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By Callimachus | Related entries in Kitchen SinkWhen you come face to face with the sentence ” ‘Well, I’m knackered,’ I’d think to myself, ‘but at least I’m still alive,’ “ you know this isn’t Jimmy Breslin.
Courtesy of the Telegraph, and in the best “There’ll Always Be an England” style, comes this tribute to the Tube from a Yorkshire boy who learned its secrets and came to love it.
I came to appreciate that riding on the Tube was not a mug’s game, but a privilege. It was the oldest, largest, most complicated and beautiful system of urban transport in the world, full of surreal lacunae, which seem to be encapsulated in the famous warning “Mind the gap”. If you look at a diagram showing the tunnels going into and out of Camden Town, it’s like an Escher drawing, an optical trick. You can’t trace the line of them with your eye. So complex is the Northern line at that point that Harry Beck, designer of the underground map, agonised for years about how best to depict the location of Mornington Crescent station.
When I was in London, I stayed down by the Albert Bridge, in Chelsea. I’d ride the 11 bus up to Sloane Square tube station. That was “my” line. And Andrew Martin’s article answers a question I’ve long pondered:
Why is there such a gigantic pipe across the platforms at Sloane Square? (It contains the Westbourne River, and it shakes in heavy rain.)
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