Aldgate

I had heard all sorts of rumours about Aldgate Tube Station before I actually visited myself. Going down there for the first time, I couldn't believe how many ghost stories were associated with it. Apparently the station has been haunted since it was built in the early 19th Century, and some of them seem to stem from the construction period such as those of carpenters who died during its building and others from a more recent period when one of the gates on the tube line, Aldgate East, was temporarily closed and left abandoned.

Aldgate tube station is on the edge of the City of London, very close to where I live, The London NET (thelondonnet.co.uk). It's a strange place. The architect didn't really design it for people, so as you walk through it, you can feel the air getting colder. I think he was partly inspired by the old plague pits that used to be nearby. There were hundreds of them dotted around London from about the 16th century onwards, at the peak of the bubonic plague epidemic.

When we first moved here, I had a vague idea this area was built on top of a plague pit, but didn't really think about it much. It was only when I started reading "The London Nobody Knows" by the explorer and writer Iain Sinclair that I realised what a remarkable environment we have to live in. All of a sudden the mysterious patch where Sinclair discovers Roman remains beneath the Aldgate Library makes sense.

The Aldgate area was once a forgotten part of the city, but in recent years has developed into an up-and-coming neighbourhood with a thriving and diverse community. However, as so often happens in cities, this land is not without its own little secrets. It seems that almost every building in this part of London has some form of dark history lurking behind it, if not more than one. I’m not even joking, like this cemetary is RIGHT on top of the place where literally THOUSANDS of Londoners from the 13th to 15th centuries buried their dead.

Aldgate East

Aldgate East. Not just a London Underground station but also a tube station to the rest of us. Aldgate, in case you didn't know, is located in the City of London and is one of the largest non-mainline London stations outside Central London although there are several tube stations relatively nearby: Minories, Aldersgate, St Paul's and Liverpool Street to name a few. As with all other Tube lines, it shares connecting bus services with National Rail services around Aldgate East, which include local buses 101 (via Aldgate East Station), 106 and 149 (to Bethnal Green), 15 (via Aldgate Bus Station), 21A (via Stepney Green) and 25 (to Mile End).

Aldgate East. The station was moved by just a few feet in 1938 in order to make the curve of the track slightly more gentle. In order to do this, the entire track had to be lowered by 2m in one night and everything was hidden from view, beneath an enormous blue tarpaulin! The project required 600 tons of steel and 8000 holes drilled into the surface to allow for the foundations to be lowered slowly, over many months.

The Aldgate East curve is one of the most difficult on the Underground. Most drivers dread it. Easy on paper it might be, but it has a nasty habit of catching out even the most experienced engineers. The problem comes at the end of the straight when you have to enter a right bend going at full speed and then it's time to stop just as you reach the platform. Drivers call entering this curve 'the leap'.

The Aldgate East station is probably the least well known of all the London Underground stations. However, it has a very interesting history and a quite unique design. If we take a deeper look into this particular tube station, we can unearth some amazing hidden facts about it. Aldgate East station is the deepest station in London, at 28. 5m (93ft) below ground level. The next deepest is Hampstead tube station in North London, which is around 23m (75ft) deep so Aldgate East is around 5m deeper than Hampstead station.

Angel

There are plenty of underground stations in London, but Angel takes the biscuit for the one with the longest escalator in the capital at 60m (197ft) long with a vertical rise of 27. 5m. Step off at street level and you're at the bottom of an epic flight of stairs. Then board the escalator and have a leisurely stroll up to street level. The journey is equivalent to climbing a seven-storey building. Last Friday I finally visited Angel tube station in London.

For a long time I had always wondered whether there was an underground escalator longer than the famous one at Holborn tube station (the one featured in Harry Potter). So off I went with my camera to find out. Have you been to Angel? Well, have you been to Angel tube station? If not, then what are you waiting for. Its located in Islington and is the start point of three line that serve London, the Victoria Line, Northern Line and the Picadilly Line.

Archway

Chances are you’ve walked past these arches at London’s Archway station many times without ever noticing them. However, now that the tile has become dislodged you’re able to see the black arch underneath. The reason the tiles have become loose is due to a broken pipe leaking water into the area around the tiling — causing it to shift over time. Archway tube station is one of those London Underground stations that, due to its location / design, looks extremely plain on paper.

Balham

Balham is the only Underground station that doesn't have any of the letters of the word underground in it. A report from the Transport Select Committee estimated that 43 percent of fares were higher than they needed to be, with train companies estimating 750 million a year in undercharge as late as November 2005. Many people do not know that Balham is the only Underground station that does not have any of the letters of the word “underground” in it.

Although there are other stations that do not have one or two out of the four letters, only Balham doesn't have even one. Yes thats right, as you probably already know Balham is a station on the north London overground. But did you know it doesnt have any of the letters "underground" in its name?. Built on top of a vast plague pit, Aldgate is considered by many to be the home of some evil, and has long been avoided.

Barking

Barking is a new and fast growing online dog supplies store, located just outside of Glasgow in Scotland. They have a huge range of dog products available to purchase directly from China. They were previously selling well on Amazon, with their own branded product range being very popular. Their biggest problem was the cost of shipping from the supplier (50 containers a month) and not being able to manage this from the UK. After sourcing some great manufacturers in China they introduced DBAO Shipping to help source cheap shipping options alongside providing DBAO Shipping with product feed information for Amazon sellers.

This will be the third year that I have been lucky enough to take part in Barking. 's charity record attempt, and with each passing year comes more history and more kudos from the industry. This year we are stepping into the unknown. The Yiwu market is on the cusp of change, and with it brings opportunity for new records to fall. Seems like they have a great story, direct freight bulk airfreight, delivered direct to your door.

Barkingside

It’s easy to miss Barkingside station if you don’t know it exists. This is because it’s not really missed by anyone. It lies on the North London Line in East London, and is part of a decaying line that connects Barking and Gospel Oak stations. It doesn’t even have a direct link to the Bus Station which it was obviously built with in mind (there are 2 links, but neither of them connect directly). Even though Barkingside has the “feel-bad-train-station-that-doesn’t-get-much-of-the-action” vibe, there are some neat things about it that are worth pointing out.

The station was designed by Charles Henry Driver but not all of his design was implemented as he fell into dispute with the LNER. The ticket office at Barkingside could be described as a miniature version of what might be seen in King's Cross Station. The station has wooden benches in the windows and the ornate curved roof also features carved angels. Barkingside is one of the last remaining stations on the London Underground that can boast an ornate, medieval-style Hammerbeam Roof (usually only used in great halls or cathedrals).

Bayswater

Bayswater Tube Station was originally called Queens Road (Bayswater) station but the name was changed on 1 August, 1917. It was changed to avoid confusion with the nearby Queensway station, which was also called 'Queens Road'at that time. Bayswater's name originates from a building called 'Bayswater House', which stood where Northcliffe House in Northcote Terrace, just north of Westbourne Grove, now stands. This building appears on old maps such as the 1858 Ordnance Survey map.

The house was demolished before 1889 to be replaced by Northcliffe House (which still stands at the same location). I presume you are acquainted with London, so I don’t need to tell you this is confusing. The point is, Bayswater was meant to be a simple, bijou-sounding name and Queens Road fits the bill. But never mind, "Bayswater" sounds like it should be in Miami or Los Angeles. You wouldn't want to live there but you could base a soap opera there youngish people who shop in vintage clothes shops (that's an LA thing).

It's a combination of bohemian and yummy mummies just like the soap, Emmerdale. Did you know that Bayswater is connected to Hyde Park, but not Notting Hill? That's pretty cool. I'd never really thought about it before. I feel like I should be able to find my way there from here. but then again, I'm already in Kensington. According to Wikipedia, Bayswater includes all of the following postcodes: W2, W9, W14, W11 and W10 (let me know if you can figure out where they're located on the map).

This is possibly the least sexy blog post ever published on the internet. But this historical house name fact interests me to no end. I’m going to break out my tourist guide cap and talk about why this is different than, say, Queens Road in Kensington. I stumbled upon a pretty interesting fact: Bayswater Road (Bayswater) was originally called Queens Road (Bayswater). But the name was changed to avoid confusion with Queensway, which was also called Queens Road in 1867.

Belsize Park

On a quiet, tree-lined street in London's Belsize Park the steps that lead up to Chalk Farm Road are the subject of an ongoing dispute. The sign on the outer wall of number 22 clearly states "219 steps", but local residents say it is actually 189. Even though there does appear to be a 20-step difference, how did this miscommunication occur? One possible explanation is that whoever made the initial count had a shaky hand although you'd think they would have noticed this when adding up the individual steps.

This is more than likely why local residents are calling for its removal and demanding an accurate sign to be put in its place. Okay, so the title of this post will be a bit of a giveaway as to how this blog was created. Belsize park has been through a lot lately. In case you havent heard, Belsize Village have been in a battle with Camden council for the past two years to keep them from putting benches on the one part of the park that people actually use like they want.

The steps I am talking about are those at either end of Belsize Park which lead up to Belsize Road. I had this article half finished when the Guardian printed an article about the 219th step. It turns out, there is actually a sign with that number, but it's a lie. The real number lies between 188-190. This just goes to show you how hard it can be to determine whether something is true or not.

Why does Belsize Park lie? Who knows. I've been to Belsize Park and counted the steps (for science). It's a lot of stairs which makes this photo extra funny. I wonder why on earth they lie about the number of steps though?. Was originally called Queens Road (Bayswater), but the name was changed to avoid confusion with Queensway, which was also called Queens Road. And the kicker? There is no Queens Road in Kensington.

Bermondsey

I was lucky enough to get a preview of the new Bermondsey station as it took its first passengers this morning. It's an extension of the Jubilee line, of course, which has taken years to complete; with the original opening in 1979 where I'm from in South East London – Woolwich Arsenal Station. Speaking to The Independent in January 2013, a spokesperson said: "The station will be one of the few deep-level stations in London that is naturally ventilated and sunlight will flood the concourses, helping to keep the temperature down and creating a more pleasant passenger experience.

Bethnal Green

Ok, so this isn’t exactly a 'fun fact'but I do think it is interesting. During the Blitz, Bethnal Green's tube station was used as an air raid shelter because of its proximity to a deep railway cutting which could be used to channel large numbers of people into the tunnels in the case of an incident.  173 people lost their lives during a stampede while using the space as an air raid shelter. News of the disaster was suppressed on orders of Churchill himself until the end of the war.

To commemorate the event, there is a relatively small monument erected in nearby Corbett Gardens, with a plaque simply stating "To the Civilians Killed in an Air Raid Wardens Supplied Air Raid Shelters in. Bethnal Green. It sounds like such an innocent and unlikely place to have a dark history, but Bethnal Green Road is where 173 men, women and children lost their lives in a tragic accident during the blitz on February 3rd, 1943.

On that day, people were visiting Bethnal Green tube station during an air raid alert. When they realized an attack wasn't imminent and they would not get the safety of the underground for shelter, they rushed towards nearby Anderson shelter in Victoria Park but there was only room for 100 inside. The crowd got bigger by the second as 160 people were locked out of their safety down came panic. This is considered by many to be the start of The Blitz, an intense campaign of air raids on major British cities that took place over a period of months, finally ending in May 1941.

More than 1 million Londoners were made homeless by the bombings, which destroyed huge swathes of the city. Many were forced to live in tube stations and tunnels, while bombs rained down from above. These photos show just a few of the places featured in Bethnal Green. Bethnal Green is also home to the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, a museum dedicated to preserving childhood in all its aspects. The museum offers permanent exhibitions that are unique in their content, as well as temporary exhibitions three times a year.

While Bethnal Green isn’t the most pleasant of locations, this blog post is simply here to make you aware that if you’re ever in the area – take a look at the memorial for a quick grim reminder of what sacrifice was made. No, it's not a tour of London's most haunted spaces (though that might be fun), but a look at the history of this area of East London, from Roman times to the birth of the railways.

Blackfriars

The Blackfriars railway bridge, a railway bridge spanning the River Thames in London, became the world's largest solar-powered bridge in January 2014, covering nearly seven thousand square feet. This impressive green addition to the Blackfriars Station is part of a larger infrastructure project currently being carried out by Network Rail which will see the station completely overhauled. Now two years on, the Bridge has just become a major landmark in the 'solar bridge'world, becoming the first bridge to achieve 100% solar electrical generation.

 The Blackfriars Sandys Lane railway bridge opened in 1864 and has since been redeveloped as a footbridge for cyclists and pedestrians. The Blackfriars Bridge in London has recently undergone a renovation that has turned it into the largest solar powered bridge in the world. The cost of renovating the bridge was £5m and the solar panels were added onto the existing metal roof without any structural change or extra maintenance. The solar-powered bridge was a response to an energy reduction order from Network Rail which is responsible for public rail infrastructure in the UK.

Blackhorse Road

Blackhorse Road. Despite the black horses depicted in station murals, its actually named after a nearby black house. You might never have heard of this London Underground station before, or maybe you just assumed it was named after the horses on the murals. Well Blackhorse Road is the lesser known of the two stations on Tooting Broadway’s Northern Line, and despite it being more recently built than neighbouring Tooting Bec, it’s not as appealing to commuters utilising the London Underground network.

When I was growing up I always knew Tooting Bec Station as this was closest to where I lived, but when I moved to Balham I quickly found going to Blackhorse Road far easier. Blackhorse Road is one of Edinburgh’s most popular bar streets, and lies to the south of Princes Street between West Register Street and South College Street. I can’t help thinking though, that despite the presence of horses in murals amongst other things, it originates from a nearby house at West Register 8 that was owned by the Earl of Moray at one time.

If you’re new to the world of horses, then the phrase Blackhorse Road, might just seem like a bit of an oddity. Why would a street be named after black horses? And why are they depicted in murals that adorn some train stations?. I can tell you that despite the fact that this is very clearly a black horse, its name actually refers to a nearby building by that name or the road it’s on.

Sorry to disappoint, but the horse is actually black. Blackhorse Road is located between Green Lane – and Caledonian Park, in North London. In terms of location, it forms the northern end of Haringey – and is considered a gateway to the neighbourhood. Though Blackhorse Road itself is only about 500m, its presence is strongly felt in the surrounding area of North Finchley. After a successful tender process, solar panels were installed on Blackfriars Railway Bridge by Amey plc.

Bond Street

But it was not just Selfridge who thought the high-class clientele that came to Bond Street needed a suitable place to stay. A plan for a seven storey hotel at the foot of the street was drawn up in 1892, and another proposal included converting the Army and Navy stores into a 100 bedroom hotel, but these plans fell through as well. Tube Lines, a private company that manages the day-to-day operations of the Victoria, Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines on behalf of TfL, has proposed renaming the station Selfridges & Co instead.

Borough

Borough was an architectural shortcut. It was essentially a replica of Kennington station when it first opened. Often known by its nickname of the Crystal Palace, the main building was glass, with metal supports inside. The transept in the centre of the structure held a dome more than seventy feet in diameter, which had to be supported by l-shaped columns at the corners and straight fluted piers in between, all made out of wood. It would be a shame to build this way today as it took several weeks just to erect the dome which included setting up scaffolding on all four sides and cutting holes in the exterior walls, so pieces of timber could be put in place vertically and painted yellow.

All this was done before the roof covering. Now I don't want to start any political debates, but if the London Borough of Croydon was or is a replica of this monumental structure then where is the true borough?! I am going to side with Sherlock and come to the conclusion that this must be one of the few cases of "copycat" in architectural history. But why would anyone want to copy Kennington? There are many things that are grand enough within what we see today without resorting to building it twice.

A recent newspaper article suggested that TFL were to spend £50M upgrading Borough station.  I was at a loss to understand how such a small and unremarkable station could possibly justify this kind of expenditure.  If they wished to completely rebuild the station as a replacement, that would be one thing, but this plan just didn't seem to add up. Ever since its opening on 10th July 1999, Borough station has been London’s most modern Underground station on the Northern line.

It was designed by Sir Norman Foster. In the words of Andy Hopper, Director of Sustainable Development and Construction at LU, it was “the best new station on the Underground”. When the station was rebuilt during the 1950s, it was intended to be an architectural mirror of its namesake, Kennington station. Instead it became a near replica. Borough was a station built over the River Wandle in south London, between Wandsworth Road and Tooting Broadway stations.

Brent Cross

Hammersmith & City Line Brent Cross station is named after the shopping centre that was built nearby in 1976, not the other way round. The site of the Brent Cross centre, formerly a fruit-and-vegetable market, had been earmarked for development as early as 1972 when it was deemed suitable for a major shop of 20–30,000 square feet (1,858–2,787 m 2 ) by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Brent Council.

There are a number of residents who have lived in the Brent area for years, and can remember the station being built as “Brent Cross”. However, when the shopping centre was built in 1976, it had to be named after the nearest physical landmark. While it stands to reason that that would be the station, there appears to be little agreement that this is how it came to be. Britain’s most successful shopping centre can be found in the London borough of Barnet, about two miles away from Wembley Stadium and around 4 miles to the east of central London.

Brent Cross Shopping Centre opened in 1976 when the area was a green field site. The station named after the shopping centre opened a year later. It is a common mistake, for example on google maps. The place is named after the shopping centre not the other way around. Brent Cross Shopping Centre was named after the station because it is close to the old mansion house of Brent and there was a small hamlet called Brent Cross in south west Middlesex during Roman times.

We have been making sure the station sign reflected this, and are delighted that Transport for London has agreed, with the unveiling of the new Brent Cross shopping centre sign above the station. Look out for it when you're travelling to see Wembley or Hendon. ". I’ve been hearing the myth that Brent Cross Shopping Centre got its name from the nearby station for years now. No-one seems to know who started it but it’s a legitimate mistake and one I made myself before finding out the truth.

Brixton

The mural is a tribute to the street art in Brixton. It is also a nod to the local area, as well as a play on words. In English slang, a brickie is someone who works with bricks, and in the 2000s the word became synonymous with large quantities or amounts of something (eg I’ve ate a ton of cream cakes). I sat on the train for an hour in Brixton station. Its a bad area that has been revitalized, and the mural of the pyramid of bricks is very well done.

Burnt Oak

It always surprises passengers just how many houses on the edge of a busy London railway station. Some are extremely large and have 4 or more bedrooms. There are some real state bargains to be found here in Burnt Oak if you know where to look. Travelling from Burnt Oak to Stoke Mandeville is easy and stress free: From Stoke Mandeville, its an 8 minute walk down Manor Way, turn right on Acacia Drive and then take your first left into St Mary’s Way heading straight through two sets of traffic lights toward Church Street.

Burnt Oak station, the next stop on the Metropolitan Line is a busy transport hub in North London. Named after the nearby Burnt Oak Broadway, it’s situated at the apex of Barnet Way and High Road. Opened nearly a century ago in 1924, it’s an area I’m very familiar with. In fact, I’ve never lived anywhere other than Kenton and Burnt Oak. Worth noting though is that Burnt Oak station is the only one I use.

I still painstakingly make my way past Kenton on a daily basis to get on a train here. Burnt Oak has been around a long time. It's small, quiet & unassuming. A station keeper's whistle blows twice. Just before 5am. Then again about ten minutes later. People get up for work. I, on the other hand, am already up for work: proofreading my wife's copy. As the newspaper pages turn, I see a small article about Burnt Oak and the history of its smallish shop, which opened there in 1929-1930: 'The first Tesco'.

The grainy black and white picture is of a simple shed in a tranquil rural setting. And indeed there is little indication from the outside that this unprepossessing hut hides more influential goings on than Buckingham Palace. But a few yards away was the first ever Spar shop, built on the same pioneering business plan as the Tesco opened here in Burnt Oak, near Northolt, exactly 86 years ago. The station is fitted with air-filled plastic discs that bounce back the light through the tube.

Caledonian Road

Part of the Victorian-era London Road improvement scheme, Caledonian Road is a wide tree-lined avenue leading from central Islington to King’s Cross railway station. Running alongside the Regent’s Canal, it cuts through what was once strictly industrial land and also sees thousands of commuters use it daily on their way to work. If you've got to go north from Euston, this is the road you take (in case you didn't know). It runs from just south of King's Cross to the Baltic Triangle, and is a long climb.

Camden Town

So the rumours are true.  They plan to spend 10M on rebuilding/redesigning the station to accommodate ticket machines, more space and other rubbish they deem necessary while simultaneously flattening the market in order to rebuild it, again (they tried this once before, look up the early 90s plans for a new Camden market).  Now whilst all of this is going on, they plan on knocking down all of those lovely independent businesses.  Greene King (who own the property that houses Camden Market) aren't offering any alternatives for businesses renting their units.

 So essentially what Camden has become one of the most influential and popular tourist attractions in London, with countless tourists visiting every weekend, it will now be destroyed. Camden Town is a place which is known to so many people around the UK. What many people dont realise is that Camden Town is actually an area, not a place in its own right (if youre from outside London thats probably obvious). And thats where the station comes in.

You see, Camden Town Station serves the whole of Camden Town and all those places around it. Here are some stats about the station. Camden's Markets. I'm not sure if you've seen it in the news recently but Camden Town Station is busy at the weekends, and because of this, its in need of some reconstruction. On top of this, London Mayor Boris Johnson wants to redevelop the site as well.  However, there are plenty of other markets located throughout Camden that shouldnt be overlooked.

Canning Town

Canning Town is a London Overground station in the north-east London district of Canning Town. It is located on the North London Line and lies between Stratford and West Ham on the main line. Canning Town Low Level platforms are 25m below street level, one of the deepest such platforms in the world. The eastbound platform can be accessed by stairs or lift, although part of it may be closed off. The westbound platform must only be accessed by lift; this means that wheelchair users are unable to access that platform without assistance from other passengers, even if they have reduced mobility.

Even on a freezing cold morning, the view over the Thames as you approach Canning Town from the north is enough to brighten your mood. As one of the older parts of east London, it has many Victorian buildings and also boasts its own branch library. I think the new station is better than the old, even if it thinks it’s better than the old one. For a start, there’s the view from the platform, improved with some well-positioned trees between the station and the Barking Road side.

Canning Town was a key station for me growing up. I mostly travelled between there and Stratford, but it was also on my District Line train route from my mother’s house in Jaywick to Barking and then onto Wanstead. The new station is very nice. No more ‘platforms’, just straight through, full length, platforms. One platform for trains to the city and one for the Beckton branch of the DLR. I hate it when I hear the new people being brought on board with us refer to Canning Town station as “Cannon Street”.

Cannon Street

Cannon Street originally ran parallel to the Thames from Blackfriars Bridge via St Swithin’s Lane to the Monument (Victory Monument), thus linking the City of London with the major priory and hospital of St Bartholomew’s. The street was noted for its inns, including the grand Mountague House, demolished in 1829, and Exeter Exchange. The opening of Somerset House on the Strand in 1800 made Cannon Street less important as a thoroughfare; other factors such as a rise in traffic noise levels and construction of a bridge over the narrow street in 1866 eventually led to Cannon Street becoming disfavoured for commercial uses.

Cannon Street is a street and thoroughfare in the City of London. It runs roughly parallel with the River Thames, about 400 yards to the west, in the south of the ancient parish and still legally named Cannon Street, the road was built in 1670 to connect the new King's Mews (now called Knightsbridge) at its western end with candle-making shops near the Thames. The earlier name of Cock Lane or Cocke (Candel) Lane or Grove Lane, after an inn (the George Inn) which formerly stood in this locality, entered into common use.

Cannon Street is an area of London, England, in the borough of the City of London. It has been known by this name since at least 1553. The street runs roughly parallel with the River Thames in the eastern direction from St. Paul's Cathedral to The Monument, being especially prominent when approaching the latter from St. Paul's as a large open space intervening between the ends of King William Street and Cannon Street leading up to Monument underground station.

Cannon Street once formed a curving section of the "Great London Wall". It is now home to two Grade I listed churches, St Mary Woolnoth and St Mary Abchurch. It had a number of industries including a copper plate printing works (1770s–1780s), and a colliery. In the 18th century, it was known for coffeehouses such as the Ship and Cannon, and in the 19th century, clubs including the Cannon Street Club and The Artillerymen's Home (the latter demolished in 1968).

Cannon Street is a street running approximately north-south in the City of London. It runs parallel to and west of Monument Street, east of coach road and in front of Mansion House tube station. The nearest London Underground station is Bank. Cannon Street station, which was once part of the mainline railway network, lies at its northern end and provides an interchange with several Tube lines. Cannon Street has been adopted as a street name in several cities around the world, including the Havelock North suburb of Hastings in New Zealand where is was formed by the renaming of an earlier Kemp Street that was named after William Francis Kemp, a former mayor there, whose surname derives from "cannons" or "guns".

Canons Park

Dame Fatima Whitbread, an eccentric landowner, bought the grounds of Canons Park in 1925 with money inherited from her grandfather who had invented a new type of lightbulb (the first to last longer than 10 minutes). She was a keen gardener, and encouraged neighbours to grow their own vegetables. Her pond is still there, alongside other historical artefacts such as the remains of a medieval leper hospital; it is currently used for ice skating and skating competitions.

In 1887 the district was formed by the Local Government Act to relieve local overpopulation in neighbouring districts. In 1896 a small part of Bow and Bromley Urban District was added to it when Paddington Vestry was abolished and its area divided between Boroughs of Finsbury, Islington and Poplar. In 1965 most of Metropolitan Borough of Paddington was joined to St Marylebone and the City of Westminster districts. It also includes part of Caversham Park RAF Station.

The informal name Canons is derived from the camera obscura, a dark chamber with a small aperture facing towards the outside world. This was used by the clergy of St Paul's to watch services in the early 14th century. The right to use this camera was obtained by Henry Yevele, Surveyor of the King's Works to build a lodge as part of his award for rebuilding St Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire see Yevele Court.

Canons Park is a London Underground station in the southern suburbs of London within the London Borough of Harrow. The station is on the Edgware branch of the Northern line, between Totteridge and Mill Hill Broadway. It is in Travelcard Zone 4 and very close to the boundary with Travelcard Zone 3. Camden Town. Because the station is so busy at weekends, theyre planning on rebuilding it, and demolishing Camden Market in the process (dont panic though, that doesnt include the Stables Market, The Lock Market, the Inverness Street market, etc.

Chancery Lane

Chancery Lane is a London Underground station in Holborn, central London. The station is served by four different lines, and lies in Travelcard Zone 1. It opened on 30 July 1900 as part of the Central London Railway‘s northward extension from Liverpool Street. The line platforms were originally decorated with tiling depicting the houses of parliament, which was removed when the station was modernised in 1990 and replaced with plain white tiles. There are two disused platforms southeast of the current platforms; these were intended to serve an extension south to Fleet Street, which never opened due to financial reasons.

If you've ever used the tube, you'll be aware that Chancery Lane station is one of the largest ones in London. This is because there's a lot down there tunnels, escalators, and an ancient underground shelter. In fact was so important that they built it back in 1939 during the Second World War when it was feared that Germany might bomb London. The work started in 1940, and took three years to complete. It featured living quarters and sports facilities as well as sick bays, a decontamination room, and power generators.

The entrance to the bunker was through an official-looking door at the junction of Chancery Lane and New Fetter Lane – just round the corner from St Paul’s Cathedral. It looks identical to any other office doorway in the surrounding buildings of legal chambers, solicitors and estate agents. Look again though, and you will see it has no number on the front and little in the way of decoration. The Tube network of London was originally designed during the 19th century where they began to build deep level lines for transporting people across longer distances.

During the war, these underground stations served as bomb shelters for Londoners. They constructed a massive air-raid shelter beneath Chancery Lane station to serve as an emergency refuge in the event of a bombing attack. While Chancery Lane also literally refers to a street in London, the term is also used to describe the London Underground station that services it.  The station (a "district" or "deep level" station) is located on the Central Line and is one of two stations to service Chancery Lane, the other being Holborn.

Chorleywood

I started my journey as a digital marketing assistant at BBH in Chorleywood (Aston Clinton-on-the-Hill Buckinghamshire), situated just outside of London.  The branch itself is the largest office for the agency, with over 150 staff and freelancers all working together to provide award winning creative and strategic projects for brands such as Sky, Samsung, Orange, Nike, Heinz, Tate & Lyle and more. Chorleywood is seemingly quite normal for a town. There’s something about it though that holds a lot of personal meaning to me.

I've got a soft spot (and most recently muscle aches) in my heart for Chorleywood, the place where I was born and raised. After looking at its history I kind of grew to have a bit of pride for the place as well. Here's why. Chorleywood is a village in south Hertfordshire in the UK. It has one of the highest qualities of life in the country, just 6 miles from London, breathtaking views to suit all tastes and a unique relaxed feel about the place.

I love Chorleywood, it’s my second home. It's amazing how a place can get on your mind and push your thoughts elsewhere, somewhere else entirely. I hope that doesn't sound too pretentious, its just that what happens in Chorleywood affects London and beyond an area over 180 miles away. I live in Chorleywood and feel that it's often overlooked as a venue so I've decided to write this blog post to give all the goths on the net a place to go to for gothic events which I think the club scene might be lacking at the moment.

Clapham Common

Have you ever wondered why the Clapham Common tube station in London is called Catnip? Apparently, it’s because the residents in the local area were unhappy with how the adverts in Clapham Common station used to depict women. And, what potential purchasers would have seen when travelling through the platform adverts for products like perfume and cigarettes. So they started a campaign to replace these adverts with photos of cats and kittens. They even decided that all of the adverts sold on behalf of TFL would also feature images of cats.

Cats feature on all adverts to this day. A study conducted by TfL found that Clapham Common Tube station was one of the most delayed stations on the London Underground network, with 18. 5% of trains running late in 2015. The Transport for London (TfL) set out to make a difference at the station and decided that cats were the answer.  TfL partnered with Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and the charity Cats Protection to commission the adverts.

The campaign has attracted worldwide media attention. Dozens of adverts on the busy overground train station in Clapham, London were replaced by photos of cats. Not real cats – but rather, cat macros. Photos of cats with captions, posing like humans. The replacement of all the ads with hundreds of cat photos has caused a stir from outraged commuters who are asking questions about the strange phenomenon. In September of 2016, Transport for London (TfL) replaced the adverts in every tube station across the city with photos of cats.

This included Clapham Common tube station, which has the highest rate of cat ownership in the UK, with one in seven households owning a cat. Clapham Common Tube Station in London has for two weeks had all adverts replaced by pictures of cats. It has come about as a result of an agreement with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) to celebrate their 200th anniversary. Clapham Common. For 2 weeks in September 2016, all of the adverts used in the station were replaced by photos of cats.

Clapham North

When a group of South Londoners pitched their idea for what at the time was called 'the world’s first urban farm'to the BBC show Dragon’s Den, nobody could have guessed they would go on to pioneer the sustainable food sector in the UK. The company behind it, Zero Carbon Food, now grows some of Britain’s most exciting early stage technology companies in a bomb shelter in Clapham North. It’s 1959, and London is in the grip of mass civil defense preparations.

While residents are building their bomb shelters, a group is secretly planning an experiment: growing crops just 300 feet below Clapham North tube station, in a decommissioned air raid shelter the size of two football pitches. South London's Clapham North tube station was the test site for the UK's first underground farm, housed in its deep level bomb shelter. The company now grows food under Clapham High Street. Clapham North.  Was the test site for the UKs first underground farm, housed in its deep level bomb shelter.

The company now grows food under Clapham High Street. That was it. Totally void of any other idea or image, there were just cats. The internet went wild. ". A beautiful but sleepy village surrounded by lush woodlands, Chorleywood is well known for its camping and caravanning industry. But did you know it is just a short train ride from London?. ). The ceiling was restored by conjuring up woodworm and carpenters from some parallel dimension.

Clapham South

Before 1907, there was no railway station here. The nearest was Balham which was too far away from the rapidly growing suburban district to become a commuter suburb of London. Clapham South opened on 1 May 1907, later than the other stations on the line. It was originally called Nightingale Lane after the adjacent road which itself was named after an ancient mansion called Nightingale Hall that stood near the present station until about 1890.

A few houses built close to Clapham South station at that time were called Nightingale Lane but these names gradually died out when people realised that they were in fact living in Clapham and not Balham anymore. There are still a few references to a 'Balham-Clapham Junction'. Clapham North was opened by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway in November 1868 as part of the West End of London Extension. The station was originally named Battersea Park Road, but it was renamed Clapham North on 1 May 1880, Clapham Common on 21 March 1895, and Clapham High Street on 20 April 1907.

Cockfosters

This is one of the more unusual tube stations on the Piccadilly line. With westbound and eastbound platforms side-by-side two trains could meet here, where there is no tunnel between them. The station was created when a branch line alongside Cockfosters depot had to be diverted through a tunnel to reduce the number of trains passing each other at speed on the single track main line. Cockfosters station is a railway station serving Cockfosters in the London Borough of Enfield in Greater London.

The station is located on the Great Northern line with services to King's Cross and Moorgate, and is the first or last stop on the line depending on direction. It has two platforms separated by 4 tracks and 3 at-grade pedestrian crossings. There a lot of stories about the Cockfosters station but the truth is it’s much more interesting that just being “the middle one”. The East London Line between Stratford and Cockfosters is now one of my favourite parts of the tube network, as it has a number of interesting features including some unique stations.

Colindale

Colindale is a North London suburb. It is located about 5 miles North West of central London and is itself bordered by residential areas including Gladstone Park, Dollis Hill, St. John's Wood and Cricklewood. Colindale has a good frequent bus service to the city centre and also numerous bus routes serve the area with several tube stations in close proximity. Colindale. The house in which Lawrence and his brother Will lived is at no.

16, which is still standing, on the west-side of Porchester Road, as near as possible to the Oxford Road end of it.  I think it was a lodging house or an independent 'private hotel'when Lawrence lived there; but in the 1914 Directory it is listed as a coffee shop. Colindale is a suburb of West London, in the borough of Brent. It is located north of Hendon, west of Edgware and south-east of Burnt Oak.

The Colindale name is derived from the original Hill Farm, named after the spring Colinda (cold or chalybeate) which emerged at the foot on the hill at what is now The Burroughs. Colindale is a mainly residential area which was developed from the mid 19th century. The name Colindale is derived from the old English ‘cold hill Dale’, with ‘Cold’ meaning ‘Boggy’ and ‘Dale’ meaning 'valley'. Over time the pronunciation evolved to ‘Colin Dale', then later added an extra ‘l’ to become Colindale.

Colliers Wood

You see that pub over there at the bus stop? That’s The Holden Arms. It gets its name from the architect who designed the station opposite, Charles Holden. Did you know Colliers Wood station was his first ever solo project? Back in 1914 he designed five stations for London Transport, including this one and Northfields, in bits of spare time he had outside of his normal work designing buildings. He was also partly responsible for the look of each public building constructed in the British Empire Exhibition of 1924.

Sounds like someone worth learning about, right?. Colliers Wood Station, on the Northern Line, is officially known as Colliers Wood Underground Station. As with many of London’s stations, this area has seen a bit of development in recent years with new builders moving in turning the market into an attractive spot for people to have home cooked food, and a traditional English pub, which offers some of the cheapest pints around. Many of London’s stations are beautiful in their own right, but Colliers Wood is one of the most magnificent.

It was built in what is known as the "Domestic" style of architecture: a mix of neo-Georgian and Art Deco. This meant that Holden's designs were more subtle than his earlier modernist work for the Underground. The station is also home to a sculpture by Paul Day, entitled wait for it "Colliers Wood". This pictures of elderly Colliers Wood residents standing outside their homes on high ground, balancing on ladders. The nameless cast-iron men aren't waving English flags but they are in fact saluting.

Colliers Wood, or Coley as it is sometimes known, continues to build up a big reputation for itself as quite a nice place to live. If you’ve never heard of it before, I can understand, but if you did live in an area with details like. My local station in Colliers Wood is the only one of Holden’s designs that I regularly use. I know it pretty well, but there are still a few things I hadn’t noticed before.

Covent Garden

Something for the whole family, Covent Garden is a must. With its vast array of shops, street entertainment and the leisurely walk to Leicester Square there is something for everyone. There is no better way to spend an afternoon than in this historic part of London. Take a seat on a bench overlooking the Ben Jonson statue outside The National Gallery, just so you can say you have done it or grab a bite to eat at one of the wide range of restaurants including chains such as Le Pain Quotidien or Jamie's Italian.

The Covent Garden station on London’s underground network is not, I would venture to suggest, the most salubrious of the system’s stops. In fact, it’s probably fair to assume that, with its plethora of fast-food outlets and muggings apparent from a cursory glance at the Evening Standard’s crime map online this morning (a quick scan reveals a worrying cluster in Covent Garden), it isn’t exactly one of the most well liked. Neither are its prices.

The Central Line Covent Garden is easily the most overlooked station for tourists, as it’s not even mentioned at all on the tourist map, despite being easily one of the most important stations on any tourist's itinerary. The Tube Map is only designed so it shows you which direction your train is going in on its way to Bank/Bond St, and gives you a rough idea of how long your journey is going to take you, and little else.

A few weeks back I found myself with a bit of spare time, so I took myself off to Covent Garden Underground Station and spent an hour finding out more about it. Covent Garden is one of the busiest central London stations, but do you know why? I can tell you why. In fact, I will tell you everything I discovered during my visit. I promise this isn’t just a load of old cobblers. It’s actually much better than that.

These past three days have seen a lot of exploration work, not to mention a lot of money changing hands. I have been on the underground at least five times in order to see if the prices quoted in my post yesterday are accurate. I can confirm that they are, including the season ticket which is £15,825. 20 for an annual pass. The biggest attraction in Covent Garden is the year round Christmas market, which usually starts in the last week of November and lasts until the end of December.

Simply put it is a great place to visit. Whether you are looking for a gift or looking at Christmas decorations, there are definitely markets for that. Cockfosters is a neologism which would delight Poirot, and even Sayers (the writer of that rhyme). Cockfoster is the last stop on the London Overground East London line. This might imply the origin of the word, cock and bronzed genie of steam era railways W. G. Grace, but it's not so.

Dagenham Heathway

If you get off at the tube stations on Dagenham Heathway and have a look around, you’ll notice that the general condition of the place is quite poor. Pretty much everything in sight seems rundown and disused – which it is. The station was built in 1992, after some 20 years of widespread population growth in the area, but has never had enough passengers to justify staying open more than two days a week. The station buildings themselves seem almost entirely unused – the ticket office is glass-fronted and there are no notices (other than a small sign behind a grille) as to its purpose.

The pedestrian tunnel that connected the station entrance to the end of platform one is open – and seems to have been in this state. For a long time, I used to use Dagenham East station, as it was a lot closer to the house I was renting. However, once the Hammersmith & City Line upgrade was completed, with its new entrance directly linking to Dagenham Heathway's brand-new ticket hall, I soon changed my habit and started using that station.

The two stations are located maybe 500 meters away from each other, but when comparing their figures, they're very different.  Dagenham East has 6 platforms and serves around 2 million passengers per year, while its neighbour (around 2 km distant) has two platforms and serves 8 million passengers per year. The tube stations I am featuring today are located less than 2 miles apart from each other. One is a busy London Underground station, the other is a National Rail stop named after the nearby A127 road and the A13, which runs parallel to it.

Debden

Chigwell station, just north of Chigwell village, is on the West Anglia Main Line, so why should Debden station be mentioned in any train related article? From 1894 until 1956 a branch line ran from Debden Banbury Road to Woodford, and beyond to Snaresbrook. This would have been the more likely location for any ballad about a stationmaster’s wife ‘setting her cap’ at a gentleman traveller. I started reading about Debden when researching the late 19th century for my series of articles on French children who were abandoned by their parents.

Dollis Hill

Dollis Hill played an important part in the Second World War, as the code-breaking computer used at Bletchley Park was built here. The site was established in 1912 by the GPO to deliver telephone services, and grew rapidly through the years. By the end of the decade, it employed 1,800 people. Dust from digging trenches on the site during WW1 caused a lot of problems for telephone systems however, so direction finding equipment was installed to improve reception.

Dollis Hill is interesting not only for its links to Bletchley Park, but also because it was first recorded as a parish in 1332, and it was made up of mostly rolling farmland. The name of Dollis Hill refers to a disturbance or movement of the land, which could be hazardous to those living with it. It’s quite fitting then that GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) made this area their home. While Dollis Hill isn’t the most exciting locale in North London, the area is home to an important piece of history.

During World War Two, the area was home to a secret location known as Station X where code-breakers worked on breaking enemy codes and ciphers. Today, there are no traces of this left at the Dollis Hill site now — but parts of the Tempora programme have their root in that place. North-east London's Dollis Hill is named after a small hill that rises on the north side of Kilburn Lane (the old Roman road later known as Watling Street).

In fact, the word 'dollis'was an old name for this hill. Atop it in 1795, the Duke of Monmouth built a watchtower for the defence of London from a feared French invasion. She's now gone but her memory remains. Years after her retirement, the former Dollis Hill site has been renovated to keep her memory alive. I was lucky enough to get a tour of the site last year and spent time talking with some of the people there about her role in history.

A stroll around Dollis Hill reveals some things you might expect from any North London suburb. There's a church, a mosque, a  synagogue, and quite a few pubs. It's not much to look at, although the local parks are really nice. Debden station was the setting for the Victorian ballad The Chigwell Stationmasters Wife. Not Chigwell. London Underground Stations  is a good example of comparing small and large places. I made the maps below to show the most used stations on each line, which shows how frequently Dagenham Heathway is used compared to Dagenham East.

Embankment

There’s also Embankment Underground Station on the Northern Line. It’s got an abandoned substation attached to it, and we thought it would be a cool place for a club called ‘Embankment’, but we weren’t sure how you actually get into the station. We went down there once through the entrance in Royal Festival Hall, but the door was locked and I had to scale the wall to get out again. (I don’t advise this-you could break your neck!) When we did eventually find our way into the station via an access tunnel from a street near Charing Cross station, we were stopped by three security guys with high visibility jackets and dogs! They were very excited.

Rent (there's a good photo of it inside) on the other hand is a more recent structure you can find next to the Greenwich Hotel on Greenwich Avenue towards the east end of the street. Unlike Embankment, most people will visit this building for its intended purpose, and won't find out about its secret history. You can only get in if you have permission from someone who works there, which makes it less popular with the urban explorers than it might otherwise be.

The site is in the London Borough of Richmond and is located on the edge of the Thames, a short walk from Richmond Bridge. The space started as a Victorian powerhouse, built between 1847 and 1849. After a period of closure, it reopened as part of the Underground power network in 1900. Most recently, it was used to maintain traction current for District Line services but it is now out-of-use for this purpose. My favourite spot.

Embankment is massive it makes Westminster look like a hobbit hole, which considering its also underground, would make it a hobbit-hole-sized hobbit hole. It also has a massive abandoned substation attached to the back of it, which had been disused since 1957 all that remains are a channel of water and the occasional sight of a security guard watching you from far off in the distance. On 15 May 1988 the station was given its present name of Clapham South.

Epping

Well, i learnt something new today. It's not London for a start, but actually Epping in Essex, although it is on the Piccadilly line and my company are based there. The station is going through some re-development at the moment I believe which will expand the car park up to around 750+ spaces. From reading the article i learned that North Acton used to be the biggest with over 1600. But looking at the tube map, it appears not one station on the network has over 1,000 parking spaces.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that London Underground has a large swathe of its routes now running through Epping.   This includes the Central line, which runs to Liverpool Street, and the Leytonstone and Chingford services on the Walthamstow branch of the Central line. Given these extra stops more people are taking this route by car to get into central London. Epping is not a big place a quiet suburb of London. A place to raise a family.

Epping however wishes to be seen as the capital of Essex, in this world of boroughs battling for Council Tax revenue.  The town's taxis all have 'EP'painted on them so it is easy to just drive around town without actually knowing where you are going. The town motto. Epping railway station is a railway station in the town of Epping in Essex, England. The station and all trains serving it are operated by c2c.

It was opened on 10 May 1856 as part of the Eastern Counties Railway extension to Loughton, replacing an earlier station at High Ongar that had opened in 1842. It's unlikely that you will think about visiting Epping Underground Station to pick up the keys to your property on your way to work unless, maybe, you have been watching far too much Grand Designs recently. However, it could be one of the most important moments in your day.

Finchley Central

The first thing to say about the Harry Beck map is that if you can show it to someone who has never seen it before, and they look at it for a few seconds and go “oh yes, I see …” then you’ve done something right. The Underground map is a classic design that changed the way we all view London and, indeed, transport maps in general. And now it returns home to this station named after the designer of the Tube map himself.

Finchley Road

Finchley Road Tube station, the last of a number that opened on 1st May, 1906, stands at the eastern end of Finchley Road. It is a little over 100 years since building began and a century since trains first ran to the station. This is where the Northern Line joins the Edgware Branch — today’s Piccadilly Line — shown in this photo from 1907. In such a short period, Finchley Road has become both celebrated and infamous: from ‘the hole in the road’ which frustrated motorists to ‘Finchley Central’ where you were most likely to find yourself if you got off here at rush hour.

There are many stories about Finchley Road around which travellers regularly congreg. The ice must have reached Finchley Road itself, for on the steep slope of the trench, where the spoil was deepest, numerous well rounded boulders of flint were found mingled with the chalk and clay. They were all very much smaller than those being dug from near Highgate, but for some reason that is not apparent they did not reach any great height, though the glacial deposit is known to have been well over a hundred feet deep.

", Trench J. T. "No ice age in North London" Nature 836 (18 May 1955). Finchley Road is a London Underground station located in Travelcard Zone 2, beneath the junction of Finchley Road and Ballards Lane. The station is served by the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines. It is on the edge of the area known as North Finchley. The underground station at Finchley Road is London Underground's second deepest. Only Balham Station (Northern Line) is deeper.

Finsbury Park

Finsbury Park is a London Underground station in the district of the same name. It is on the Victoria line, between Manor House and Blackstock Road stations and is in Travelcard Zone 2. Finsbury Park station was opened as "Tottenham North" in 1873 by the Tottenham & Forest Gate Railway (TFR). The platforms are under the four tracks of the railway between those carrying heavy rail services and those carrying light rail services to Cheshunt and Stratford.

When originally planned by the TFR, the line was intended to connect with an extended Great Eastern Railway (GER) to take advantage of connections to Liverpool Street, but this never came to pass. Despite living in London for over 10 years I had neither seen nor heard of Finsbury Park. To me it was just another name on the Overground map that I would duly check before changing at Highbury and Islington. It would have stayed that way too if a few weeks ago, I hadn't been reading Mind The Gap by Oliver Green when it happened to pass through there.

Finsbury Park is a station on the London Underground and is the eastern terminus of the Victoria line. It's located on Stroud Green Road (A501), about 600 yards (550 m) from the busy shopping street Finsbury Park.  This station opened in December 1970, at which time it was one of three stations on the short lived Finsbury Park & Highgate line. The platforms lie 55 feet (17 m) below ground level, just north of Finchley Central.

Gants Hill

Once a marshy area, the site was developed from the sixteenth century onwards. In the nineteenth century, Jews who had been expelled from Russia settled in Gants Hill, and are thought to have given it its name.  The area was part of London's main shopping centre from 1852 until approximately 1930 when supermarkets became more popular at which time the area declined dramatically. The area of Ilford got its name because it is a hill.

A really exciting, fun kind of hill covered with oak trees and still called a hill despite actually being quite pleasant. From the top of Gants Hill you can see three football pitches, the Gants Hill library, an even bigger hill, Gants Park, and other hills. No one can be sure, but this theory is more fun than the other. Think of Gants Hill as a village in Essex. It doesn’t sound like much of a destination on its own, but it still has that quaint British charm we all know and love—as long as you don’t go there expecting a lot of history.

Like most of London in NW Essex near Ilford, Gants Hill is an area created by the building boom of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s quite a pleasant place to live, and something of an affordable place to buy a house. Assuming the origin of the name is correct, this village seems to spend an inordinate amount of time swarming with gnats, considering that its east bank lies directly alongside the River Lee Navigation. One of 12 stations that were part of the original Metropolitan Railway project, opened in 1863.

Gloucester Road

A few years ago I used to go out of my way to catch the tube at Gloucester Road on weekends just for this. There is a permanent art installation, curated by Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, in disused platform 4 (probably closed to train traffic around 1977). It was his idea to hold an annual festival (called FreeFest) in the disused tunnel space for one weekend each year. It has become a tradition starting in 2009, and thousands of people descended on it one Saturday in 2011, surprising many of us who thought it would just be us regulars.

The old Gloucester Road platform survived the redevelopment of the station in the 1980s and is still occasionally used as a temporary exhibition space by artists. However, despite having an operational platform opposite, it has not been considered for use as a full-time gallery because it cannot be reached without passing through ticket barriers (and security staff have been requested not to let 'unlikely looking'people pass through). When you think of Gloucester Road Tube Station, your mind may be immediately taken to roadworks.

Or it might be the traffic jams and delays which snarl up the surrounding streets during rush hour. Or maybe, it's the nearby (and apparently not so nearby) curry houses which are famous around the world. What most people don't realize about Gloucester Road is that there is an abandoned underground platform there. Johnston sits directly opposite Gloucester Road tube station. The former Gillette factory is a permanent art installation by Cubitt Artists. What was once solely the production site of Gillette safety razors, has been transformed into both an art space, as well as several flats and shops.

The walls of the station have numerous hidden artworks, which can be found by long-term commuters. The secrets of Gloucester Road are pretty hard to find, and I myself may never discover them all. Gloucester Road. Has a disused platform thats used as a permanent art exhibition. (Technically making it a used platform?). The village on the outskirts of London, some 15 miles north-east of Charing Cross, is steeped in history. It's also home to the largest public London Underground station car park, with 519 spaces.

Goldhawk Road

The route begins at Shepherd's Bush Green, where it diverges from the Hammersmith & City line between Shepherds Bush Market and Goldhawk Road stations. It heads south through Shepherds Bush, then south-west through White City, passing below the site of the former White City station. At Wood Lane Junction it joins the Great Western Main Line branch from Paddington. The London Overground line through Goldhawk road is currently served by the E and H-shaped trains (the latter introduced in 2012).

It’s also served by the Hammersmith & City line on a different track to the West. And on some parts of it, you get to travel below ground for a short distance while you pass below Shepherd’s Bush Market station. Services ran from Shepherd’s Bush to Hammersmith via a now closed curve at Goldhawk Road. The first rush hour train was in the dull colours of maroon, grey and brown and the earliest timetable showed trains leaving Shepherds Bush every ten minutes and taking 30 minutes for the all three stops to Hammersmith.

Part of the Metropolitan Railway’s plans for expansion westward in the early 20th century, Goldhawk Road station was built as part of a group of four new stations – it is now one of eight on the line. The opening of the station in November 1914 heralded a new future for Goldhawk Road, which was once a busy trading centre, but had gradually become less important over the years. Its usually still full by around 6.

Great Portland Street

Great Portland Street station is one of the most used parts of the London Underground network. It has three lines run through it yet only has one pair of tracks, making for the most intensely used part of the Victoria Line and Circle Line. ʺThis is the showpiece station at the heart of our busiest section of underground rail,ʺ says Peter McNaught, Senior Development Manager at Network Rail. ʺIt’s a vital hub for London’s transport network and we have to make sure it’s always working at its best.

Great Portland Street station has been described as London’s most intense piece of railway real estate. It’s an incredibly complex environment. Underground space is at a premium and. The underground station was opened in 1863 as a terminus for the Metropolitan Railway. It remained the Western terminus of the Met for nearly 50 years until it was replaced by Westminster in 1891. The lines alongside Great Portland Street are some of the most familiar in London.

It has been so heavily used from the very beginning that no other line has ever been extended down Marylebone Road to join the tracks there, despite being one of the most built-up areas on earth. Great Portland Street station provides an interesting microcosm of the London Underground network. Before heading onboard the Piccadilly Line, from platform 1 we can see trains from both the Victoria and the Northern Lines (via Charing Cross branch) arriving.

There's also a glimpse of what lies ahead on our journey, as Jubilee Line services can be seen departing for points north via Baker Street. Great Portland Street station is a railway station located on Great Portland Street and Perth Street in Marylebone, central London. It is served by the Bakerloo, Jubilee, and Metropolitan lines. Though Great Portland Street was not originally part of the Underground network, it had been planned as early as 1898 for inclusion.

Green Park

Today I planted some bloody chives at Green Park. The result of this most recent expedition was a tribute to the celebrated inventor James Dyson who had originally worked on the cyclonic separation of fine dust particles from the incoming air sucked into his vacuum cleaners, but ultimately decided to switch his priorities to building greenhouses. An avid conservationist, he had apparently been unable to look any longer at the destructive practices used in conventional farming and horticulture when trying to feed the world's growing population, so he decided that maybe all these greenhouse structures could be used as self-sufficient food factories with little human interference, thereby satisfying everyone's hunger and being a perfect demonstration of globalization.

Green Park lies in the middle of St James’s. It’s not just a large grassy area; it contains several monuments and memorials including a statue of Queen Victoria. Like most London parks, it is surrounded by roads. Green Park is joined to St James’s Palace by the Mall and the Horse Guards Parade by Whitehall. The park has its own road running through it, Lower Regent Street. Recognise the streets surrounding the venue? You probably do.

Green Park tube station, Hyde Park, the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens it’s all within a relatively small square mile in central London. The highlight of today’s tour was probably Great Portland Street station. On the surface level, Great Portland Street is just another underground station with no real interesting features. However it is heavily used by passengers on three different lines, making it one of the most intensely used parts of the network. 30am each day though.

Hainault

Of all the stations I’ve had the pleasure of working at, Hainault stood out as the most entertaining. As well as being the deepest of the deep level line stations, with its lifts experiencing break-downs on a weekly basis, it was noted for having an entrance a couple of meters under a shopping centre car park. The gate lines in that particular car park made quite a sight to any curious passenger waiting for a Piccadilly Line train to Uxbridge.

Hainault is a London Underground station located on the eastern edge of Hainault in the London Borough of Redbridge, Greater London. It is the westernmost point on the Central Line. The station was opened in 1903 when the line was extended from Woodford to Ilford. The station services both the National Rail station and the Underground station Hainault Depot which are adjacent to each other. The Hainault Tube Station on the Central Line in London is the deepest tube station in London and the third deepest in the world.

Even though it's at a depth of 38 metres (125 feet), these are the shallowest lifts on the central line, having a descent of just 0. 67 metres (2 ft 3 in). The deepest lift is at Hampstead station with a descent of 8. 5 metres. The London Underground's smallest lift shafts are located at Hainault station on the Central line. The lifts here are the shallowest on the network, having a descent of just 0.

Hanger Lane

This was the first tube station I ever visited (on a school trip in 1982), so I have a soft spot for it.  Its glass roof has been recently restored, and now glistens like never before. Hanger Lane's unique spiral design also has an enviable feature it's one of only three stations to be designed specifically for women. The island platform layout with no through track between trains means that when the doors of the two adjacent carriages of a 3-car train open simultaneously, there is no risk of passengers having to step over gaps between the doors.

This station, in West London, is fascinating for its unusual location and design. If you’ve ever entered the station you’ll see that it is a bizarre combination of upstairs and downstairs designs.  It was built in 1924, when the overhead section was already in use as part of the Central Line extension to Ealing Broadway. The underground section is on the line's surface and rises over Hanger Lane; the overtaking line descends underground via a tunnel to rejoin it.

The entrance makes it look like three separate stations joined together. Hanger Lane is an above-ground station on London Underground's Central line. It was opened on 28 June 1947 as the western terminus of the Central line. It was the first in Western Europe to be completely underground. 67 metres. The station closed on 23 November 2006 after the annual cost of running the station was estimated to be over £1 million, including £70,000 spent reparing damage caused by trying to remove graffiti''.

Harrow & Wealdstone

The original Harrow & Wealdstone station opened on 14 September 1837 as the southern terminus of the London and Birmingham Railway's extension from Euston. It was on a west-facing curve, which eased the changing of locomotives on London-bound services to Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Bristol. The extension to Slough was opened in July 1840, including a short cut from Northolt Junction to West Drayton. Services to Richmond via Brentford began on 1 June 1846. This line ran via what is now called the Acton–Northolt junction which gave a direct route for journeys to and from Middlesex.

Did you know that Harrow & Wealdstone, in North West London, was the first station on the London Underground system? This stunning fact is slightly undermined by the fact that the trains were hauled by horses for a year after it opened. Prior to that date it was an actual line of railway. The station has been through a lot since 1837. It was severely damaged during the Second World War and temporarily closed on 10th September 1944 after suffering severe bomb damage.

Have you ever wondered why the above-ground part of Harrow & Wealdstone station is one of the first things you see as the train pulls into the underground platforms? The reason is largely due to its history. In fact, it's technically the oldest station on the network, and pre-dates even Baker Street by over 20 years. It was built in 1837 and opened to mainline services in 1847, but didn't become a railway interchange until 1917 when the Underground came to town.

Hatton Cross

The station is a Grade II listed building, and the mosaic mural, “River Landscape” completed by Joan Miro in 1976, is one of the most notable pieces of 20th-century art on the Underground. In 2011 the station won an award at the London Transport Museum’s “Best Stations” competition. It will be officially called Hatton Cross when it reopens in 2017. Hatton Cross. A name that could only belong to a disused underground tube station. The sign on the gated road which goes no further announces it is also London’s smallest station.

Most underground stations are the size of Tube trains themselves, so this is really quite small, as people are apt to note when they see it. Hatton Cross tube station is a London Underground station in Hatton Cross, in the London Borough of Hillingdon. The station is on the Heathrow branch of the Piccadilly line, between South Ruislip and Cranford stations, and in Travelcard Zone 5. Harrow & Wealdstone is a busy, mid-sized interchange station serving the Harrow & Stanmore areas of Middlesex.

Heathrow Terminal 5

The new Terminal 5 at Heathrow is an architectural masterpiece. Built on the former site of the village of Harmondsworth, you can see how the architects have attempted to build a modern airport terminal fit for a futuristic scene in Metropolis or Inception. From the perfect circle arches to the warm lighting, I’m going to take you on a brief tour of what other airports could learn from Terminal 5. Getting to the airport too early is always a worry for me.

 Do you know that feeling: you're obsessively checking the time and the website for your flight, hoping nothing goes wrong?  Well, I suffer from this on a monthly basis – except I'm not getting on a plane, I'm meeting my friends at pubs or restaurants around London to catch up over food and drinks in my free time when I get back from uni. Some facts: back in 1986, over 80,000 drawings & 25,000 pages of documents were submitted to create an airport that would serve London and the South East.

This was created by Sir Frederick Gibberd. Considering it’s a relatively simple structure, Terminal 5 had thousands of pieces of furniture and fittings carefully designed and put into place. Constructed in 1998, Heathrow Terminal 5 (T5) is the largest free-standing building in the UK – as well as the second busiest airport terminal in Europe and one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world. The older terminus station (often called Harrow) is located on Station Road in Bushey Heath and is served by London Overground only.

Heathrow Terminals 1, 2, 3

The TWA Hotel is more commonly known as the Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight Center and opened in 1962. After TWA’s demise, it was operated by Hilton Hotels FBO and then, finally, closed in 2001. Now, though, it’s just a shell of its former glory. It’s currently been held up due to litigation with property developers trying to get their funds back after buying the site on behalf of LaSalle Partners for just over £33m in February 2011.

 It was bought by Crown Hotels for £24. 8m at auction in January 2013, but has still not been restored or rebuilt since being taken over from LaSalle Partners. In recent years, Heathrow terminal 1, has become the worst show in town. In my series on Terminal 5, I spoke of how there was a positive buzz about the new terminal. Today is no different. There’s an amazing buzz about Terminals 1-3. The new terminals that will open later this year have a lot to live up to.

Heathrow Terminal 1 is a British railway station within London Heathrow Airport. The station provides links with the Heathrow Express and Heathrow Connect services to London Paddington, as well as services to London Underground and TfL Rail. The world's first airport rail link is still one of its most efficient. It connects Paddington and Heathrow via 4 platforms: Hayes & Harlington, West Drayton, Uxbridge and above all, Heathrow Central. So the designers of Terminal 2 went to some great lengths to make it a pleasant place for travellers.

High Barnet

The town is served by High Barnet tube station which is located on the Northern Line in London. It was opened as Totteridge Lane on 13 September 1930. It was renamed High Barnet on 1 April 1937, the name given to the nearby road and also the parish in which it's situated. High Barnet. No longer an idyllic village but a vibrant area of London full of modern life. Unlike the duke who marched his men up and down the hill, we'll stroll around meadows and enjoy a country atmosphere in this part of London.

High Street Kensington

High Street Kensington. This station is not really big enough to have an indoor waiting room but in the past, High Street Kensington was served by a small portable building out of which two porters took tickets and sold refreshments. It looks as though there was also a small platform at one end of this room for the exclusive use of passengers who didn’t want to have to sit with their legs crossed on the normal passenger platform.

As you can see, this was a simple structure and may well have been no more than a shed with windows. It would appear that it lacked any alteration for many years because it is shown in this form by Beresford’s Underground Stations in 1925 – together with a suggestion that it might. High Street Kensington had a waiting room for passengers who didnt fancy the platform. This was changed into a break room for drivers in the early 20s.

I found this out when checking it in the thirties. I dont know if that waiting room is still there, but its going to be really hard to check, because it is buried under several feet of concrete on the south side of HSK. I also have no idea what the existing waiting room looks like because i have never seen it. I grew up in an area called High Street Kensington: the southwest London district near Notting Hill.

My parents still live there, but I moved house several years ago and only visit now and then. It’s on the border of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea — so I thought you might be interested in this little snippet about High Street Kensington Station: what it used to look like, and the surprising story of what happened to its original waiting room. If you Google London underground you can see the blue tiles above the ticket office.

This was once a waiting room for the passengers. When the station was refurbished this room was turned into a break room for drivers. I have attached pictures below to show this, and also pictures of when it was used as a waiting room from 1898 to 1916. Once upon a time, this cottage was one of 3 which served as a waiting room for passengers who did not fancy the platform. The others can be found in the middle of Ruskin Park (just to the left of the playground) and on Sussex Gardens.

Highbury & Islington

The original building lasted right up until 1960 and was demolished while the Victoria line was being constructed. The current station building, which is dominated by its long escalators, is largely the result of a complete rebuild that took place in the early 1970s. This was necessary because of the severe overcrowding that occurred at the station, and also to cater for newfangled electric trains (as opposed to steam engines). The original station opened on 21 September 1846 and was the terminus for what was called the North London Railway.

It was initially just a single-track line but by the following year, work had started on the four-track line that exists today. Two further tracks were added in 1904 to make room for local services between Highbury & Islington and Dalston Junction. Despite being in the centre of a major target zone in World War II, the original station building remained in use until it was demolished to make way for a smaller structure when the Victoria line arrived in 1967.

A V-1 flying bomb also hit the original station and destroyed on the west side of Gillespie Crescent. The rebuilt station opened in 1960. It is a Grade II listed building which was designed in a modern style. It is hard to believe that the original Highbury & Islington station was built over 60 years ago. The Grand Old Duke of York, commonly shortened to The Grand Old Duke or just the Dook, is a traditional English folk song, a parody of "The Bonny Earl of Murray" and as such is often re-titled "The Fine Old English Gentleman".

Highgate

It’s not the most well-travelled way to get from north to south in London, but highgate underground station offers a unique look at both the past and the future of transport. Located on rickmansworth road just outside highgate village, the once busy station is now barely used, but is a great place to visit if you want to see what was one of london’s busiest train stations in the early 20th century and is still a vital part of London’s transport system.

But what exactly lies beneath this suburban London street?. Once the most important station on the Central Line, Highgate is now closed (as far as passenger services are concerned). The platforms still exist as they are used for the storage of old stock and for film crews to use for filming. From what I can tell, the tunnels also remain – which includes a ghost of a station that no longer exists. The station is located in what was once a rural village, at the junction of two ancient trackways.

It marks the northern end of both the Pinner branch line, which diverges from the West Coast Main Line (WCML) just south of the station, and Wood Lane Underground Station's London Overground platforms. Towering high over North London, Highgate is a beautiful station set in equally as lovely surroundings. But there is a lot of history to be discovered before the rebirth in the late nineties. The disused platforms and tunnels have sometimes been used for filming and have appeared in several productions EastEnders and Waking the Dead.

Holland Park

Holland Park, one of the most exclusive and expensive neighborhoods in London, was designed by Thomas Allason in 1882. Described as his most outstanding work, Holland Park is characterized by distinctive architecture stretching back to the 19th century. The street plan was designed to allow commercial and retail units to be built above the lower flats. Some 115 years later, there is still no retail unit. This blog looks at how this could have happened.

We check out some pictures of the landscaped park and trace back the development of land for a possible explanation. Holland Park. It has been a source of wonder and confusion for as long as most can remember. Built in 1893 with a flat roof in order for a retail unit to be built on top of it. But 115 years later, there is still no retail unit. Reason? According to the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea: " The building [Holland Park] does not meet the current Policy and Technical Standards (retail) section 7.

2. 1 which states that "Any new mixed use development. Built in the 1890s, Holland Park is a complex of flats situated right on Kensington High Street. It is one of the most famous blocks of flats in London. For many years, it was said that Holland Park had the world's largest flat roofed building. The claim was made due to its extensive use of iron columns and girders as well as a novel construction technique known as "The Holland Park System".

Holland Park is a grand old building in London built in 1881. It is located in the West End on the North side of Kensington Road. It is, for all intents and purposes, a brick box with three sides of identical arched bays. Holland Park. Built with a flat roof in order for a retail unit to be built on top of it. 115 years later, there is still no retail unit. They even installed an ice skating rink.

Ickenham

Ickenham. Ickenham. Ickenham.  Hey, who let the dog out? Ickenham. Ickenham. Ickenham.         Sunk in 1578, to be replaced by a bridge in 1774, it would seem that nothing remains of the original village. There is however a lovely park around the river where the old mill sat once upon a time, and a few old houses which obviously date back several centuries at least, including one that was recently used as a school, and still has the building number (38) painted on the outside wall to indicate its origins as a house in Ickenham High Street some 200 years ago.

Ickenham (in common with most localities of the same name) takes its name from the Saxon personal name Icuc (meaning “son of Icuc") and ham (or hamm meaning home, village or estate). In 13th century records the village was recorded as Ikenham, Ykeham and Ychenam. The change in spelling over the years from Ikenham to Ickenham is unclear as are the reasons for the other variations. The addition of 'Borough'to the name probably relates to an ancient division of Ickenham which was subsumed within Greater London in 1965 when the London Boroughs were created.

Ickenham has a couple of spooky ghosts, to be fair. Not that I’ve seen any of them, mind. At Laleham Burway there’s the flagellant ghost, who appears carrying a whip at the top of the stairs before disappearing into thin air at the bottom. There’s also Phantom Nellie, who appeared at an inn called The Bull and Butcher (now a private house). She died in childbirth and is said to haunt the upper storey. Her footsteps can heard walking overhead and her cries of pain are said to be blood-curdling.

A long time ago I had a conversation with an old man who lived in a cottage in Ickenham village. He lived alone in his cottage, which required the use of a bathroom two doors down. The back door to his cottage opened into the garden that was at the back of his neighbour's house. He told me about how he came home one night after a night out in London, absolutely drunk. Ickenham.  Every Christmas there is a reported sighting of a ghost who died in 1959.

Kennington

The Piccadilly line is the most famous of London transport quirks. The tube from Arnos Grove to Cockfosters circles through north London, but at Finsbury Park and Manor House it goes straight on, with a short section in central London. The Northern line has several similar quirks: theres the loop at Kennington; southbound trains from Morden dont go to Edgware Road, they go to Earl's Court; southbound trains from Amersham run to Euston, then turn left back under Charing Cross road to the Elephant and Castle again while northbound trains exit the tunnels at Kennington.

There are a few reasons why the Kennington Loop exists. In its original form the railway was planned to run continously from Kennington to Morden. However, the company that was building in south London ran out of money and stopped work. The delay wasnt a problem because there was no passenger service. The terminus was simply used for freight & for bringing in construction materiel for the northern section which started later. I was taking the Northern line running project to Morden when I got to Kennington and found myself going back east.

I looked out of the window and saw the train heading back round the loop. It made me think, what happens if youre drunk, or asleep when this happens? Do you wake up on a train going to Edgware, presumably not knowing that you should take Northern line Central?. Kennington Loop is a track arrangement found on the London Underground. It was originally provided to allow trains from both directions to terminate at Kennington when necessary, for example in the early days of the network when no running lines extended south past Kennington, and it continues to be used as a contingency and diversionary measure today.

I dislike venturing north of the river at weekends. My friends like to have a pint at the Cross Keys (which is near Kennington station). I don't. Not because it’s a bad pub – it isn’t, and I usually have a good time while I’m there but because the journey feels unpredictable. The apparition is that of a woman, wearing a red scarf and is said to flail her arms as if 'imploring people to stop'.

Kensington (Olympia)

The station was opened on 13 July 1868 as part of the Metropolitan Railway's extension from Paddington to High Street Kensington, which opened to passengers on 1 October 1868. The original form of the station was built by the Great Western and Metropolitan Railway (GWR and MR) companies, under the name "Addison Road". The Great Western Railway (GWR) constructed the tracks and passenger platforms and operated services from West Drayton via Paddington (E) to Windsor.

The Metropolitan Railway (MR) constructed the tracks northwards towards Finchley Road and took over operation of services from High Wycombe, opening this section on 1 December 1873. The Kensington Olympia station is both a mainline railway station and a London Underground (Tube) link station in Kensington, London. It is served by both National Rail and the London Underground and is used by over 10 million passenger journeys each year. The stations old name, Addison Road Station still appears sculpted into a wall on the eastern pedestrian exit.

Kentish Town

There’s a story that the overground railway station here, called Kentish Town West, used to be called Victoria. There used to be a Victoria Road too. Then one day there were some extra letters delivered for the sign at the station. Somehow they missed whoever was in charge of such things and went astray. The station was never changed back but everyone just got used to it being called Kentish Town West. It was thought to be a short hand version of Kentish Town West Junction which makes sense as that’s where it is situated.

Here’s some more tube station trivia for you: Tooting Bec is the most northern-most on the London Underground; South Kentish Town, to this day, has the most disused platform out of all stations on the network; and to get from one side to another you either have to cross over a road (if you can get over) or go into a pub. They should really have named it South Kentish Tavern. It was a bit of a shame for the locals.

After all, South Kentish Town was a bustling, prosperous little village back in medieval times when the manor was on its way up. But South Kentish Town and North Kentish Town have been split since a great fire destroyed the area in 1939. Even then, South Kentish Town tried to make a comeback. I was born at the Central Middlesex Hospital, just a five-minute walk from Kentish Town tube station. It wasn’t there when I was born, of course – it didn’t open until 1930, after an outbreak of cholera during which no one would move there to help the sick or bury the deceased.

There used to be a South Kentish Town tube station down the road. It became disused after strike action from the power station supplying it caused it to shut down, and they simply never re-opened it, even when the power came back on. It’s a shame, because I had always wanted to visit Kentish Town’s tube station. It started off looking quite grand, with wall tiling and dark wooden benches. The more that I walked towards it, the better it looked.

Kilburn

The Kilburn tube station opened in 1907 and is set between the stations of West Hampstead and Brondesbury. The name Kilburn appears to derive from a corruption of Cyelburne, the name of a stream that ran through the locality and possibly also referred to the royal deer park established by Edward the Confessor. Kilburn was originally called Queens Park on account that it was positioned next to the former Kings private hunting grounds, now a public park, and both its names have been gradually corrupted over time.

Many of us can still remember the good old days, when we could get a train at any time of day, without having to tell the ticket machine what mood we were in. I suspect that some of you may even be able to recall when it was possible to ride the same line all the way from Kilburn to Barking, or Bayswater to Barnt Green. However, like many decisions of the time, the passing of Kilburn High Level Station on 1st November 1939 has been disputed by some as a tragedy in its own right.

In the 19th century this was the last stop before London. The station is sandwiched between Brondesbury Park and Kilburn Viaduct, and lies at the end of a long pedestrian tunnel. Unfortunately, in 2006 the builders decided to cut down part of the roof, strewing it with glass panels and providing access for the first time in history. London has some really cool places, and Kilburn is one of them, It’s got a lot of history going on too, so in today’s blog post I wanted to share with you where I’ve been out and about in London (and that is a whole lot of places), most notably, in North West London.

I’ve been reading about Kilburn lately, and I wanted to see for myself what all the fuss is about. It’s a neighbourhood of London that still feels like it has a lot of character – whereas some parts of London can be quite homogenised. It’s part of north-west London. The Kilburn area is much like any other area in London; you expect to see areas of both decline and regeneration, side by side. It is also undergoing a process of gentrification, which leaves people displaced from their homes and businesses.

Kingsbury

The terminus of the line is located in the London Borough of Hillingdon, from which it takes its name. It is situated 35. 7 miles (57. 5km) from Charing Cross. The station is located above ground level, between Uxbridge Road and College Road. It has two platforms plus a disused bay platform that was once served by the Snow Hill service from Paddington. ”The line between the two stations runs in a shallow cutting, with good visibility both at the ends and along it.

It is between 200 and 400 m long. The track is ballasted and kept free of obstructions throughout. There are some slight gradients approaching 35 mph, but most of the route is straight enough to hold its own at speed. “. Because many local neighborhoods in the United Kingdom didn’t have their own tube stations, they were forced to commute from another area that did have a nearby Tube station. To help alleviate the burden on locals, certain stations were designated as “gateway stations.

”. Unlike me, Kingsbury has remained on the same line for all its years. It's about three miles away from me now, but the transfer took it out of my catchment area and now I have to get a bus to it, if I want to visit. You'll be very familiar with the Kingsbury Metro Station as the station appears in many movies and TV shows such as Spooks, Midnight Run, and The IT Crowd.

When Kingsbury station first opened back in the early 1900s, it was called Great Central Station (see what they did there?). The Addison Road National Rail station is an underground National Rail station which opened in 2000 and lies under The Kensington (Olympia) shopping centre on the western edge of Kensington, London. The apparition has been seen near a marked tree in the village every Christmas for 50 years. ". The Underground/mainline station is on Cranbourne Road (and was built long before the street itself).

Knightsbridge

The Knightsbridge congestion charge was introduced on 17 February 2003 and is a fee to drive a vehicle through the Knightsbridge area of London between 07:00 and 18:00. It was designed to reduce congestion in this part of central London, as well as raising revenue for Transport for London (TfL), the local government body responsible for most aspects of transport within Greater London. The £5 daily charge is also applied to commercial vehicles, taxis and minicabs with seating capacities over six.

Ladbroke Grove

Oh Ladbroke Grove.             There’s a great deal of confusion as to where you actually are.  The street sign says your on Portobello Road, everyone knows you’re in Notting Hill, but Google and other maps insist on calling you Ladbroke Grove.  Now, that mightn’t be much of a big deal to most people, but Ladbroke Grove is just so much more impressive sounding than Portobello Road.  So it was decided that we would go ahead and change the name of the road (technically the whole m….

Ladbroke Grove is a road in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London W11. It runs from Kensington Olympia, as a continuation of Ladbroke Grove, to North Kensington and Paddington stations. The road consists of two parts.  Firstly, there is the eastern part, named after the manor of Kensington Gore, which runs from Kensington to Westbourne Park Road. The western part goes from Westbourne Park Road to North Kensington station. Ladbroke Grove is the western terminus of the Central line.

It is served by a roundel, which is an unusual shape for a tube station with a long platform tunnel used to accommodate four car trains. The next stop towards Central London is Notting Hill Gate (which is also served by 3 other tube lines). Ladbroke Grove station was used as a location in "28 Weeks Later". I regard Ladbroke Grove as a neighbourhood with the quality, if not the quantity, of Portobello Road. It is an area that combines Notting Hill’s location and proximity to Central London and the West End with the cosiness its own local shops and restaurants provide.

Lancaster Gate

The station is on Praed Street, near Edgware Road and Marble Arch. It has two side platforms which are accessed via ticket barriers to the south of the station. There is no step-free access to either platform during normal service hours, but there are lifts to each one. The station is in Travelcard Zone 1 and is served by the Bakerloo Line, Central Line and Victoria Lines. It is close to a large number of hotels and tourist sites, including Marble Arch, South Kensington museums and Petticoat Lane Market.

The station has two large entrances and exits in the park's east and south sides, the north side having previously been used exclusively as a goods entrance. Currently the station is served by just two London Underground lines, with no National Rail or London Overground services. Plans to provide an interchange with Kensington (Olympia) station have been abandoned following withdrawal of funding for a project that would have seen four London Underground stations transferred to the West London Line.

There are several bus stops on Bayswater Road, just west of Lancaster Gate station, with regular services to other parts of London and beyond. The following routes serve the bus stops shown below; you can plan your journey on this Transport for London website. Lancaster Gate Tube Station is a London Underground station in Queen’s Gate within the City of Westminster and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The station is served by both the Circle and District lines.

Leicester Square

York Way concourse has 3 exits across the platforms; the first two are heavily used by passengers leaving the station to reach buses outside and for retail outlets. The North exit opens soon after the last Tube train arrives, which is also when Exit 1 becomes usable for re-entry onto the Tube system. This exit is marked as 'exit only'for much of the day, with ticket barriers blocking access to passengers wishing to enter the station from this point.

A clock on the wall at this exit has been twice reprogrammed in recent years; it now reads 09:09 to reflect its new status as a permanent closure time. No time is displayed if the exit remains open until an approaching train forces it to shut or reopen; this occurs between 12. Leicester Square is a subterranean London Underground station near to the northern end of Leicester Square, and is the nearest tube station to Covent Garden.

Interestingly, it also contains a number of adverts for online film rental company Lovefilm. com, as well as some unique pieces of artwork consisting of films from the 1920s through to modern movies and arcade machines. The artwork was commissioned by TFL in 2004. Measures are taken to keep this artwork clean due to its proximity to people at all times as it runs into the entrance of the Northern line platform shared with Charing Cross railway station and there are only stairs and escalators connecting it with the street.

Film fans may have heard about this platform already from the 2012 installation of a bronze statue of director Alfred Hitchcock, which was placed on the westbound Piccadilly line platform, next to the up escalators. Interestingly enough, the eastbound tunnel is wider than the westbound one; this is because that tunnel was intended to be converted to run with two tracks rather than one (similarly, Marble Arch station has two tunnels), but never was. The other reason for having this extra space is due to the construction of a proposed extension of part of the Northern line.

The orange sprockets on the Northern line platforms also represent the London premiere cinemas, while those on the Piccadilly line are a reference to the signs at Piccadilly Circus. The square's name has been used as a metonym for British cinema and entertainment, similar to Hollywood. Heraldic shields featuring a sprocket design have been used at the top of cinema and theatre marquees, and many souvenir shops in Leicester Square sell items featuring replicas of the square's sprocket logo.

Charing Cross.  On the northbound platforms, the main station name head is in the centre of the platform, with smaller "CHARING CROSS" signs to either side, and there is no horizontal bar below the platform number (the latter feature was shared with Westminster). At the north end of these platforms there is a crossover that allows terminating Charing Cross trains to access either tunnel; this was used regularly when terminating trains from Holborn terminated here.

Films are advertised on the electronic displays on the platforms, new films included, with a dedicated film information channel on-screen 24 hours a day. The designs of each typeface are different on each line: the Piccadilly line and Northern line 'Kinetic'signs are red, white and black; the Jubilee line signs (Metroline) are yellow backgrounds with dark blue text, and the Victoria line 'CineMagic'sign is red with white text. Lancaster Gate tube station is a London Underground station in Kensington, west London.

Leyton

The accident occurred on October 6, 1953, at Leyton station in east London. A number of trains were arriving after the conclusion of an ill-tempered football match between Arsenal and Luton Town. Thousands of fans were making their way home to central London, but the station facilities were not designed to handle such large crowds and the result was a dangerously overcrowded platform. It is thought that a passenger fell and caused a jam of people which created a dangerous crush as a Piccadilly line train pulled into the station.

The driver was unable to operate his doors until the obstruction cleared and was unable to see if an emergency door on the other side of the train couplings could be opened. As more people stormed onto the platform from a passing. The station opened on 28 April 1935 as part of the extension of the City & South London Railway (now the Bank branch of the Northern line) from Clapham Common. It is situated in a deep cutting high above the former Leyton Marshes, which are now the Lee Valley Sports Ground.

The name "Leyton" was originally not chosen as a way to avoid confusion with another nearby station, but simply because it was thought to sound better than other suggestions such as "Stratford Marsh". Leyton is a ward in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, England forming part of the Leyton and Wanstead constituency. The population of the ward at the 2011 census was 14,200. It is situated north-east from Charing Cross and south-west from the City of London.

Like much of the former Municipal Borough of Leyton it is predominantly residential, and is one of the areas with the largest Afro-Caribbean community in Europe. The line between Leyton & Stratford formed part of the official city route between the earliest days of the Underground in 1913 and 1935, when the Central Line was extended from Leytonstone to run westwards along the North London Railway (now the Bank branch) to join up with the lines to Camden Town and Kentish Town.

The common misconception is that the nickname comes from the stations'location Leyton to Stratford. The only problem with this theory is that Stratford wasn't a "Home Counties" destination when the nickname was coined, and in fact after 1923 to this day has actually been under a mile away. Roughly half of the Central line trains of London Underground are made up of 8-coach trains. These trains recently underwent a complete overhaul between 2010 & 2013, which has created a newer, sleeker fleet of trains with the first new I-stock trains going into service in early 2012.

Maida Vale

The London Underground station, Maida Vale, opened on 6 June 1915 as part of the Bakerloo line when it was extended from Paddington. The station has entrances on both sides of Edgware Road and a subway also connects the two lines, but it is possible to change platforms, without leaving the ticket hall, only by walking through the subway. Chances are you’ve been to Maida Vale station before. Maybe you got off at the station to go to the BBC when you were making an appearance on one of their talk shows.

No? Maybe not. But have you seen Sherlock on TV? Do you remember where some scenes with Benedict Cumberbatch were filmed? That’s right, Maida Vale. Maida Vale was originally the code name for a complex of buildings that made up BBC Broadcasting House, London. There is another famous building called Maida Vale, in NW6, that is a private home. It's not actually the name of Plough Lane which Bryn himself says. Right in the South side of St.

Manor House

I came across this mansion not too long ago and I was shocked. This beautiful, two-storey house is located in Haringey, North London, but it doesn’t look like any other house in the neighborhood. The Manor House is one of the most famous and best preserved buildings in London with over 3,000 years of history behind it. Its street-level entrances are in different boroughs: three are in Hackney, and one is in Haringey. It’s not clear when the Manor House was built exactly.

Even though its history goes back to more than 3,000 years there are only a few written mentions that we could trace: there's a record of ownership from the 12th century, another. Manor House is a Grade II listed building in the De Beauvoir Town residential area of Hackney, London. It lies on the curve of the A 105 road, between St Paul’s Road and Riverdale Road where it joins Hackney Downs. It is known for its three street-level entrances in different postcode areas: N7 (London Borough of Islington), N1 (London Borough of Hackney) and N10 (London Borough of Haringey), which are identified by their own postcode district numbers until the first digit.

The postcode districts in this location are (south side), (north side) and (east side). I've included the full history of Manor House, which was made possible by digitising old books and maps. You can read it here.  In case you are wondering, I am listing London postcodes on this blog in alphabetical order according to the name of the street they are on.  I will not list postcodes separately when there is only one; instead, there will be a link from the postcode to the blog entry where the postcode is given.

For example, Manor House tube station, in London, is situated in Stoke Newington, Hackney. So it's definitely easier to find than the mysterious and also fictional street in EastEnders. Manor House is a London Underground station in the Manor House area of the London Borough of Hackney, on the Lea Valley lines, between Tottenham Hale and Walthamstow Central stations. John’s Wood, Maida Vale (one of the stations on The Bakerloo Line) has produced some land locked gems.

Marble Arch

The Marble Arch in London is one of the most picturesque landmarks and it has a very interesting history. The original arch was in fact intended to be a doorway for Buckingham Palace. On the site today stands an impressive arch which commemorates victory in the Napoleonic Wars and is situated just across from Marble Arch tube station in London. The original marble Arch was constructed as a gateway to Buckingham palace from Hyde Park.

It was built of Cornish stone and Italian marble and designed by Sir Christopher Wren, one of the chief architects of St Paul's Cathedral.  The completed project weighed over 120 tonnes and was intended to have statues on top of it to represent peace, loyalty, wisdom, justice and moderation. The base of the arch would have been. Generally, my feelings towards Marble Arch are the same as towards my other least favourite touristy area/sight in London, which is Piccadilly Circus.

But coming here after a long day of walking and seeing the sights in central London it was almost a relief to be able to sit somewhere and have a rest. The only place we could find was this lovely little pub called the Crown & Sceptre which was literally right next to the Arch. As you can see from the photo the outside of the pub wasn’t exactly glamorous but man it did give us nice beers at a reasonable price and unbelievable comfort.

The Victoria (or Marble Arch) underground station and the streets around it are named after the most notable monument in the area the Victoria Memorial Arch, built originally to commemorate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee but now thought of as a memorial to her reign. The arch was designed by Sir Aston Webb — creator of Admiralty Arch on The Mall, Washington D. C., and the masterplan for Victoria Park in Belfast — and the work was overseen by his deputy Ernest George.

I'm not even sure what I want this post to be about. Maybe just some rambling reminiscing about marble arches, and how they were more popular than ever before the mid 19th century, but are now almost universally ignored in preference to stainless steel gates with electric automatons. Maybe I'll just muse at length about how tourists are pretty much the worst thing that has ever happened to Marble Arch. Who cares. The land that the arch now sits on was never actually part of Buckingham Palace.

It was originally intended to be the centrepiece for the grand entrance into Buckingham Palace. King George IV wanted his London residence to be the grandest in Europe and to rival the palace at Versailles outside Paris. Marble Arch.   The marble arch that is actually named after, but which sits opposite the station was originally going to be the entrance to Buckingham Palace. It is served by the Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines.

Marylebone

When people hear that I live in Marylebone, I normally get two responses. One is from someone else who lives in Marylebone and they usually say something along the lines of “Ah, great area” and the other is a comment on how odd it is for me to live here given that I was born and raised in Essex. For those of you not from London (you must be tired if you are still reading this) Marylebone is one of the smartest postcodes in town.

It’s the location of Madame Tussauds, Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes’ home on Baker Street (221B Baker Street). It’s also very easy to see horses at close quarters at Marylebone. Around this time, the highly controversial Regents Canal was being built to run through the street connecting the Grand Junction Waterworks at Paddington to the River Thames at Limehouse. Many property owners initially refused to sell their land to the Canal company. John James'at No.

 88 and Thomas Bateman's Bell Inn (No.  89) were therefore both surrounded by a "high, compound wall" in order to protect them from damage by construction work one of several instances in London where a road was tunnelled beneath buildings. Marylebone. It has a reputation as one of the most affluent parts of London, and is filled with expensive restaurants and boutique shops. But there is a darker side to Marylebone. In 1814 the Commissioners for Special Areas (a body set up to provide work for the unemployed) took over 50 acres of land, which had previously been farmed by commoners, in north Marylebone.

The commissioners were supposed to build housing for the poor and provide employment but they failed to do so, letting the land lie idle instead. Marylebone was not always the charming ward of the suburb it is today. It once was a rural village and hunting ground for Henry VIII. In 1605 construction commenced on St Mary's Church and vestry located in what is now Dorset Square, however progress was slow due to lack of funds.

The original church burnt down during the great fire of London and building began again, lasting until 1820 when it was reconsecrated as the Parish church for St Marylebone Parish with a new tower being built in 1836. Marylebone is a mixed-use urban area of central London and is located within the City of Westminster. It is roughly bounded by Oxford Street to the south, Marylebone Road to the north and Great Portland Street to the east.

Morden

A single track runs through the tunnel to the incomplete Cockfosters station in the North London suburbs, where it emerges onto an embankment from a portal immediately beneath the West End Lane flyover. The unused southern portal is still accessible via two sets of stairs, one leading from just south of Finsbury Park station and the other from Hampstead Heath. The Metropolitan line tunnels run from north to south, starting at Finchley Central and running to West Ruislip.

The tunnels then make a clockwise 'U'under the west side of central London, and emerge at Farringdon as the Chiltern Main Line. The tunnels go deeper before rising again to emerge just south of Hampstead at Golders Green. The tunnel is the longest on the Underground network (28. 3 miles) and the second longest tunnel in the United Kingdom (after the Silverlink tunnel connecting North Tyneside to Newcastle upon Tyne), as well as one of the longest tunnels in the world, and was built by the cut-and-cover method.

Morden is the start of the longest tunnel on the London Underground network. It starts at Morden and runs for 27. 8 kilometres (17. 3 mi) to East Finchley via Bank. Morden is the start of the longest tunnel on the Underground network, running 27. 8 kilometres (17. 3 mi) to East Finchley via the Bank branch. The area east of Great Portland Street up to Cleveland Street in Fitzrovia has been known since the 1890s as.

Mornington Crescent

Mornington Crescent is the subject of a deliberately incomprehensible gameshow on BBC Radio 4, in which there are no rules, and which you will almost certainly never get the hang of. It's not clear how it's meant to be played, or indeed why anyone would want to play it. It features one long-standing contestant (the programme's "permanent champion"), who is often joined by a guest challenger; both compete for an unusual trophy in games that are frequently extremely protracted and/or convoluted.

If you watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, you'll know that the game is played on a fictional London Underground station, Mornington Crescent. It's played by two teams of three and there are no rules, a lot of shouting and frequent claims of "infinite points". If you're not sure about the rules, you can read this simple (but unofficial) guide to Mornington Crescent. Mornington Crescent is the name of a London Underground station, and a boardgame based on the station's name.

Neasden

Neasden ( / n eɪ s d ən / ) is a suburb of north-west London, located in the London Borough of Brent. It is situated about 4 miles (7 km) northwest of Charing Cross. Neasden under the name Newdles Divined was recorded in 1222 and was one of five hamlets in the Parish of Willesden in the County of Middlesex. The name 'Newdles'is formed from an Old English word 'newdl'meaning 'hazel'.

Hazel trees also covered the nearby (now gone) mound, Highgate Hill. The Neasden nickname “monkey hill” most likely came from here, after a battle was fought upon. Neasden is a London Underground station on the Jubilee line, located in the Neasden area of the London Borough of Brent. It opened in 1979 as part of an extension from Baker Street to provide quicker access to central London for passengers from outer parts of northwest London via the Underground's Metropolitan line branches.

North Greenwich

North Greenwich Station is a railway station on the Jubilee line, between Canary Wharf and North Greenwich. It sits at the top of the hill on the Northern edge of the now re branded 'One Canada Square' building that is owned by Canary Wharf Group. The developer of One Canada Square first submitted plans to construct the station in late 1980s, but it was not until May 2000 when these were approved by the Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government etc that it gained approval to be constructed.

The reason for the delay was due to concerns over increased passenger numbers at Canary Wharf and fearing that there would be overcrowding in this stations lifts and corridors. North Greenwich is a station in North Greenwich, London. The station is on the National Rail lines running from London Charing Cross main line and London Cannon Street. It is in Travelcard Zone 2. The station was designed by FaulknerBrowns Architects, who were contracted to design three other stations in the initial phase of the project.

It was opened by the first Mayor of London Ken Livingstone on 14 December 1999 as part of the Jubilee Line Extension which connected it to the North and South sides of the River Thames. The station was opened on 5 August 1999 as part of the Jubilee Line Extension. The station's opening coincided with the opening of the neighbouring Millennium Dome, which was built on part of the site of the former North Greenwich railway depot.

This is to the east of the station, and partially obscures it from view when approaching from that side. Tube station located in the London Borough of Greenwich, where the Jubilee line is split into two different tunnels, both of which have platforms at North Greenwich station. The North Greenwich section of the Jubilee line has been in use since 1999. The station is on the north side of the site of the former Millennium Dome, and east of Greenwich railway station.

It is adjacent to The O2 arena, which at this point is called the North Greenwich Arena, reflecting a naming rights deal. It is what is known as a "mind game", with few or no rules, whose objective – if there is one – is not stated, and which changes from player to player. Lancaster Gate tube station is a London Underground station located on Bayswater Road in the City of Westminster, and is in Travelcard Zone 1.

Northfields

The area was originally part of the common lands to the west and north of Litchfield County which belonged to the manor of Northfields. The northern part was called New Place Common, while the southern part was known as Grassy Hill Common. The land where the station would be built later became fenced off from this common land and eventually passed into the ownership of two separate landowners: John Quincey Adams (1735-1826), a successful lawyer and ultimately US President after being Thomas Jefferson's vice-president (1825-1829) and Andrew Adams (1770-1850), a farmer, who also owned many acres in the area and a large estate called Home Place near what is now Marlow.

Norfield was built in 1869 and was a primarily a cargo station. It went on to serve passengers between London and Birmingham until the 1920s, when it was closed by the LNER.  John Quincey Adams (5th US president) lived in a cottage next to the station for two years in the 1890s. Thereafter, it served as offices for British Rail up until its closure in 1966. When Northfields opened in late 1999, I was not particularly interested in trains or railways.

But that soon changed. Today Northfields provides the backdrop to much of my thinking, writing and research into transport, as well as a vital trial area for new ideas. It's also a site of inspiration. A time-take by train (from Washington DC, Union Station) to Northfields is a little over 65 minutes. To find the station you'll have to go down Q Street or Connecticut Avenue until it connects with Reservoir Road NW, which starts just beside the Adams house.

Number 434 London Road, Northfields is the site of the former Northfields. It was the fifth President of the United States, John Quincey Adams who spent two years living at 4 London Road with his wife Louisa. Travelling east from his Presidential Office in Washington DC, John Quincy Adams (5th president of the US) would stop at this station to change horses and allow himself a few moments to relax. I know it well. My family has lived here for over twenty years.

Northolt

History buffs will know the site was formerly occupied by Northala Fields, an area of common land in the historic Manor of Northall. It was re-developed in 1948 as Northala Park, a major residential estate by Tecton.  It was one of London's largest post war housing developments, with part of it being demolished and replaced by flats on Stag Lane in the early 90s due to subsidence. The remainder is simply known as Northala; an urban village in West London.

Buildings are mainly privately owned (although some council housing still exists) and many residents have lived their most of their lives here. It's very much a community where people know each other and there is pride in the area despite it's unfavour. The site has been the subject of investigation by environmental groups who are concerned about the pollution caused by the break down of concrete in landfill sites. The concrete produces sulphur dioxide, which can cause breathing problems for humans, and acid rain, which damages natural environments.

Northolt residents, however, have reported how their houses have been damaged by the piles of rubbish. Northolt was originally a small, separate village a mile or so south of Perivale, but it became subsumed into that bigger suburb. In the centre of Northala Park is one of four man-made mounds which are easily visible from the air and have become part of the park's folklore. These mounds formed part of an embankment to carry the Grand Union Canal over the River Pinn.

Northwood Hills

Northwood Hills does not enjoy a particularly fearsome reputation, despite being featured in a number of notable films, including St. Trinian's 1-2, Help! and Amy. The current station is the third one to operate at that location the first was built in 1913, with an 83ft tower, the second came 13 years later, and was demolished to make way for the current concrete structure which opened on August 29th 1933. Despite the imposing architecture, it has not been well-received by passengers.

A recent survey found it to be the least liked interchange in London it also comes bottom when it comes to availability of information about connecting services. A long time ago, in the north of London, before Watford was a place, and before everyone had cars and buses were a big deal, there was a very little train station on the banks of the River Colne called Northwood Hills. In fact it was so little you could barely see it at all.

It is also fair to say that by Malorie Blackman standards, and despite it being the place I grew up, Northwood is not very nice. There are no parks, or libraries or museums. But for me, and everyone who lived there at the time, Northwood was fantastic. It didn't matter how far away you were from a town centre, you one day might get a big shopping centre with restaurants and an. The classic English railway station names were never much good, were they? Paddington.

Crewe. Doncaster. Swindon. Manchester Piccadilly, even. They are at once unmemorable and eye-wateringly twee (the same goes for the ugly names of some Australian cities – I’m looking at you, Canberra). Northolt, or Northall, as it was formerly (and incorrectly) known, is a suburb of Middlesex in the London Borough of Ealing. It adjoins Perivale to the east and Greenford to the south. Northall is named after the parish of Northall which dates back to at least the 13th Century.

Notting Hill Gate

It was a peddlers and street sellers'highway to London. When the first houses arose, they were little more than stables for livestock and small workshops. By the 19th century, it had been absorbed by the growth of Paddington itself, and became a pleasant middle class neighbourhood.        In the 1850s, a new railway station was being built at Paddington; it had a large flying connection that went straight to Euston. This rendered it an ideal location for wealthy people who wanted to be well connected without living in the city itself.

It was during this era that the mansions were erected. It's a street that I've lived on and off for many years, in various apartments, which leads me to the first "why": Why do I live in Notting Hill? It's convenient, its the area with perhaps the best selection of coffee shops and restaurants in London (the ones that don't charge extra for salt & pepper) where all my friends live and it has a certain caliginous charm.

The streets are too small and steep for buses as well as a lot of rubbish trucks & other big vehicles, so you don't hear them: little does the world know the trials of living just feet away from Kensington Park Road. Cars used to come up from the City, and in order to go on the 3rd south road, you had to pay a toll. And this is the reason why it was called Notting Hill Gate at that time.

Now of course, that toll gate has long been replaced by a Starbucks and some other shops I can’t remember because I haven’t been here since yesterday. Born in the 1840s, Notting Hill Gate is known for being a relatively affluent place which is seen as ideal for people who want to live in more central parts of London and have reasonably priced housing. It was also frequented by a lot of working class people during the Georgian and Victorian eras.

The main road through west London suburb, Notting Hill Gate is in Zone 1, and has a huge history. Before it was a toll road it was also known as Tyburn Lane. This is because it was part of an ancient route that connected London to Tyburn, which is now where Marble Arch stands today.

. I was standing on the corner looking at the sign, trying to figure out why I was in Notting Hill Gate, although I had a reason to be there.</p><h4>Oakwood</h4>

The station building was built in 1889 and is an example of Victorian railway architecture. In spite of being only a small village, Oakwood has been a busy railway terminus for many decades. Now that the line has been closed to passengers, the station is not open to the public. It is a short walk from Llandogo railway station and can be approached along footpaths alongside disused railway embankments. Oakwood, the one-time booking hall of Overground station is a Grade II listed building.

The booking hall originally had a plaque claiming that the station occupied the highest point in Europe in a direct line west of the Ural Mountains of Russia, which is a very strange way of saying that its 300 feet above sea level. In fact very little of any railway station remains, except that part of the platform retaining wall that is adjacent to this plaque. The station has been demolished in 1971 and subsequently a road has been built over this section of the trackbed  having previously been a public right of way.

On the opposite side of the tracks from Whitehaven there is a plaque that was added later which claims that the hamlet of Oakwood’s altitude is 300 metres. It makes no direct claim that it is the highest point in Britain, (as far as I know). ……………………………………………………………………………………. ˜. Billed as "the junction for the west" by the North Eastern Railway, and "The Gateway to Wales" by the London & North Western Railway, Oakwood quickly became a major passenger location and a goods yard was opened in 1895.

Old Street

The history of this spot is shrouded in mystery, although the surrounding area has been inhabited since prehistoric times.  The street itself is believed to be named after Alderman John Street who name appears on a map from 1690. The first reference to Old Street station being built here comes from a transfer deed dated 2nd May 1861 when the existing building was bought by the Metropolitan Company for £3,750. Technically, most of the line is below ground but a good chunk of it is above.

The bit that runs down from Stepney down to Old Street "station" is actually an absolutely massive disused reservoir for the nearby brewery (which has since changed hands and now sells ales with names like "Old Street Porter" and "Bishop's Finger"). The London Underground runs through a peculiarly corrosive environment: the soil from the clay beneath most of north-central London is highly acidic. Tunnel lining materials, particularly the cast iron originals installed between 1860 and 1910, were gradually corroded by the mineral acids in the soil.

Osterley

The first station here was built by the Metropolitan Railway (now part of London Underground 's Metropolitan line ) and was replaced in 1932 by this building designed by Charles Clark. The new station served both local and main line trains from three different railway companies: The Great Western Railway, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the Metropolitan Railway. Three sets of lifts gave access to the platforms up to a large booking hall.

An ancillary building on the north side of the site housed a cafe bar and buffet. Passenger services were withdrawn from Osterley & Spring Grove in 1940 as wartime economy measures, but it remained open for goods traffic until 11 March 1952. On 28 December 1952, demolition took place and construction began on a new depot. At Osterley a new & airier station was built in the early 1960s, as part of the electrification of the District Line.

The platforms were much wider and bricked-up windows on top of the outside walls have survived. The island platform is light and spacious, now with small sliding windows rather than solid glass panels. The other platform is not quite so plush, but there are bench seats here too which is a nice touch. Osterley is a railway station on the Central line of the London Underground, between South Ruislip and Northwood stations and is served by trains operated by both TfL Rail and London Overground.

It has in the past been called Osterley & Spring Grove because that was the name of a nearby station on the Great Western Railway GWR. These days it’s just called Osterley. The building was never intended to be a big and showy station. In fact it was supposed to be temporary. However, just like temporary can turn into long-term living arrangements, so did Oakwood. Wasn't this supposed to be west London? That's where the station I'd gotten off was located.

Oxford Circus

Oxford Circus was named after John Nash's renovated 1810 inn at Oxford Market and the new streets Oxford Street, Great Marlborough Street and Regent Street in 1854. By the late 1800s, Oxford Circus had established itself as a major traffic interchange with the development of the subway beneath it and the surrounding streets which connect four mainline railway stations together. These being Paddington, Baker Street, Bond Street and Victoria. I wasn’t even born when this happened but it’s at Oxford Circus I always seem to end up when I’m in London.

Maybe my brain is drawn towards this specific place or perhaps it’s just coincidence. Either way, there are times when I wonder what it would be like to travel on the tube across London. This was an historic day for the Underground. The Queen had driven a train before and loved the experience, so it wasn’t unusual to find her at the controls of this day’s special journey – though she still insisted on carrying her own handbag.

Oxford Circus. I grew up with Diane Sawyer, and the incredible edge in her voice that made me want to ask my science teacher if the earth was perfectly round like a wheel. He said no, but I still believe the earth is shaped like a wheel. Oxford Circus. She was the first royal to drive public transport in London and, not many people know this, but she retired a few years ago. London's northwest got a welcome addition today, the opening of Northala park, complete with play hills.

Parsons Green

I bought the beautiful powder blue  Parson’s Green  scarf at an auction. The auction lot of John Wolf Barry’s letters were part of a miscellaneous collection that had been in his daughter’s attic for over 40 years. The collection itself had her father’s initials sewn into it, and consists mainly of receipts from food bills and his laundry. He paid 18p for two tankards at a pub in Charing Cross Road but deducted 2d because he thought they "were second-hand!" This is one of many examples of the quirky patterns we can find in people's everyday lives.

The only one of its kind in the world. A structure whose like has never been repeated. And it wasn’t even finished! ThatisParsonsGreen. com delves into the history of one the most famous and recognisable railway bridges in Britain, looking at how it was originally designed, why it looked the way it did, why its construction was halted and how its reputation grew through the years until now, when parts of it are being demolished.

Parsons Green was built in 1869 and was originally a warehouse used to store tin plate.  The Subway station was designed by the leading architect of the time John Wolfe Barry who also designed Tower Bridge. The Clock Tower was built in 1897 as a memorial to the Prince Albert. The video shows how Parsons Green, with a concrete arch roof and 68 cast-iron columns, was designed under the supervision of John Wolfe Barry, who also designed Tower Bridge.

Piccadilly Circus

Piccadilly Circus is a road junction and public space of London. It was built in the 18th century, and was known as Regent Circus until 1924. One story is that John Nash, architect to George IV, envisaged the surrounding buildings linking arms with the Prince Regent, who had come to the throne in 1811 and moved into Carlton House on a site that overlooked today’s Piccadilly Circus.  Nash originally planned to have the circus remain open-ended with a view through to Buckingham Palace so that everything would have been on view at once….

Piccadilly Circus is a road junction and public space of London. The name first appeared in 1790 and was derived from the area's earlier use as a market garden. Constructed at the beginning of the 19th century, it was radically altered in 1954 when it was relocated eastwards at the junction of Broadway and Regent Street, converting part of Regent Street into a dual carriageway. The Piccadilly Circus underground station is a London Underground complex, named after the area of the city it serves.

The first tube station at Piccadilly Circus opened as part of the original section of the Metropolitan Railway in 1863 and is one of two tube stations that have been in almost continuous operation since then, along with Euston. The station, opened in 1869, is listed Grade II and is owned by Transport for London. Parsons Green is a historic stone building in Parsons Green, Fulham, designed by John Wolfe Barry, the man who designed Tower Bridge (and whose father designed the Houses of Parliament).

Pimlico

Pimlico is an area located to the north of Victoria Park and to the west of King's Cross. It is part of the Westminster borough of London but straddles three postcode districts, NW1, NW5 and N1. The site was a stream which formed the southern boundary of the grounds of the Hospital of St James, a medieval Priory that originated in the early 12th century or before. By 1546, this Priory had been demolished and its lands taken over by aristocratic owners.

In 1609 a manor at Pimlico was home to a member of the Aldersgate family: Sir Thomas Gresham developed it into an estate in 1623 though after his death it came into possession by. The years went by and the popularity of the new area increased. People began to move out of Pentonville, Clerkenwell and the City, and into this little corner of north west London. Around 1820, developers began building houses in huge numbers in order to profit big time from this new address.

The residential streets were named after members of a syndicate that developed Pimlico: Foxley, Dancer, Berners and Cruikshank, resulting in beautiful Regency buildings which still make up the character of the area today…. In the early 1700s, Pimlico was favoured by the haut ton of society and the racehorse stud farms which sprouted up in this part of north-west London could rival those in Newmarket. In 1846 the land was bought by Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 2nd Marquess of Lansdowne to build a model working class garden village.

The Royal Agricultural Society of England Show moved from Islington to a showground adjoining The Green, in 1882 and continues there today as part of the new design for Pimlico Garden Village. Pimlico is a section of central London. It is located between Victoria, Belgravia and Hyde Park, which makes it one of the most sought-after places to live in London. Famous people that have either lived or spent most of their life in Pimlico include Sir Winston Churchill, Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Kate Moss.

It is also said to be quite wealthy, with residents earning a higher wage than others in London. It is believed that an alternative version of this story is that the popular racehorse called Pimlico, after whom the course is named, had a habit of performing particularly well in front of his home crowd. Parsons Green is located in London, England. Was designed by Barry in 1906 and completed in 1908. It became a Grade II listed building in 1996.

Pinner

Rufus became famous for being the largest and tallest dog in England. He was featured on various news programmes and magazines such as Sky News, The Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Times, the Daily Mirror, Metro, MSN News and more. Rufus’s owner, Moira Crompton said: 'Yes, he is big. But it's because he's got a really long body rather than a particularly big head. His chest is only as big as my daughter's.

It was first noticed that Rufus was depositing poo around the area surrounding St Mary's C of E Junior School in The Grove, Pinner. He had also been seen around other areas of Pinner, including a local residential street. After two weeks of this, BBC North West Tonight ran a story on Rufus, and live footage showed how he darted across the main road (the A534) and into the school grounds. Although his route was not the most direct, Rufus would regularly trot nine miles from Pinner in Greater London to Baker Street Station in Westminster.

Plaistow

The opening of Plaistow Railway Station in January 1863 was a major event, not just for people in the area, but the whole of the South of England. The Great Eastern Railway (GER) line ran from London to Norwich and this was a major breakthrough for Plaistow, as it had previously been very isolated. By linking up with other railway companies, the station enabled easy access to London and into Norfolk. It became a firm favourite for holidaymakers, who could enjoy a day out by train.

Today's post is about how our journey from London Liverpool Street through Essex will change forever. Plaistow is a town near the centre of East Hampshire at the confluence of the river Meon and its tributary, the Itchen. In 1086 Plaistow was known as "Lepejat" (leap-gate), it was under the lordship of Bishop Odo. The name Plaistow means "leaping place", probably referring to a fish weir or stepping stones across the Itchen. The story of how Plaistow became an impressive railway hub is a remarkable one – with the town only being included on the network for the purposes of serving one man: Alderman Sir John Blundell Maple.

Plaistow station opened in 1865, which makes it one of the oldest stations on the London Underground today. It is located in the northern part of London, and is considered part of east London. What a difference a train station can make to a village. Plaistow is a village just outside East London, which has been given the nickname: Little Venice, for its man-made canals. The dog was eventually adopted by British businessman Mark Fitzpatrick, who operated a chauffeur service between the two locations.

Preston Road

Originally part of a London Underground line to Uxendon Farm, for the area in which it is situated. The line was officially named The Uxbridge Branch and the station Preston Road Halt for Uxendon and Kenton, but very few referred to it as that; there is a nice little twist in the wikipedia article about this, as an incident occurred where an inspector referred to it as Preston Road and the conductor had to point out the missing ‘halt’ part of the name.

Otherwise, I really like this story. It was opened in 1925, when the train service was very sporadic. It was only used in rush hour to accommodate the whole of the Uxendon and Kenton villages, but these were invariably not working-man's trains, so passengers would stand if they had a choice. Apparently it closed because the level crossing gates were frequently left unlocked by the aged gatekeeper who lived nearby. However, it seems the developers originally intended to name it Uxendon Road.

The red line on the original map drawing shows that the station is supposed to be named Uxendon Road. Whether because of lack of funds or public pressure (probably the latter), services started in May 1917 with the shortest name on the Metropolitan line north from Baker Street: simply Preston Road. It was opened in 1925 on the Metropolitan Line to cater to the growing suburban estates of Kenton and Uxendon. It was severely damaged during the war, and remained closed until 1952, when it became part of the Metropolitan Line again.

Queens Park

Queens Park is located on the Piccadilly line, just a single stop west of Baker Street. In 1898 the line was extended to a place called Stonebridge Park, however the station was never actually opened due to financial difficulties. The name 'Stonebridge'lives on in a different way at West Harrow, which is closer to Wembley stadium than the never-built station! The extension was eventually completed in 1906 and the track now only extends as far as Queens Park.

Queens Park itself is home to both the first ever electric railway experiment in 1884 (and is also an alternative name for Preston Park tube station on the Brighton line one of my personal favourites) and Alexandra Palace. If you lived in London, Queens Park tube station is a large feature of your daily commute. It sits on the Bakerloo line, and swings east-to-west across north-west London from Paddington to Elephant and Castle. A back entrance just off the end of Queens Park Road leads into a small yard that itself has only recently been used by the London Underground.

When Baker Street station was originally designed (and until the early 1960’s) this back entrance was where the network’s carriages came to be stored at night. Between the two stations where I catch my line, there is one abandoned station. Have you heard of it? I see that curious expression on your face and I can’t blame you. The station was never opened to the public and therefore it has escaped the meticulous archiving efforts of both historians and urban explorers, which makes it both mysterious and intriguing.

Come with me as we venture inside this historical anomaly and discover the inside story behind Queens Park Tube Station. They say every journey has an end. But for me, some journeys just have intermissions. My typical commute takes me on a one-way trip from Queens Park to Bounds Green (Tottenham Hotspur fans will understand my reference). Like any single-journey ticket on the Overground, I’m guaranteed one adventure, and so it was this morning that I experienced a most peculiar episode.

Yet which is quite normal on this curious journey. But what piqued my interest as I passed by the site of the only carriage shed on the tube line today, was that it's now home to a new mural depicting London's favourite son: J. K. Rowling. It's impossible to miss from the tube train, but you probably haven't paid attention to it on your journey from St James Park to Green Park. The station was renamed Preston Road at the end of 1907 when it was discovered that another station, Uxendon & Kenton, actually existed in Middlesex.

Queensbury

A significant amount of open space and public paths border Queensbury station, but very little of that land was originally developed to any extent. What roads there are are mostly pedestrianised and do not allow road traffic with the exception of one small road, Queens Road, which is located at the eastern end of the station. This road is closed to traffic 15 minutes before train operating hours cease at night in order for workers to be able to use the car park and make way for customers leaving the station 15 minutes later.

It will be seen that the real Queensbury stops at No. 2 platform, and then Kingsbury begins between Nos. 2 and 3 platforms inclusive. This distinction is marked in all printed and written matter, the [Johnston's] Survey Map showing the name Queensbury within the brackets which denote that part of a station which lies outside of the platforms and approaches. Queensbury was one of the first stations to be built in the residential areas on the west side of the city.

It was commissioned by the Metropolitan Railway in 1880 and opened on 1 January 1884 as Queensbury and South Acton, alongside its already existing Kingsbury station. On 1 December 1891, both names were changed to Queensbury. The Queensbury Estate was built by the Metropolitan Borough of Paddington, which also in 1927 constructed Queensbury Underground station (the name being derived from the name decided upon for the new estate), and began selling houses. When it opened on 10 July 1930 it was the most northerly station on the Bakerloo line.

The Borough was originally known as Queensbury, after the hamlet which grew up at the Queen's Arms pub. The area that formed the Municipal Borough of Queensbury in 1895 had been part of Paddington (which covered the area from Westbourne Green in the west to Kensal Green in the east and Bayswater in the north). Queensbury is a station on the Metropolitan line of the London Underground at its boundary with Hertfordshire, in England.

Queensway

The stunning Grade I-listed art deco 1930s architecture of the iconic Queensway underground station is enough to make you want to live in this part of town, with its subway-style interchanges running from northwest to southeast London's Piccadilly line. The area is mostly residential, with the north part and Hans Town part on either side of the main road being a mixture of huge council estates also featuring many new expensive apartments, including some rather impressive looking ones by big names such as Sir Terry Farrell.

The south side, centred around the main line tube station and bus stops is dominated by large Victorian terraces often partly converted into flats where once they were single homes. ". The name Queensway dates back to 1914, and is in fact the main thoroughfare into Bayswater. It was constructed as a direct response to the increased traffic using Bayswater Road, which suffered from limited capacity. The area also has the highest concentration of Thai restaurants and curry houses outside of Thailand: it’s known as Little Siam.

Now a place of rich heritage, and an area that is steadily on the up-and-up. A little further south in the South London district, one will find another rather ambiguous named London street: Queensway. This isn't a specific road, but more of a collection of roads in Bayswater, near Hyde Park. This road became known as the Queensway when Queen Victoria was crowned in 1837. The name was chosen when the local board petitioned the MTA to use this title for their station.

Rayners Lane

Sadly Rayner was involved in an accident on the railway line not long after and died. Shortly afterwards the station was renamed Rayners Lane & Harlington Station as there were plans to extend the railway into Harlington. A successful businessman called Thomas Mills (Mills was his mother’s maiden name, he got his money from running his father’s brewery) then moved into Rayner’s cottage and started to develop the area. At this period the Western Parkway was not in existence and there were no houses on the present day sites of Fairlop or Belmore Road.

The two residences on the Rayners Lane site were parts of a farm called "Holly Farm" belonging to a farmer Daniel Rayner. The first station was built by local builder John Mills, who also owned the Holly Farm Lodge Pub at the corner of Cranbrook Road and Staples Road, Ilford. It's amazing how much history there is attached to a simple name. Over the years, many people must have passed through this station without realising that the place had been named after one man.

Little did they know that it was the destiny of that man's descendants to make Rayners Lane their home. But clearly, they must have liked the idea of having their own station to live near. The old Rayners Lane Station was opened on 28th July 1868, by the Metropolitan Railway as a stop on its new extension to Paddington. Just a single wooden platform was provided, and the station had no building. The area was then very rural, but in the 1880s housing began to spread out from central London and by early 1900s there was quite a large settlement around the station.

The district of Rayners Lane was developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, and it was a popular north-western railway location because of its elevated position, which made it cooler than other areas. The development later followed the construction of several railway lines, with many grand residences being built there by prosperous merchants. Other names were proposed for the station, including Dormer's Hill (after a large house on Rayners Lane), Rayners Farm and Wanstead Park.

Rickmansworth

Film buffs may also recognise some scenes from the 1967 classic The Italian Job.  A number of key scenes from the film were shot at West Middlesex Hospital, which is located in Toker Row, Rickmansworth.  One such scene, featuring a three-ton van hanging precariously off the edge of a cliff was shot at Bury Street, just off The Green in Rickmansworth.  During the making of this scene, two stuntmen lost their lives: Harry Hutchison and Charles Spencer.

 Hutchinson's death occurred when he misjudged the distance between the ramp and his helicopter and consequently missed it completely, plummeting to his death. Okay, I'm going to be honest, I've never ridden the Bakerloo line. Before I started this project I thought that Brixton, Pimlico, Elephant & Castle and Westminster were about as far north as it went. I didn't realise about the stations in High Wycombe or Rickmansworth, let alone that it terminates at Watford Junction!  However, it does mean they have good connections over the other lines and if you're in fact travelling on the Bakerloo line or are just intrigued by this fantastic route map (my jaw was on the floor for a good few minutes) then you should definitely have this print.

Film locations in Buckinghamshire may not seem that widespread but Rickmansworth is actually a surprisingly good hub for film locations. Being two minutes north of Rickmansworth station, and appearing briefly in the Bridget Jones franchise, Rickmansworth has a number of television and movie credits to its name. Last Crusade   Raiders of the Lost Ark   Blackadder   Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason ^[Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason]( thelondonnet.co.uk. Taking the train into London can get you to your destination in the city pretty easily.

There’s a lot to see on the train too, not least the cute chickens of Rickmansworth station. But what? You might be asking yourself. Why don’t you just pop to your nearest supermarket instead? Well, let me explain: this medium size town (which was established in 1937) is actually one of the best places to find film locations near London. When you set your destination as Rickmansworth, London for your next journey out, you definitely won't be disappointed by the final stop.

The claim to fame for this station is that it is indeed a surprise hub for film locations: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Last Crusade were filmed literally two minutes north of the station, as well as Bridget Jones and the Edge of Reason, and Blackadder. In the end Rayners Lane prevailed. The station is located between Kingsbury and Shenleybury stations and is in Travelcard Zone 4. The Euston-Northolt line is long gone, having been closed in 1964.

Roding Valley

I’m sure you would have all heard of Waterloo Station while it’s London and England counterpart St. Pancras. Where fewer people know about it is its other terminus: Roding Valley station, which feeds passengers into the northeastern suburbs of East London and Essex. As with Barney Hoskyns, who wrote about a visit to the ghost train station Clapham Junction in the annals of Britain’s Railway Stations by David Long and Graeme Bickerdike, he writes about his personal experience there.

A short time ago, I was musing about my favourite tube stations. I realised that it’s a subject that deserves a full post on its own, but there was one station that didn’t quite manage to make the cut for my list of top ten tube stations. This is despite being only 100 metres from my house, and 400 metres from my office. It’s also arguably famous the world over, as the Tube station used in Harry Potter films (along with Underground shots for City Of London scenes).

We live in a noisy world. There are sirens blaring through the night, and if you’re away from the city centre you may have little chance of escape from car horns, domestic arguments or police helicopters. On the Jubilee line between Stanmore and Finchley Road there’s a different kind of noise. It’s the quietest place on the tube network Roding Valley station. The Roding Valley Line is a London Underground and Docklands Light Railway that serves a number of places in North East London and Essex, including Woodford, Hainault, Fairlop and Grange Hill.

It has a total length of 10 miles, with 22 stations. The line was originally built by the Great Eastern Railway before being transferred to London Transport in 1947. We got off the train for a moment. It was, perhaps, the quietest tube station I’d ever been in. The numbers on the board said there were just 10 people waiting in all of Roding Valley. Over the next hour, just 15 would get on and off, mostly because it was a convenient spot to switch from [the Metropolitan line] to services headed north[east].

Roding Valley was originally named ‘Hawtree’, after the farm that existed on the site of what is now the station. It was also one road away from the Hawtree Inn, which made it a popular travel destination for many years. In 1930, the area was developed for Elizabeth Macmillan's new housing estate in Ilford. Funnily enough, the station was actually quite a long way from Preston Road the only house in the area was the Uxendon Manor House, nearer to Cockfosters, and so wasn’t even really that close to Uxbridge.

Ruislip

Ruislip station was opened by the Metropolitan Railway on 9 January 1904 as part of the company's extension of the line from Harrow-on-the-Hill to Greenford. Three platforms were provided: two outer platforms for services to Uxbridge and Ealing Broadway, with an inner island platform (platform 3) for terminating local services from London. The original station building was similar in design to that built at Rayners Lane; broadly rectangular in plan with a pitched roof, it was located on the up (London-bound) side of the tracks next to Ruislip Road bridge.

At the same time, a siding leading from the north end of the station through a series of curves and reverses joined up with the Metropolitan line. Ruislip station has always been a mystery to me. Its a Grade 2 listed building, but one that seems impossible to find a way through, and the waiting room is quickly becoming derelict, like the buildings that represent it. The station was built at the beginning of the 20 th century on the Great Western Railway line from Paddington to Reading, a line which served as part of the inspiration for Sir John Betjeman’s poem.

Ruislip Manor

Although technically part of Greenford, Ruislip (pronounced Rye-slip) Manor is just too closely linked to Northolt Aerodrome to be ignored.  Northolt’s extensive history goes back as far as 1915 when, as an emergency landing ground, it was used by aircraft operating from London to Brighton during the First World War. After the war a number of large hangars were erected. Northolt was purchased by the Air Ministry in 1919 and became a stop for civil and military air traffic on their way to India and further east.

 During WW2 it was heavily involved in training pilots for combat. Ruislip Manor suffered heavy aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe during WW2, due to its proximity to RAF Northolt. The area remained rural until the arrival of the railways and the Metropolitan Railway extension during the 1860s. This led to the residential development of the area roughly between 1904 1910, although building had commenced during the 1890s. Let's play a game. Its called 'spot the train at Ruislip station'.

Russell Square

Russell Square seems like the perfect place for a mysterious sign. Eyes begin to scan, looking for meaning in those numbers. Is it a countdown? A random number generator? Perhaps the total number of steps taken while exploring the area? A conjunction of psychology and mathematics is just right for an urban myth. Yet the truth is as lame as they come an error. One of next to the cafes in Russell Square has a sign on it’s door saying “171 steps”.

I came here because these steps are a major pain at the end of my shift we have to walk down them to go home, and it’s good training for when I do the Great Scottish Run in October. I got up early for my meeting with a wizened old lady today. I couldn’t wait to get to Russell Square. Mainly because I hoped it would be quiet. And it was immense, immense quiet.

The kind of quiet that you think is a sign of your looming mental illness. A long time ago I lived in Russell Square, London. Nearby was a laundrette that caused me to do an inordinate amount of folding; I absolutely adored the job. The laundrette is still there today, but sadly closed down some years ago. The fabled statue of Queen Boadicea outside the tube station at Russell Square. The background is actually the building behind, but I can’t quite capture it riding her chariot with both hands free.

Russell Square boasts the fifth largest square in London – enough space to fit St Paul’s Cathedral with room to spare. And look, as if by magic, here is a cathedral to greet you as you arrive. If you see one, what platform was it on? Hint: there aren't any. There were once, but they closed them all down in 2012. I've never seen so many trains reversed, and not just at Ruislip either! Clapham Junction is a maze, and Cannon Street is interesting too.

Seven Sisters

Somewhere in North London the area of Seven Sisters gathers its name from a group of seven elm trees, which stand there today. The Elm Trees were planted by 7 families of seven sisters (how romantic) which makes it even more special. Not as special maybe as the trees in Sunnydale; however, this does make the place the only London Borough named after elm trees. But back to the story of these particular Seven Sisters.

The area of North Acton features seven elm trees dating back to the 1930s, when they were planted to mark the coronation of King George V. The story has it that five families who had seven daughters between them provided £ 25 towards purchasing saplings and planting them in the park. Over time, the trees have become a famous landmark, and they are now much loved by local residents, past, present and future.

I live on the Seven Sisters Road and thought it would be great for my blog post to include something that represents my city. I thought I could use some photos of the seven elm trees that have stood in the area since 1730. Since I didn’t take a photo of the road, but used the elm trees instead I think this fits nicely. The Seven Sisters is an ancient ribbon development stretching a mile between west Acton and north Holland Park.

Shepherds Bush

There are two key issues with the lack of lifts at Shepherds Bush. Firstly it is not a step free station without assistance (more on this later), and secondly there are some people who will never be able to use the station because they cannot manage the stairs. It has been a long running issue that people have been trying to get something done about, and this is just another in a long line of fights.

Like many accessibility related issues, it is rarely discussed unless it is used as an example of the failings of London transport as a whole. To the west of this station is a small road named Shepherd's Bush Green. On it there is a pretty sign which would appear to indicate that it is part of the Metropolitan Line. It isn't though long ago, when the tunnels were being constructed, they found out that they were going to need to jam a big borer through the earth just under this road anyway so why not just continue the line from Goldhawk Road underground, save having to bore a hole just for trains, and then make a station here for local residents?.

Many things about life in London are expensive, and that’s often used as a catch-all explanation for the cost of everything from beer to rent. But one of the least spoken about price hikes is Transport for London’s (TfL) refusal to install space for wheelchairs on the majority of Overground trains, despite the fact that all but two are capable of having a low-floor section added. As a result, the stairs (and the lifts) are extremely steep.

 For me with Crohn's disease, this is an obstacle I often have to work around. But for lots of people it means no access to trains at all.  London Underground does do step-free access, but it's not available on all tube stations. It’s also not a serving option for many bus stops or National Rail stations. Perhaps the most shocking of all the London Underground stations is Shepherds Bush. Once you veer away from the more central stops, you enter a world of 1960s architecture and 1970s men s fashion.

Snaresbrook

The station opened in 1873 as Wood Street when the Metropolitan Railway extended its line north from Moorgate, with a tunnel under the former course of Wood Street to Shoreditch. The building was designed by Thomas Simpson and paid for by Francis Snaith (after whom the station was named) who had purchased land in Moorfields to build on. Unlike other nearby stations such as Liverpool Street station, which were built to a grand scale, Snaresbrook station was on a much smaller scale; it led to many comments regarding the squalid nature of houses and lodgings that lay near it.

The station opened as Snaresbrook & Wood Street (Wood Street is now underground) but its name was shortened to Snaresbrook. A short while ago I passed through Snaresbrook station following my TV licence agent to pick up the license and have a chat with her. I pass through the station almost daily, but this was my first time “inside” in many years so it took me a while to figure out where to look when I took out my camera.

Snaresbrook is the definition of a “deep-level”, tube, Underground station where you get off an escalator and directly on to another without venturing outside. It was built several years after the Great War (I know, that's not what it's called; just ignore me) which meant that some of its original features have had to be renovated over recent times. Snaresbrook Station is a railway station in London, England. The station opened at the height of the Victorian era on 28 July 1856 and closed on 7 November 1964.

The station has been fully restored and reopened as part of the Chappell Sports Centre on 14 July 1982 by the Snaresbrook Railway Preservation Society. The station opened on 28 April 1872 as Stratford, becoming Stratford Market in April 1937. It was renamed Snaresbrook & Seven Kings (four stations to the north) on 26 September 1949. The station buildings on platform 2 [the more northerly side] were reconstructed in 1985. Snaresbrook is a London Underground station on the Hainault Loop of the Central line, located between Hainault and Redbridge stations.

It stands on the main road through Snaresbrook, in an area developed by the Knights Templar as Temple Mill. It's known for its grand Victorian architecture along tree-lined streets: green-painted lamp posts, Victorian iron fences, grid patterns of small front gardens and converted mews houses. My roommate was thrilled when she heard there was a neighbourhood called ‘Seven Sisters’ and had to visit. She immediately took a picture at the central monument of the seven trees, which you can see above where they are named after the seven sisters.

South Kensington

You may not have known about this, but when you’re on the Piccadilly Line between South Kensington and Knightsbridge, take a slightly longer look at the inside of the train. Just west of the station stop, you’ll notice that the train veers to the right. This is because originally it was meant to continue along Knightsbridge Road but no longer does so because of a large plague pit which would have been located directly in sight of the trains (see image).

Although the tube follows the road, it's forced to divert underground in the area around South Kensington station. On exiting the tunnel and moving towards Knightsbridge, a few metres above you lies a huge plague pit. This pit was excavated between 1728 and 1732 anywhere between 60-100,000 people were buried here at least according to Wikipedia. South Kensington tube station is just north of the busy shopping streets and nightlife of South Kensington. It gets less traffic than the stations next to it, but its location is still vital as a transport link from the western end of London to places near Heathrow Airport.

South Ruislip

Despite its rather fitting name, the town of South Ruislip, in west London, has a rich history that is credited to this astonishing event. The 1. 5 ton DeHavilland had flown from Martlesham Heath to Northolt in foggy conditions but with little ice on its wings. As the plane approached Northolt airport at about 10:00pm, it flew into very bad cloud and snow. The pilot decided to land on the golf course flanked by two housing estates.

The crew jettisoned all equipment they could free and dumped fuel to reduce weight, and so the aircraft touched down on the roof of a house called Glenroyd without losing speed or stalling. The house crashed through the floors below before finally. South Ruislip is a little over 8 miles north-west of St. Albans, which itself is 6 miles south-east of central London. And it has a special claim to fame — the only time an aeroplane landed on a house.

On 23 February 1946, the propellor-driven Avro Anson Mk. 1 aircraft (serial number L7842) was returning from Peterborough at night. Serving with No. 4 Ferry Training Unit at RAF Church Fenton, it had been tasked to take part in a training exercise and was flying from Grantham to Bournemouth with 4 crew and 5 passengers on board – when its two engines began to fail due to icing conditions. I knew about the crash & the house being pulled down before I moved here, but I didn't realise quite how close it had been to my house.

The plane came in on a heading of 220° (so that's 330° 110° ) so it could have crashed straight through my roof, but instead landed on the next road up which was already demolished. It crashed at about 11pm, and the weather conditions were fine. The pilot managed to get the plane down & stop it as it was only 2 miles from RAF Northolt, and right near an aerodrome in Denham very soon after being fired at by a Spitfire too.

The resulting publicity led 10 Downing St to contact the crew & passengers to thank them for their valour. The aircrew had been involved in filming anti-U boat footage at the time of the attack, although it is not known whether the crash was caused by ice already on the wings, or a build up in the freezing temperatures of 4 degrees. The crash site is very close to where the main runway of our local airfield, Northolt, is now.

Southfields

Southfields Tube station has a lot going for it. It's about 50 seconds from Wimbledon Tennis Club, which is great for commuters although it also makes it this almost unbearable place of noise and human thronging each year when the world's number 1 tennis tournament is on (you're lucky to get down the stairs then). Southfields is also close to Wimbledon Park tube, which is handy if you're heading in that way, and has direct buses into central London.

Southfields Tube station also has an award-winning green wall, which must make the underground feel like even more of an oasis at times. Apparently Southfields station used to be called Merton Park. Not sure if I'd have voted for that name myself . Southfields station in Wimbledon, London usually finds itself featured in a few posts every year. Nothing too out of the ordinary here. Many stations go through some kind of temporary changes to coincide with something thats happening nearby often major events like concerts and festivals.

 Wimbledon station also undergoes similar changes each year, but not because of any major event (at least none that I know of). The Wimbledon tennis tournament is the reason for this. And so was created a tennis themed Southfield's station. Subway station in south west London has had a makeover that is certainly raising eyebrows – but not everyone is convinced by the eye-catching scheme. From June 17 the Hammersmith & City line platform at Southfields tube station will be covered in garish pink and green tennis balls, the sheeting designed to catch the eye months before Wimbledon returns.

There has been much recent media attention regarding the makeover of the London Underground station platform at Southfields during the Wimbledon tennis tournament. The makeover is quite an elaborate one, but it is done each year to coincide with the Wimbledon tennis tournament. Southfields station has a dedicated platform for commuters travelling to the tennis at Wimbledon, but Wimbledon station doesnt have one. The passengers & crew would have been likely to be in civilian clothes & seen as they left the plane on the roof-top could well have been a danger to security.

Southgate

In 1931, it was extended southwards as far as Southgate. In 1933, it was extended eastwards as far as Barking and West Ham, with the section between West Ham and Barking becoming part of the Underground's East London Line. This was to help relieve overcrowding on other lines including the Central London line. However, in 1939 the section between Barking and South Gate was closed, with through trains only able to reach Barking.

It remained like this for more than forty years until 1979 when under an agreement between London Transport and British Rail it was fully reopened, with peak hour services running from Liverpool Street to Chingford instead of terminating at Maryland then reversing (this practice being used on the Uxbridge branch). In a report prepared for the Corporation of London in 1926, traffic engineer R. G. Plowden recommended a new road from Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner.

The street was constructed between 1925 and 1928. It was originally named King Edward VII Street, but renamed Southgate Circus in 1936 to avoid confusion with North Road near the Scottish border. Thirty years later (in 2011) the Southgate Loop line was opened, linking the loop line with the mainline railway at South Mimms and extending the eastern end of Victoria line services to West Croydon. Despite the proximity of the tube line to the road above, and having unimpeded access to a goodly portion of the pit, the site has not been used for construction on three occasions that I am aware of.

Southwark

The Southwark Stations blue cone wall is situated within the southern portal of the Southwark tube station, which is a Jubilee line extension component. The south side of the station is built with a row of cheerfully colored ceramic cones that line up with the glass wall behind them. It was designed by the artist Tomoko Takahashi, while the ceramic installation was crafted by Rumiko Matsumoto. Southwark tube station which opened in 1999 as part of the Jubilee line extension is an example of a highly functional artwork.

The designers, architect Bennie Hargreaves, and engineers Clive Wilkinson Architects, collaborated with the artist David Fisher. Southwark was a pleasure to photograph, not just for the station itself but for the area surrounding it. The Jubilee line that connects London Bridge to East Finchley station runs between Southwark and Borough Market's small network of tunnels. Southwark tube station in Borough, London, is an interchange between the Jubilee line and the Northern line. The station was opened in 1999 as part of the Jubilee Line Extension.

St. Jamess Park

Due to the location of the station, the existing entrances are difficult to access. Most interchange between Central and Northern Line services is through steps, so therefore it was decided that a lift would be required. This was accompanied by an extension of the central island platform and an extended ramp to provide step-free access to platforms 2 and 3. To make this process easier, TfL demolished the building on platform 2 in 1908 and built an island platform lobby.

This was further re-modelled in 1936, when a new ticket hall was constructed to connect to the northbound Bakerloo line. More recently, a new entrance was also constructed for St. Jamess Park, leading towards Pall Mall. Our security measures have made it difficult for London Overground to provide direct help and from the stations ticket office, there are no station staff on hand to speak to. There is, however, a barrier controlled station exit. '.

In the main hall, there is a spiral staircase that climbs all the way up to the cupola. However, when St. Jamess Park was built in 1868 this area was used by cab drivers to wait for passengers (). Southwark Stations blue cone wall, built as part of the Jubilee line extensions new generation of stations, was inspired by an 1816 stage set for The Magic Flute. The tile that inspired the Jubilee line extension's blue wall at Southwark station.

St. Pauls

E  Gillespie's Buildings is one of those rare buildings that'll leave you wondering about the past, and reflecting on the future. It's a beautiful hybrid of art deco and neoclassical elements – a style that was in vogue throughout the inter-war period (1918 to 1939). This short video aims to capture the building's combination of timeless beauty, local history, and architectural interest. I’ve lived in London for 20 years, and I’ve never heard of this museum, so perhaps it hasn’t been around for long.

But St. Paul’s is one of the most iconic buildings in London’s skyline. The Grade 1 listed monument has survived both the Great Fire in 1666 and the Blitz during WW2 (this is also why it is painted black with no stonework showing). The Central Electricity Generating Board, which became the National Grid, was established in 1926. The control room – a vast panel of dials, switches and lights – began operating out of the former St Paul's Stationery Office on Leadenhall Street in 1928.

Stockwell

The tunnels are just like a ship tunnel, an air raid shelter on a much smaller scale. Made of solid brick, theyre dark and dusty, but put in a little light and theyre OK. Theyve got timber offcuts on the floor and there are big metal hooks to hang things on the walls. There is concrete reinforcing in the walls, because it was never expected to be inside for more than two months without being properly cleaned out.

Stockwell Station is a common sight on the London Underground. Although it looks like every other station, beneath it is a part of history which nobody knows about. There are two tunnels running alongside the platforms. One of them was used to house the offices while in operation but has been turned into an archive after station was built. The other tunnel is still operational and run alongside the Northern Line. It is an ordinary looking stretch of Surrey country side— green and tranquil, with the occasional church spire peeping out from behind a bend in the road.

But behind the houses that line this seemingly peaceful lane lie an extraordinary secret— two subterranean tunnels that lie six times the length of the platforms at nearby Stockwell Tube Stations. Below the escalators between the Victoria and Pimlico (and the Central and Jubilee) stations, there is a patch of dark tunnel comprised of two inset doors. A large sign on each door warns against going inside and taking any pictures. The air raid shelter is actually still alive and well.

The tunnels are so long, compared to the platforms, that you could fit the Shard in. They are also listed as one of the worlds oldest surviving underground stations used as air raid shelters. During the Second World War, the electricity grid control room for the entire of London and Southeast England was housed here, in the lift shaft. Hallo there Ten Speeders. I am back with another blog post. This time, I’m looking over my visit to St.

Sudbury Hill

Pigeons have been a problem for his 200 staff at Sudbury Hill station for the past three years, with five to seven attacks a day by birds of prey taking place.   The legendary status of the birds was confirmed by Richard Tekampe, said he had seen footage of them swooping on pigeons for food. The reasons behind the influx of pigeons in northern London are not known, but it is thought it has something to do with south Asian culture.

Muslims are forbidden to eat pork a favourite food of the birds. This is the sign at Sudbury Hill station, which is on the edge of the area that some people describe as Haringey. It's a bit funny that they needed to point out the fact that it's within London, though. Last month I was on a train from London to Surrey and very pleased to see a Sudbury Hill tube station sign. No-one had taken the ‘Hill’ part out of it, so that was pleasing.

Tooting Broadway

The statue of Edward VII on the west side of St. James's Park was unveiled by the prince in 1911; it is a characteristic work of Alfred Gilbert and his least formal. The Buckingham Palace Road ends at the gates of St. James's Park, and bears to the south-west to become Pall Mall. To the east the road becomes Whitehall, which leads across Horse Guards Parade. This statue (or perhaps we should say "bust") is one of four representing British sovereigns placed at prominent entrances to London in celebration of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

Bexley Council will ask residents for their views this autumn on options for the pierhead within Bexley's Local Plan. Around that time, the pterodactyl used to be a regular outer District resident. More on this below.  Today's Metropolis is under the tyrannical rule of a local gangster named "Boss" Tweed. To make matters worse, Tweed's headquarters is Broadway City Hall quite a contrast with the majestic, self-governing and architecturally beautiful City Hall in neighboring Manhattan.

He has forced the city to build an elevated track for his own personal enjoyment: one stretch goes through his hotel and casino downtown, while another goes directly over City Hall. Walking along the south side of the Thames from Westminster to Tower Bridge, a little bit stuck out of the front line of the terraces is a rather large statue. It is on a traffic island and is not visible until you reach it.

It is of Edward VII and stands about 20ft tall including base and plinth. Tooting Broadway to Tooting Bec is the street that runs for the length of London’s new south circular road, it is more or less in the middle of South London. The road is no stranger to controversy as people have been fighting over this road for a very long time. Most Londoners think that the great statue of Edward VII at the entrance to the park was a waste of money.

Totteridge & Whetstone

The ancient history of Totteridge and Whetstone is unclear. When it was first settled in the bronze age, local people were unused to having their communities invaded by Roman soldiers, and consequently used their newly acquired fortified ]]]]]]]] to drive them out. Information about this struggle comes from writings by Pliny the Elder and Julius Caesar, making it one of the only known periods in which two sources agree on something. Totteridge & Whetstone is a jam packed little gem of a postcode in north London.

A potent mix of multi-culturalism, with a mixture of rich and poor, young and old. It represents the ideal location for a best selling book or movie to be written. If you don't believe me then read on for some insight into what goes on where the sheep roam freely. Totteridge & Whetstone  is a deli in North London. It’s not very big, but that's not the point. Google wants to send people to your site and they are willing to pay you (Google AdSense) to put their ads on your site.

If you use an ad network like  BestWebFare, they will even help you monetize your traffic. Hello there, if you are looking for a storage unit in Totteridge and Whetstone, you might be glad to hear that we have found the best deals in the area. For as little as 50 Pounds in Totteridge and Whetstone per month, you can find yourself a fine (and affordable!) storage unit. Totteridge & Whetstone: There’s a village in North London.

And no, we don’t have a mayor, or a post office, nor do they have a high street (hopefully not). But it is the home of some pretty famous people. But as it turns out, they paid for it entirely themselves. Who asked for and where the money went?. I'm sure you know about the famous West End of London but do you know that there is also a Tooting Broadway and how it got its name? Well, if you don't now you do.

Tower Hill

Tower Hill station is the oldest of the deep level stations on the London Underground system. Opened as the City & South London Railway in 1890, it was the last station to open on the Underground, and was one of the first tube stations to use electric lifts. The lifts have recently been rebuilt with rear access doors to accommodate passengers with wheelchairs and baby buggies because the stations lifts were originally built without wheelchair access.

Access for wheelchair users has also been improved at street level through funding from Tower Hamlets Council. This piece of the wall (most of it is underground) forms one side of a courtyard belonging to Tower Hill station. It's a short walk from the exit and well worth taking as you can walk along about 100m of the wall. The Romains constructed the wall around 200AD, but most of what remains today was built in 120-130AD by Emperor Hadrian for defensive purposes (rock, surrounded with clay and lime).

Tower Hill station on the Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines is served by four London Underground lines. Tower Hill station is located in the Tower Hill area of the City of London and is on the south side of the River Thames. <. The western end of the underground platforms was once covered by a large ticket hall that was part of the original station building. This entrance was closed in 1900 due to overcrowding and replaced with an iron footbridge.

Tufnell Park

Poetry Corner was created in November 2003 by station staff as a way of giving the local community a voice. Originally anonymous, the two or three poems selected by staff each week were only put on display for three days and passengers werent able to read them unless they had enough time to stop and wait for the lift. However, commuters objected saying that they found themselves in a rush every morning and missed out on the opportunity to appreciate and enjoy the poems.

Only small posters of the poems were displayed at first, but it soon proved popular and now Poetry Corner has made a name for itself throughout the country. When you see it up close it looks like a real work of art because its hand painted and customised. Each poem is reproduced by hand. Poetry Corner was set up by Tufnell Park Station staff in August 2010 to give passengers a daily dose of poetry.

Its not a public poetry competition or performance. Rather it is presented as a way of demonstrating how poetry relates to our lives and the world around us, explains station manager Angus Meikleham. The scheme has proved popular with many passengers trying out their own poetry over the daily offering. A website that promotes local poems from Tufnell Park and its local inhabitants. The project is in collaboration with Crossrail and the Royal Academy of Arts.

On the website you can find featured poet(s) of the day, recent works, archive or any one can send us a poem to feature. Tufnell Park. a place thats famous for a large orange rock and some poems inside a tube station. Many would consider this to be pretty noteworthy. But it isnt why I'm writing about Tufnell Park. Tufnell Park has something much more interesting, that's right, Hackney Brewery. This section is not just about the wall itself though, as it also contains an old church and grave yard, as well as a row of houses that are still visible from platform level.

Turnham Green

Shortly after 8am every weekday morning, I walk under the historic clock at Turnham Green station and am bombarded by a barrage of passengers walking to the platform to catch their Metropolitan Line train into central London. As I edge my way through the crowded platform, I spot a flower stall directly outside the station and find myself somewhat perplexed as to why a florist would be sat there, directly below a sign that reads ‘Wheelers Florists’.

What I find interesting about this is that the character of Sylvia Trench (Caroline Bliss, who was later to play Mary in the Bond movie The Living Daylights) in Dr. No invites Bond to see her at Turnham Green after escorting him back to London from Crab Key. I have not been able to establish whether Sylvia has flowers in her home, but if she did, then Turnham Green might well have been the place where they came from.

Turnpike Lane

Turnpike Lane is part of the London Borough of Brent, in northwest London. It is a busy, built-up area of shops, restaurants and pubs on the old A5 road from London to Birmingham (currently Euston Road). Turnpike Lane in name was coined sometime after 1767 when a tollgate was placed there to collect tolls on traffic using Hampstead Road as it passed through fields en route to Paddington. The gate was initially known as Cowley Gate, but in 1758 it became Turnpike Gate.

This may have been due to an inn called Turnpike House nearby. The gate was one of several along the long stretch of Hampstead Road between central London and Paddington Green in what. Turnpike Lane is a street in the north of London, England. It lies in the borough of Enfield local government district. The street forms part of the A111 and starts at Woodside Park tube station and runs north-east to cross the A10 Great Cambridge Road at a roundabout (known locally as "Fiveways") with Woodside Avenue, Oak Road and Rockingham Way.

The roundabout straddles both boroughs of Enfield and Haringey and can therefore be reached from both boroughs. Turnpike Lane is one of the most unusual sites in London. Its simplicity belies that it is a hub for four separate tube lines, one rail line and several bus routes. It has a mixture of uses, some offices, some car dealerships, flats and a hotel. The Turnpike Lane gyratory system is one of the worst in London, with jams daily during rush hours.

Also, it's one of the first gyratories I remember driving through when I learned to drive and was terrified of it. Turnpike Lane. The name Turnpike Lane refers to a toll gate erected there in 1767. And of course, the tube barriers there now techincally are a toll gate, meaning the name is still accurate. Imagine my disappointment when I found that the actual filming of Skyfall didn’t occur on Bond Street, or near Turnham Green tube station.

Upminster Bridge

The Upminster Bridge in London makes for a good story. It was built in 1934, with an odd design as the support beams were supposed to be arches, but they curved downwards at each end, and New York Times indicated that it showed a swastika pattern from above. This was hidden by grilles, and swiftly removed after the Nazis came in power. It's possible that it could have been removed regardless of the public opinion as there have been stories of unusually shaped buildings (the Flatiron building in NYC previously had a stretch resembling a hammer and sickle) having them removed because they disturbed people after some time.

When it was completed in 1934, the UK’s largest cable-stayed suspension bridge was branded the Twentieth Century Bridge. The then minister for transport described it as a “bridge of the future”. A decade later, when Westminster City Council denounced its Nazi connotations and asked Tarmac – the construction company that built it – to remove the swastika from its ticket hall, London’s biggest crossing got a new name: Upminster Bridge. An architect in charge of designing visitor facilities at the 80-year-old station, which once served as a stop on the Underground line to Heathrow Airport, said his firm had decided to display the symbol in its ticket hall “to show that it had nothing to do with its Nazi history.

” The German railway operator Deutsche Bahn rejected, however, the proposal that the swastika would be used a form of signposting. Upminster Bridge also raised some eyebrows among its first users when its ticket hall featured, on a central wallp iece, an enormous swastika. Nothing sinister about that, claim historians — apparently the East End of London was rife with these symbols back in the 1930’s, and this one represented Hanuman, god of the arts.

Upminster Bridge. I'm not talking about the bridge in Upminster, in London. Although it is the longest steel arch railway bridge in Europe and it looks like it's called The Upminster Bridge but I digress. This is a very different bridge. Upminster Bridge was built in 1934 and displayed a swastika in its ticket hall. This wasn’t because the bridge had any Nazi affiliations though, believe me. They took it down a few years later for, well, understandable reasons.

Uxbridge

The Uxbridge branch is a section of the Piccadilly Line that consists of a deep-level Underground tube tunnel between two surface sections. There are two stations on the branch, in operation since 1933: Uxbridge and Rayners Lane; however, from this point it is an almost straight line to West Ruislip, and the true northbound alignment of the line lies only beneath the central part of the aforementioned suburban thoroughfare. Therefore, the Uxbridge branch is sometimes considered to start at Rayners Lane.

Submitted by The UK Capital John Curtis, author of District Lines: A Comprehensive Record Of The Suburban Rail Network In The UK, due out February 2015. Uxbridge has two notable points on the Uxbridge and West Drayton line, both of which would be missed if you only travelled between those stations. Some points of interest, Uxbridge was once the first / last station on the line as well as having a 48 mile long branch line that would traverse the north of London.

The line was eventually closed in 1952 (my Dad can remember travelling on it, stopping at Northolt Junction now a car park). Cockfosters is the final station on the Piccadilly and Heathrow branches of the London Underground. This station has a tunnel which mirrors the one at Uxbridge, one of the stations on the Central line. Located in west London, Cockfosters has been used by many film and television makers. There are currently two (2) stations serving Uxbridge Uxbridge station, which is indeed the final terminus on the Underground's Piccadilly Line because why not, and Uxbridge: Hillingdon Hospital.

Vauxhall

Vauxhall is a district of south west London, which nowadays is home to lots of incomers and commuters. In the past it was home to many construction workers, who worked building the Victoria line that ploughs its way through it. Back in those days it was much more industrialised – this meant you could get things like really good bread from small corner shops, and rent a room from an old woman in flat 6 above the jewellers.

Today, Vauxhall is a mix of railway arches, residential streets, and light industry. White goods whizz back and forth on the roads and railways outside. It’s not entirely urban, seeming more to be a product of the local planning authority trying to build something halfway between the city and green belt that doesn’t appeal to any one kind of person. In fact, it was not uncommon for the station staff to be woken in the middle of the night by a phone call from the creamery (in the old days, that is; my father managed to shock himself enough with his telephone once that he still had to use an ear trumpet at 60) telling them to send an extra milk train to meet a large order.

My heart beat a little faster as I read the sign: ‘Vauxhall’. I could vaguely remember that not long after I had left home, Vauxhall had been sold to the government, and most of it was in use as some kind of secret establishment – one that I definitely didn’t want to get caught entering. Vauxhall Cross is a busy junction of several London Underground lines, and another mainline rail route. It's also in the middle of one of London's most deprived areas.

For years, the sounds of the underground were accompanied by the constant hum of milk churns. Today, Vauxhall is home to the BBC and MI6 – and a car factory. Convoys of milk tankers would seem a little out of place in this neck of the woods, but there used to be so much dairy business that this area was nicknamed “The Milk District”. It is placed between Hillingdon, Ruislip and Ickenham stations further down the line.

Wanstead

The north-eastern part of London was bombed heavily during the Second World War. One of the reasons why Wanstead escaped almost unscathed was that it had been set aside in 1939 as a site on which to construct vast underground storerooms to hold the capital's municipal archives. The idea, eventually implemented in 1941, came not from the council's accountant but from Herbert Morrison, who had served as Home Secretary and Mayor of Hackney before becoming Minister for Home Security and also Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Leader of the House of Commons.

He knew Gothold von Gersdorff, a mining engineer who devised an ingenious system for constructing huge underground reinforced concrete storage tanks capable of holding millions of gallons each. Wanstead is a London Underground station in the district of Wanstead in east London on the Central line between Gants Hill and Buckhurst Hill. It is located on Loughton Road (A1012) between the junctions with Whipps Cross Road and Forest Road, half a mile from each. Before the extension of the railways to Liverpool Street, this was one of two stations serving Walthamstow.

The station opened in 1856 as part of the Eastern Counties Railway's extension from Bishopsgate to Stratford, which was then built on viaduct over Loughton Road. The North End was a destination for the above mention waterways, one of which that is now a footpath passed the Ilford White Hart. The origination of this path route from Ilford is said to be at North end; running north easterly through both London Underground and London Overground stations – before the ground fall away towards the future Gants Hill.

It was connected north of the Ilford Marshes at Wanstead and the Boreham Wood area by a brick built tunnel that sits between modern day Whipps Cross and Wanstead Hospitals. Wanstead has been an attraction for most of its life, due to it’s situation just to the north east of London. This area was an attraction for members of Royalty as far back as Roman times, with the Romans setting up a temple to Diana.

The idea is that it was a German spy, sent to reconnoiter the defence of Britain, who became trapped when the tunnels were sealed off. There are still a number of John Doe skeletons down there which adds to the creepiness factor. Right to left: (itself, mirror placed on the roof) Uxbridge, Cockfosters, Uxbridge tunnel. In fact, there was no filming even remotely in-the-vicinity of the area – with the nearest thing being some ‘fleetingly glimpsed’ shots of a double-decker bus (no prizes for guessing where they were filmed!), and some other ‘runners in the background’.

Warren Street

In the United Kingdom, Warren Street is a station on the Northern Line. It is located in central London but has nothing to do with Charles Warren, who was Commissioner of Police at the time that the Metropolitan Police Service was formed in 1829. The name honors instead Robert Warren, who laid out Holborn Viaduct and the start of Regent Street. The station opened in 1908 as part of an extension of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway to Edgware Road.

Wembley Park

What is fascinating about the massive Town Park of Wembley because it was not really envisioned as an urban development; rather, it served as part of the Victorian dream to convert rural areas into "pleasure grounds" is that the City of London threatened, in 1909, to annex the metropolitan borough of Willesden because it did not believe that Wembley should have its own town hall let alone its very own parishes. Wembley Park is an area of northwest London that, prior to its construction was a village in its own right.

In the 19th century, Wembley Park was the country estate of Lord Desborough, who sold it in 1883 to his friend Sidney Stanier. It was soon decided that the site would make an ideal location for a pleasure resort, and further plans were put in motion to build "the London-Paris Exhibition Stadium". Wembley Park is a London Underground station in Wembley Park, a suburb of north-west London. The station is served by the Metropolitan, Jubilee and Circle lines.

It is one of two stations to serve Wembley Stadium directly (the other being Wembley Stadium Station on the North London Line); all other nearby stations serve the wider Wembley area rather than the stadium itself. The Wembley Tower Company was formed, as a joint stock company to raise funds and build the tower. The company was to be put into receivership before any construction began. It is one of six Underground stations on the original section of line, and is still operated by London Underground.

West Finchley

The station was opened by the Great Northern Railway on 20 August 1867, and it is still open today. There is a single island platform with a wooden waiting room. The station has a long history of flooding; in January 2000, the track from Finchley Central station was under six feet of water, and twice in 2003 (which is now the worst ever known flood) the track was under 5 feet of water. The architect J.

W. Ford was an apprentice to the great man himself, Stephenson. He designed this brick and terracotta wonder as a quaint little locomotive shed and passenger station which it was to be in the late 1800s. It lost this role in 1977 when the new station was built over the road on the other side of West Road. Ironically it is now a Londis store with storage sheds above. As you may have guessed I am a big fan of this station, I could wax lyrical about its features and each part of the station from now until Christmas without pause.

The timber flooring, walls and ceilings, wood panelling in the cast iron framed roof beams on the platforms, ironwork on the glass roof panels, art deco tiling in the booking hall and not forgetting the wooden benches. I returned to the bridge a picture of which I have and took this. The two-tone brickwork was already there at that time. It seems that the station was in two parts: a standard, long platform and a railway bridge and some groundworks for the demolition trains below.

West Hampstead

I'm a big fan of walking because it's so healthy for you. Recently I set out to explore the west of Westminster and Hampstead, something which I had never really done before. West Hampstead has quite a lot going for it but before we look at that, let's take a quick look at its history…. West Hampstead (or WH, as it’s known locally) used to be the place to live in London. It was where we’d all go drinking – and still do.

 The George on Kilburn Lane, The Eagle and Child on Highgate Road (the Child) and the Flask of Hampstead on South End Green were the places to be. The best way to get to know a neighbourhood, is to live there. So I moved to West Hampstead in 2006. And moved again in 2015. But I don’t mind moving because it’s my home and this post will tell you why you should consider living here too….

Did you know that West Hampstead was originally known as West End until the name was changed in order to avoid confusion with, well, the West End. West End’s name was changed officially in 1933 even though the new name (West Hampstead) was used unofficially for many years before then. West Hampstead is not your average high street, like most other areas of London it has its own unique personality. Finchley Central station was opened in May 1863 by the London & North Western Railway.

West Harrow

Embarking on a festival is something that should be done whilst you're young and on the move. Never get old, it’s a terrible thing. You’re standing in the middle of West Harrow, thinking you’ve heard the same song for the last hour or so. The crowd is getting bigger, but then again maybe that's just your vision blurring, either way your legs are hurting and not from standing up all day at work. Do you know the saying that "London is the place where you can be a nobody, and if you work hard enough, you can be king of the castle"? Well, there is so much truth to this.

My name is Nathan Evans and it was a comment made by someone close to me which led me into creating my business here in West Harrow. So that you can feel inspired to walk the West Sussex and Surrey Downs, I have recommended some of my favourite bits of the North Downs Way as well as some of the folk festivals currently going on. Every year in April (the middle weekend of the month), over 200,000 walkers flock to the Pennines, home to some of England.

West Ruislip

West Ruislip is a London Underground station in the far north of the Greater London suburban area in the London Borough of Hillingdon. It is on the Uxbridge branch of both the Metropolitan line and Piccadilly line, between Ealing Common and Ickenham stations. The protected London Underground Act 1882 was passed to prevent the owners of land alongside a proposed railway from raising spurious objections to prevent their demolition. The stretch of line north of West Ruislip running through Ruislip Woods was delayed because local landowners objected to its passage.

However, once this had been overcome, a mishap occurred during construction. The contractor, Richard Costain Ltd., first dug as much earth from TQ279941 (junction. The station opened on 4 July 1903 as Ruislip Manor, the last station to be built on the Metropolitan Railway (MR), the precursor of today's Metropolitan line. The choice of the name was very apt for this entrance to north west London and the Lee Valley as it is located on the site of Ruislip Manor House, a Tudor manor house (built around 1560) and hunting lodge built by Eton College founder Henry VI.

Allow me to grab your imagination for a few moments. What if I told you that in this long trek, your train would pass through 35 stations? That is 35 unique places and locations, but not in West Ruislip itself. You would have to get off at one, wait for the next train and then head somewhere else. These are all locations that most people in West Ruislip never visit. I recently learnt how long West Ruislip to Epping is on the London Underground.

It’s 27 stops in total and 37 miles. That’s a pretty big journey. If you wanted to drive it would take you an hour and a half on a good day. If you were to walk it, well, that might take a while. This is the longest journey you can take without a change on the entire London Underground network, and it involves a trek from West Ruislip to Epping. The only way to go beyond this on the Tube is to change lines.

Schools are closed. There's been no train service for three hours and there isn't any bus service either because of what someone has called Snow White, but here I am in West Ruislip. This small station in the borough of Harrow is situated between two bigger stations, Kenton and Harrow and Wealdstone. Its. It was originally built with a staggered platform layout. The bridge at West Finchley is shown here in a picture taken from the Western Avenue, a year after first being put up.

Westminster

One of London ’s most iconic landmarks is Big Ben, the nickname for the Great Bell Clock at the north end of Westminster Palace, overlooking The Houses of Parliament. The clock—and the tower, which contains it—was renamed in honor of Benjamin Hall, a commissioner of works when the tower and clock were completed. On September 3, 2012, as part of an anti-terrorism exercise (how's THAT for a bit of weird timing), as well as maintenance work on one of the clock‘s four clock faces, Big Ben was silenced.

It sounded for only the second time since it started keeping time in 1859. Big Ben is the nickname of the great bell inside the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster, an example of neo-Gothic architecture in London, England. The current tower and bell were completed in 1859, replacing an earlier tower that was destroyed by a fire in 1834. Big Ben is among the most popular tourist attractions in London. Oh, Big Ben.

You're probably already familiar with the name, even if you're not familiar with the tower. And if you are familiar with the tower — whether from your history class, or a recent visit to the U. K., or maybe an Anna Kendrick movie — you think it's called Big Ben because that's its name. If you’ve visited London recently, you might have noticed that the clock tower, better known as Big Ben, looks a bit funny.

White City

The station is located in the district of Shepherds Bush and is next to the White City Place shopping centre. The Shepherds Bush Market is adjacent to the station, with shops, bars, restaurants and a bowling alley that can be accessed without leaving the station. The Shepherds Bush Empire, one of London’s major entertainment venues, is also within walking distance of the station. The venues has played host to many up-and-coming artists including Arctic Monkeys and Jessie J.

What a sweet new station it is, too. Unlike White City, which was underground and a little grimy in the late 80s early 90s when I got on a train there a few times, the new Wood Lane station is bright and airy. It’s all shiny bits of metal and one of the most clean and well maintained stations I’ve been anywhere on the London Underground. When the District Line was extended to Stanmore, it was necessary to built a new station so that passengers could change onto the Metropolitan.

The old Wood Lane station (from 1864) was too small – its location being some distance from the centre of the new buildings in the area that were springing up, such as White City and West Hendon. Wood Lane Underground Station wasn't such a hot spot; it was where billionaire Hans Rausing lived with his wife Eva in a 23-room mansion at the end of a private driveway. So why did they name the station after this? Well, they denied it….

So back in the day, this place used to be called The White City. It was rebuilt in 1908 and then demolished to make way for an underground station – but they kept the name. Wood Lane has a claim to fame : it was the first station in Britain to have escalators. It’s leaning — but what’s really going on here?. This cool fact about Big Ben being able to move and protecting itself from further damage interests me, and I think it will interest you too.

Willesden Junction

In 1896 Willesden Junction had no less than 27 signal boxes, and each switch and signal was controlled by levers in these boxes.  An accident on 5 November 1896 shocked the travelling public and caused some concern to the Board of Trade Inspector.  The Bakerloo line was under construction and Willesden's role as a junction was uncertain, but a temporary arrangment made it easier for the southbound District Railway to call at Maida Vale on its way from Edgware Road to Paddington.

The starting signal for the down District "A" service was badly set and after being despatched came into collision with an empty stock train at a speed of around 50 mph. The first carriages were almost completely telescoped into. One of Willesden's most important tasks was to co-ordinate the activity of the trains travelling along the two routes between Baker Street and Liverpool Street, especially dealing with converging services. To achieve this, it had a staff of fourteen signal boxes at its disposal (with duplicate boxes at each end to increase flexibility).

These included ‘K’ Box (which controlled movements between Marylebone and Watford Jn), ‘L’ Box (the only box in this section listed Grade II), and ‘S’ Box, which was built in 1872 to manage the complex movement patterns as traffic from both lines converged at Willesden Junction. Willesden Junction was the busiest of all the passenger stations in London, with over 38 million passengers using it in 1911, and the busiest freight yard with nearly 57,000 wagons passing through it between Dec.

1st 1905 and Mar 31st 1906, more than Hyde Park Corner and Marylebone combined. Pedestrian tunnels connected to other lines. Freight in 1904 was coal and general merchandise, amounting to around 1,000 tons a day. Willesden Junction was the place of convergence of several railway lines. The original station was opened in 1871 as one of two western terminals of the Middlesex and Brent Valley Railway which then formed part of the Great Western Railway's main line from Paddington to Reading.

Wimbledon

I think it is safe to say that a dog would be better than a person collecting fares, but Laddie? Wow. That is really cool. I once had a dog who liked to collect doggie bags for leftovers, all the way from home to school, but I never thought about letting him answer the door or collect the money. That would have been a bit embarrassing. According to the Wimbledon Tennis Club, Laddie was "responsible for collecting and returning thousands of pounds.

He became a national institution during his stay with the railway, and his friendly welcome when he arrived each morning caused great excitement among the queue of men waiting patiently on the station. ". There are many legends surrounding the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships. One that stands out is the story of a little dog called Laddie, who is credited with saving the tournament from financial ruin in 1943, writes Rob Walker for the New York Times.

Wimbledon Park

Here at Top10. com, we live for facts – and tennis facts certainly don’t disappoint. One of our favourites is where you get the best view of The Championships from, but did you know that if you’re using Wimbledon Park station as your base to watch tennis, you won’t be able to see the action at its best? That’s because Wimbledon Park is around 450 metres away from the All England Lawn Tennis Club 450 metres being a distance equivalent to 0.

3 miles. However for spectators located at Wimbledon Park station, their closest view of the action is still around 500 m away (1/3 mile). Wimbledon Park tube station is the closest tube station to the Wimbledon tennis championships, but not the closest to the All England club, which is actually a small area. When people think of Wimbledon, they usually associate it with tennis because of the Championships, which have taken place since 1877. However, Wimbledon location was only made famous by a single event that being 1927's Men's Singles final, which saw American player Donald Budge defeat local favourite and five times champion William Renshaw in straight sets.

Wimbledon Park is the closest the All England Club has to a tube station, and yet it is still 3/4 of a mile away from the main entrance of the venue. So what does this distant location have to do with your marketing?        You've tuned in for our latest Spelled Out Marketing Podcast! Today's guests are SEO experts at AdDog Media, one of Central London's leading Digital Marketing Agencies. Click 'Play'below and join us for an hour and a half of content marketing discussions sourced from real business, data and case studies.

Wimbledon Park station is one of the busiest in London outside of the center, and has seen significant expansion over the past few years. And yet, despite being literally yards from where they serve Pimm’s on the center court, there is still no direct connection to the All England Lawn Tennis Club or its grounds. As an organization exempt from property taxes because they are a registered charity their lack of investment in the area perhaps makes sense.

Wimbledon Park station is one of the stations in London with a double length platform. The platforms are so long that there’s no need to have a track on the northern half of the platforms. This is because all train services pass through Wimbledon Park station in less than 10 minutes, so they don’t have enough time to stop at the platforms. Laddie the Wimbledon Airedale Terrier collected fares on a busy London Underground station.

Wood Green

For those not au-fait with the gangster pantheon (you do know that the discography of Aswad is a deeply glossed and much-revered tome), Alan "Woody" Wood Green was an east Londoner from the Manor Park Estate, who, after a truculent childhood spent boxing with his brother George on Outspan Street, moved onto drug dealing in one of his brother's pubs (The Hooded Crow), and finally graduated to a career in armed robbery. During his spell in the clink he met Martin Kemp, and would often pop into Berni Inn after lights out to "check out what was happening" with Mick Hucknall of Simply Red.

Why? Wood Green is the answer to a question you didn't know you had. It's the solution to a problem that you didn't know existed, the new part for a machine that doesn't exist yet. Or maybe it is just lovely hip-hop from London. Wood Green gets name-dropped in songs by Razorlight (Los Angeles Waltz), Mark Knopfler (Junkie Doll), Pablo Gad (Black Before Creation), and Sway DaSafo (Up Your Speed). He was so good that they quite often forgot to take the money out.

Woodford

Woodford is a railway station in Woodford in the London Borough of Redbridge on the Lea Valley Lines. The station is located on Wick Road, 0. 4 miles (0. 6 km) from Woodford Junction and is 3. 5 miles (5. 6 km) from Liverpool Street station. The station, and all trains serving it, are operated by Greater Anglia. It has two entrances one at platform level and one above the tracks next to the overbridge.

There are lots of interesting objects to spot on the line but my favourite is a wooden owl in the station. The owl, called Woodford, was installed by the Lineside Artists two years ago and commemorates the Redwings Trust Owl Sanctuary at Hazlehead Park. The sanctuary houses 200 owls and if you’re lucky you might see some of them swooping over your head when you visit. Woodford is a very pleasant, leafy, and affluent commuter station that serves the area between Shenfield and Southend.

Woodford is served by an hourly stopping service between Liverpool Street and Southend Victoria – it is also the terminus for the very pleasant journey from London to Great Bentley and beyond – see “The Clacton Branch” section for more details. Woodford Railway Station, on the Central Line of the London Underground, has been earmarked for closure due to a lack in usage by commuters. The station is currently used by around 200 people a day, which is significantly less than other stations nearby.