, then finally the doors open and I step on at the closest door, no matter how crowded the car is, no matter how many people are already standing in that particular car. Sweating bodies are pressed against each other … that’s rush hour on a London Underground train.

One day, my sister commented, “I love stepping out of a Tube station. You don’t know what you’ll see—you’re in a completely different place.” She said this after we stepped out of a Tube station and I saw a very gothic-looking building right in front of us and for a couple seconds thought it was Westminster Abbey, because that was our destination at that moment. But then as I stepped through the big entrance and out from the Tube station, Big Ben hovered overhead, right there before me. It was very surreal. Indeed, I really don’t know what to expect, what fascinating architecture or what kind of neighborhood I’ll enter when I step out of a Tube station. I’ve come off a different planet, in effect.

Tube Station Details

I know I’m getting closer to the Tube station if I see this in the distance: a square white Tube sign with the standard symbol of a red circle and a blue line across the center. Such signs are on black iron poles, and a black iron railing surrounds the staircase entrance descending into the Tube station. (Actually, this city has lots of black wrought iron fences and gates just in general—first there’s the street, then the sidewalk, then a black fence, and then steps or bushes or another sidewalk or walkway, or if I’m lucky I might see a garden or bright green grass on the other side of the fence.)

The Regents Park Station and at least one other station have a pair of huge elevators (or lifts, if you prefer) onto which travelers step, and those stations have doors on either side of the elevator (reminiscent of the O’Hare Airport that I remember from my childhood—I have to say it is totally unrecognizable now). If many people are waiting for the lift, when the doors open, a herd all together steps forward onto the lift and fills it up. Sometimes, before the herd moves on, and after the door has opened, I see the back of many people stepping off the lift through the other doors. That’s quite weird looking. And as long as the doors are open, I hear a continual, slow, short BEEP BEEP BEEP similar to the sound large vehicles make while backing up. (For that matter, when double-decker buses stop at a bus terminal they also make a high-pitched squeal that’s painful to the ears.)

The walls/ceiling of the tunnels and platforms of Tube stations form a semicircle, with the exception of a few (such as I think Blackfriars), where there are platforms in the sides and center and a flat, grey, ridged metal ceiling, making it look I suppose more modern than the other station, and less Art Deco.

Both Waterloo Station and Grand Portland Street Station involve entering a building. For Waterloo it’s a regular train station also, dating to the Victorian era, and what a regal, elaborate façade it has, with a giant eagle in the sky. Not only for subway trains, it has shops inside. Following signs is important in Tube stations, particularly at Waterloo. I take a walkway to South Bank, and when I step out of Waterloo Station I end up on a clanking metal bridge and walk down a somewhat spiral metal staircase, made of a grey filigree sort of metal, that seems lightweight and that clangs while I step down it.

Another interesting detail is the phrase “way out.” It is in bright yellow letters over an arrow at the Tube stations, painted overhead on the walls, like overhead breadcrumbs leading people to the correct exit; it also appears in glowing digital yellow lights on black signs. But it is also in other places, not just the Underground. For instance, the National Gallery contains exit signs over doors saying “Way Out” or “Way Out / Trafalgar Square.” At the Transport Museum, my sister pointed out that another meaning for “way out” is that there’s always a way out, no matter what situation you’re in. Before she said that, I had jokingly said, “Way out, dude.”

The Tube and Advertisements:

Underpasses and Tube passageways contain poster ads all along the walls, not only for such products as cars, wine, clothing, and hotels, but also for books (such as, for instance, Old Flame Smoldering I think was the title) and for plays at theatres in London, such as The Woman in White, a musical that opens in August, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and starring Michael Crawford. Even when you’re going up one of these big long escalators, the posters are also going up, and sometimes they’re connected in theme, or some of them are; in those circumstances, every other poster is part of a series. Three posters for the London Aquarium caught my attention: the first showed a large orange fish and the caption “Where could he be?” At least one unrelated ad followed this, and then the next showed a bunch of little silvery fish with the caption, “I saw him over there!” and the last is a picture of a clown fish with the caption, “Here’s the clown fish!”

Also, when standing on a platform, facing me are huge posters attached to the walls, like in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and they advertise such things as stores, wine, books—for instance, Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? describing him as the “capped crusader.” Also, I see more posters on the wall behind me while standing on the platform, and some of these posters (as is the same with the passageways) actually shift, making a mechanized rumbling sound, so that there are at least two different ads in the same frame. Go to a Tube station at an unpopular hour, and the only sound will be that mechanical rumbling noise. Benches and vending machines, such as Coca Cola or Cadbury chocolate vending machines, stand against the wall on the subway platforms. The benches are usually silver-colored metal.

Inside the trains themselves are displayed a string of long, rectangular ads up above the windows, not to mention up above the Tube maps over the windows (the latter only cover the route of that particular train). Ads are for cell phones (mobile phones, rather), newspapers, books, job hunting, career counseling, and juice.

Art and the London Underground

Poetry. Among the ads along the top edge inside the trains, sometimes I notice “Poetry On the Underground;” a poem followed by the author’s name. Also—I believe it was on the orange walls of the underpass below Waterloo Bridge, or on the South Bank just south of Waterloo Bridge—a beautiful poem was painted on in simple stenciled letters and followed by the author’s name. Unfortunately, we hurried by and I neither wrote nor remembered her name. The poem was very appropriate, mentioning darkness and maybe a tunnel.

Paint and Mosaics. The Tottenham Court Road Station is beautifully decorated in rainbow colors, with little one inch square porcelain tiles creating the mosaics. This is on the platform walls and the tunnels. At the Marble Arch Station, tiles (of the usual size, about 4” square) have an arch design painted on, blue and white coloring. At Baker St. Station, down the street from Sherlock Holmes: tiles are yellow and brown, and there might also be red and green tiles with the typical Sherlock Holmes silhouettes centered in the tiles. Over and over, there are hundreds of little Sherlock Holmes silhouettes. At Regency Park, the tiles are white, brown, and orange, and “Regents Park” is displayed on the wall in brown letters, elegant stenciled style reminiscent of nineteenth century lettering. Charing Cross Station has predominantly black and white versions of famous paintings painted on the walls, because of the National Portrait Gallery. They include Shakespeare (along with a quote in calligraphy, beginning with the phrase “Dear Reader”), Lord Byron, and Napoleon, among others. The latter is rather appropriate, since just above ground is a memorial to Wellington. Another station has diagonal green strips painted on the tiles, with abstract little people sticking up out of them; this may have been Great Portland Street—no, no, more likely a location with a particularly long escalator. Maybe it was Trafalgar Square. Great Portland Street and one other station had blonde brick with archways creating little alcoves all along the platform, reminiscent of a Victorian train station or sewer.

Music. Musicians and singers, usually one though sometimes a pair, perform music at Tube stations and walkways. Often the song is by a famous group or songwriter rather than something the musician composed. All the performers we saw were male, and a bunch played the guitar. One of the guitarists had long dark hair and big pretty eyes, and he was playing a haunting song by John Lennon that I heard echoing down the walkway long before I saw the musician. Another sang and played Radiohead’s song “Creep” on a guitar. A pair of musicians performed something by Simon and Garfunkel. That of course doesn’t necessarily mean that they are all male, though oddly I don’t remember seeing any female musicians.

London Transport Museum: http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/