16 posts tagged “london”

A decade ago, when the Jubilee Line was extended from Green Park to Stratford, there were plenty of glossy books published, examining the design and architecture of the twelve stations that made up the extension. Deservedly so, too; one, Foster's Canary Wharf, has become iconic in that time. There's still plenty you can find about the philosophy of the designers, and the way they wanted a commonality but individuality for each of the stations.

By contrast, it's almost impossible to find out about the thinking behind the Victoria Line. This was only all-new Underground line in the last century¹, and it's forty years old this year. Most people, if they think of its design at all, consider it dull at best.

However, I've been using it for my commute for a year now, and as a primary line for half a decade, and I think that does it a disservice. First, consider the station layouts. This is, I'll admit, more commonly thought of as engineering, but even so, someone had to think about it. There are sixteen stations on the line; five have cross-platform interchanges with either Tube or British Rail lines, far more than any other line², while all but one station offer interchanges with either Underground or British Rail lines.

Admittedly, partly this is due to politics: during the "tube boom" from 1898 to 1908, the organisations building lines were in competition with one another, whereas the Victoria was the first line designed by London Underground, a single company responsible for all lines. Even so, it's a boon to people who use the line - ask anyone who changes to the Piccadilly at Finsbury Park, or the Bakerloo at Oxford Street.

Beyond the engineering, though, I think the stations are also designed well. Unlike the aforementioned Jubilee Line, most stations follow the same basic look, with three escalators³ down to a main hallway between the two platforms. Unlike some earlier lines (the Central Line springs to mind), these are almost always straight, and I can't think of a station with steps from the central section to either platform. As I've said before, there are also cross-platform interchanges, which complicate things, but even there, consistency leaps out in other ways.

All of the Victoria Line platforms are tiled in a light, almost blue-tinted, grey, with simple wooden benches. Each also has a mural; there's a lovely set on Flickr by Chutney Bannister collecting them all. Recently, the southbound Oxford Street tiling was refurbished as part of the station's PPP makeover, and I was impressed by the lovely, modern design that replaced the snakes-and-ladders mural you can still see on the northbound platform. It turns out that this was the original design, removed in the 1980s after the Oxford Circus fire, but now re-instated, and it doesn't look at all dated - in fact, it's positively modern.

For now, the original 1967 tube stock is still used on the line. However, next year should see the introduction of the new 2009 stock, which, to be honest, I'm somewhat dreading. As with the stations, these are nicely consistent and minimal, with a quirky use of circular glass panels dividing vestibules from seating areas, and standard seating. The new stock will introduce more fold-up seats, and more room to stand, at the cost of fixed seats. I suppose I should wait and see how it turns out, but my gut feeling is that I'll dislike them.

That's not to say the line is without problems. As part of the engineering work to get the line ready for the new trains, its previously solid reliability seems to have taken a knock. More seriously, the above-ground buildings are generally appalling, with far too many of the stations lumbered with unpleasant subway complexes or buildings that look like glorified portakabins. This is particularly shameful at Highbury and Islington, where a damaged but glorious old station was demolished in favour of the current single-storey shed.

Despite this, I think the effort going into the line has been unfairly neglected. The design work for the Victoria line seems to be largely lost, on the Internet at least. Mischa Black was in charge of the overall design effort, leading the Design Research Unit, but I can easily imagine how the utilitarian style leant itself to concealing the identities of the others who contributed. I think it's a shame; the line, while perhaps understated, deserves more attention than it gets. I can't imagine my London without it.

¹ Parts of the Jubilee line were inherited from the Metropolitan line in 1977, and of course the extension in 1999, while needing new tracks, was not a new line end-to-end. Amazingly, the Central London tube network we know today - with the exception of the Victoria and Jubilee lines - was completed by 1907.

² I believe the Central, District and Piccadilly each have two, excluding Victoria Line interchanges, but none are within zone 1 (I'm thinking of Stratford, Mile End, and Hammersmith).

³ Annoyingly, cost-cutting sometimes (as at my home station, Blackhorse Road) led to the central escalator being replaced by a fixed staircase, which means that any failure results in people having to walk or, in extreme cases, station closures.

As every Londoner knows, all tube lines were not created equal. There's a definite ranking of the lines you'd like to have to use, and those you'd like to avoid. So here's my own, totally unscientific (yet, I hope, reasonable) list of lines in order of usefulness.

Victoria

This isn't just because it's my daily commute (although I must say, in the nine months since I've been using it regularly, it's been pretty much rock solid), but it's because it's reliable and frequent. It probably helps that it's a single line with no branches (the only exception being the slight thinning of trains north of Seven Sisters as they peel off to the depot). Other things that help are the fact it's a relatively new line - only forty years old - and that the stations are spaced relatively far apart, making end-to-end journeys remarkably quick. Let's hope the current engineering works and the new stock (in service from next year, and hopefully a bit more roomy inside) don't cause any problems.

Bakerloo

The Bakerloo feels remarkably like the Victoria's older sister, partly due to its similar rolling stock. (It's much older, as it happens - the line celebrated its centenary a couple of years ago). However, it's also a single line (avoiding all those pesky problems with points) and it's mainly sheltered underground, so it seems to me - and I'm an infrequent user - that it's near the top of the list.

Central

Another old line, the Central manages to be remarkably useful despite having a fork at one end and a rather complicated loop at the other. However, its stock is pretty cramped - the line has some of the smallest tubes n the network - and although I commuted on it happily for six months, it doesn't quite reach the heights of the previous two entrants.

Piccadilly

Another line with branches, the Piccadilly does especially well given its length, with long extensions to Heathrow and Uxbridge (although the latter is a bit unreliable, from what I've noticed). I'm one of those people who'll save a tenner by taking it rather than the Heathrow Express, for example, and when I lived in the western half of Islington it was a pretty safe way to get back from the West End. However, it is pretty slow through the centre, with stops that are arguably too close together (the classic being Covent Garden's proximity to Leicester Square, exacerbated by the former's reliance on slow lifts), which keep it down at the current ranking, as does its extensive overground sections - always a problem if there's sufficient heat, rain or snow.

Waterloo & City

On the grounds of reliability alone, I reckon the Waterloo and City would score highly. Unfortunately, it loses out rather severely on the utility front, since it connects just two stations, closes in the early evening and isn't open at all on Sundays. It's also got the most uneven flow of any line I can think of, being full northbound in the mornings, with the reverse in the evenings, as commuters from the south west head back to their mainline trains.

Jubilee

The Jubilee is the newest line, with older sections being younger than the Victoria. However, a botched attempt to move to sophisticated signalling during the construction of the extended section seems to have doomed it to unreliability, and it seems to have quite low train frequency. This all knocks it along way down the list, which is a shame, because I like the noise of the gate thyristors of the trains, and it really should be a showcase for the system.

East London Line

This is a rather special case, since it's closed for engineering works until 2010, when it vanishes - it'll become part of London Overground (which, in the interests of sanity, I've excluded from this list, along with the DLR). Certainly, the current replacement bus services would be bottom of the list, but before its closure, I found the line reliable and friendly. Its use of Metropolitan stock meant the trains were spacious, and while train frequency was a little low (there was only one every six minutes) I still think it comes in as a fairly useful line.

Metropolitan

A long subsurface line, and the oldest (incorporating the original 1863 route from Baker Street to Farringdon), the Metropolitan seems to do surprisingly well, given the amount of its track exposed to the elements and the complexity of its north-western end. However, it does have issues, both out in the suburbs and when it gets interleaved with the other lines, which mean that, despite the spacious interiors, the line ends up pretty low in the rankings.

District

Another long subsurface line, the District has its fair share of branches, but mainly it loses points not for junction delays or complexity, but because it's so slow. The stations it shares with the southern edge of the Circle line all feel far too close together, so it takes an age to get anywhere. However, as with the Metropolitan, large carriages help it out, so it's saved from bottom place.

 

Northern

Ah, the Misery Line. No wonder it's down here. But what's this? A look at TfL's performance data seem to show more trains in service than any other line, and not too many delays. So why does the Northern end up all the way down here? Well, its complex layout is mostly to blame, causing both low train frequency on either branch (especially if you need to pass one of the link points at Camden Town or Kennington), while also letting delays affect either branch, if they're bad enough. Coupled with that are the short rolling stock - only six carriages, compared with a more typical eight for tube stock - and somewhat cramped interiors. (One can only be thankful that London Underground abandoned their usual colour-coding inside the train: all-black handrails would have just been even more depressing.) It drops into the last place for the deep tubes.

Hammersmith & City, Circle

I'm going to list these as a single line, because they share rolling stock, and they also share some of the same problems. However, in case you were wondering, the Circle really is deliberately listed last. The problem with it is simply that, except for two points, the line doesn't really exist: it's shared with the Metropolitan and District lines, and, as the name makes clear, has no terminus. This also means that there's nowhere to go when the service gets disrupted, and the usual outcome is that these two get sacrificed for the others. TfL plan to unroll the line somewhat in the next few years, running from Hammersmith around the loop once and then back to Edgware Road, which should help, but even so, the low train frequency (you can wait ten minutes for a Circle line train) and relatively small carriages (for a subsurface line, anyway) put the line at the bottom of the list.

So, that's the list. I should note that, even though it's last, the Circle still manages a reliability of over 85% and the average customer delay is about 10 minutes. I'd certainly usually choose it over buses, taxis or (horrors) driving.

I'd love to hear from more regular users of any of these lines if they have any comments.

Reasons I've been told not to take photographs since work moved to the edge of the City of London three weeks ago:

• They were of the back of a police station
• There were children (five to ten metres away, in a nursery just south of Christ Church, which is what I was actually interested in)
• I was standing on the art
• I was on private property

However, in each of these cases, I wasn't asked to delete any photographs (which is, I know, something you can work around, but not if you only have one card). Be grateful for small mercies, I suppose.

When I moved to London eight and a half years ago, it was to start work at a dotcom/consultancy called Oven Digital, based in the old Truman Brewery at Brick Lane. The first time I visited was in late January, and as I walked from the Norwich train out of Liverpool Street there was a clear point where you passed from the City, which clung to Bishopsgate, into a completely different area.

Unlike the glass and steel, it wasn't incredibly well lit, except for Christ Church, spotlit at the end of Brushfield Street. Instead, the low  brick buildings on either side concealed a ragtag collection of shops and restaurants, all of which felt like they had a history. The Brewery itself was quiet, off the beaten track, and surprisingly insecure - it was pretty easy to wander around huge parts of the buildings, even when you weren't really meant to. There were vague rumblings about Spitalfields being under threat, but I didn't really bear it much mind. Development happens, right?

Unfortunately, Oven ran into the typical financial difficulties of a dotcom circa 2001, and the London office closed. As I'm not a great follower of fashion, my trips back to the market and Brick Lane have been infrequent and fleeting, so when the employers finally moved into their new office at the beginning of the month, I got to rediscover the area anew, after over seven years.

What have those years wrought? Well, everything is so much more... middle class now. Sure, it's a bohemian middle class, a trendy one, but nonetheless, there's a distinctly different crowd there these days. Of course, where the City's bled east, demolishing half of the old market buildings, that's even more obvious; the business suits give it away.  It's also busy; incredibly busy, most days, whereas it used to be that Saturdays were deserted and Sundays the only time it was hard to find space.

More than the people, though, the spaces have changed. As I've said, half the market's gone, although the shell of it around the edges has been retained. The businesses there haven't, though; the family-run pizzerias replaced by SF-based chain makeup stores and expensive Soho bakeries. The worst, though, is that even inside the old market, the character has been almost entirely sterilised away. Bubba's BBQ, which had both supporters and detractors, is gone; Square Pie survived, though. So much for those "free-thinking independents", although I must admit a few (who can, somehow, afford the rent) are holding on. Even the stalwart caff I went to back then, Rosa's, is gone. At least Rossi hangs on, providing a reasonably-priced fry-up.

I think the best single example of this is the Spitz, which moved into the market in 1996, when nobody even heard of it, and which was forced out in 2007 as the final redevelopment of the "saved" market was completed. It's due to be replaced by The Luxe, run by the chef who heads up Smiths of Smithfield. It's hardly going to be the same, is it?

In fact, that's a pretty good epitaph for the entire area. Sure, there's still a Sunday market, and there are retro clothes to be had. The market traders do their best in the scrubbed interior of the retained buildings. To me, though, it'll always be a pale remnant of the place I found when I moved to the city, and the fact it's far from alone - just ask someone who liked the South Bank before the chains moved in - doesn't make it any easier to bear.

At lunch yesterday, I surprised myself by ranting for a minute or two about kettles. Most people don't really think to much about them, but my employers have got through a surprising number of them over the last couple of years, and I've noticed the aspects of the designs that are useable, and those that aren't. Here, then, are a few notes you might find useful if you need to buy an electric kettle.

Upright kettles are far more usable. Sure, retro styling can be cool, but by putting the lid under the handle, they're a pain to fill. They also tend to fall foul of other items below; in particular, the ones we had featured no way at all of figuring out how much water was in them, unless you count "lifting it up and checking it's heavy". Not recommended.

The kettle should be transparent, or have a clear panel. Otherwise you can't tell how much water there is inside. Beware of the "gauge with a plastic ball" design - the ball furs up with limescale (especially in a hard water area like London), and within a few months it'll be useless.

Go cordless with a circular base. Most kettles are cord-free these days - and it is handy for filling - but some still have an asymmetric base, which means you have to fiddle around to put it back. A circular base with a central socket makes it easy to put things back.

Concealed, flat elements don't scale up. Or rather, they do, but at least they're far easier to clean than an exposed element.

In a hard water area like London, you'll need a filter. Most kettles have a gauze filter over the spout, but some - like the Brita kettle candace and I have at home, which is, I believe, discontinued - have a proper water filter. It can be annoying waiting for it to filter, but the water is less full of gunk - especially useful for green teas. (If you're regularly making that, though, you may want to look for a kettle that allows you to set the temperature of the water.)

Obviously, since we've got through a lot of kettles, I have a good idea what the failure modes are. The two common ones are that the power switches break, and that the kettle gets terminally unclean; usually that's because the filter gums up, but it can just be that the elements are too badly scaled for people to be happy. Both are probably only a real issue because of the sheer usage levels of the kettles, but if you're really fond of tea I thought I'd mention them.

Dan Hill posted an incredibly wide-ranging roundup of developments in transport informatics a couple of days ago on his site, and it's justifiably been widely linked to by the sort of people who care about such things. Of course, I'm one of them. I also tried to add a few things he missed in a rather dense, link-laden comment. Unfortunately, it was so link-laden that Typepad thinks it has to be comment spam, and it's now spent two nights in an approval queue, so I fear it's lost. Fortunately, I have my own blog, so here are some additional, somewhat London-centric notes.

Holisitic As Chris Heathcote noted when I mentioned the Guardian story on Helsinki's bus mapping, the statement that "every bus and tram is visible on a Google map" isn't true as of yet - the beta only covers a couple of trams and a few buses, if I'm remembering correctly. However, it's a promising start; London's iBus will generate similar raw data, and we'll see if the will's there to use it. Maybe someone should ask the mayoral candidates?

Here's a piece on the implications of Google Transit in the UK.

Rail The UK's National Rail maintains real-time arrivals and departures information, available on the web. It's probably unrealistic to map more than the trains going to a single terminus at the moment, because scraping doesn't scale, but that would be an interesting (hackday/barcamp?) project. A few Tube lines have similar information available, but that'll be harder to scrape into a single map.

Maritime There's a real-time high-resolution map of shipping in the San Francisco Bay available.

Walking Although not strictly informatics, on the subject of walking in London, there's a couple more initiatives; Legible London is a trial of maps for tube stations, bus maps and street pedestals, currently limited to the Bond Street area, but aiming at a unified signage standard for the entire city, and next week there's a Walk to Work day, encouraging people to walk, if not the entire distance, the first or last 30 minutes of their commute.

Edit: as often happens when I do something like this, it's now emerged. Thanks, Dan. I'll leave this up for posterity, though.

It's not a good time to be a fan of modernist architecture in London. The last two years have seen a number of 1960s and 1970s buildings being demolished, notably Drapers Gardens (which I really should write a eulogy for) and Mondial House. Meanwhile, two pieces of brutalist architecture, Milton Court and Pimlico School, are facing demolition (in fact, Milton Court's already wrapped up for the process to start. 122 Leadenhall Street and 20 Fenchurch Street continue the casualty list.

I could rant about what's replacing these (invariably, tedious glass and steel boxes), but instead I'd like to concentrate on another development at risk, Robin Hood Gardens. Currently, English Heritage are considering whether or not to list the estate, which Tower Hamlets would rather redevelop. The minister responsible for acting on their recommendation, Margaret Hodge, has been reported as saying

"Decisions on listing modern architecture should be left to people who can be booted out if they get it wrong. And when some concrete monstrosity - sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece - fails to make the cut, despite having expert opinion behind it, let's find a third way: a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever."

This is a horrific statement. If Hodge is prejudging applications based on opinions like that, she's in no position to be making them. Imagine the fuss if she'd said "Gothic monstrosity" and "Victorian masterpiece" - the reaction would be overwhelming. (Just look at how much attention has been paid to St Pancras as it reopens housing the Eurostar terminal.) However, as the BBC's Magazine notes today,

"In the 1960s, 'Victorian' and 'monstrosity' were two words that seemed to be inextricably linked," says architect Robert Adam.

This brings me to the second point: Hodge argues that the decision should be made be "people who can be booted out if they get it wrong". But who does she think is making that judgement? Voters? Well, perhaps that's one way to do it, but we're really talking about preserving buildings for the future here. We won't really know if Hodge and English Heritage were right or wrong for decades, perhaps even centuries. Just because she won't be able to answer to them doesn't mean she should be catering to the prejudices of today's constituency.

Finally, her "third way", a "perfect digital image", seems like a joke. I linked to photos of Mondial House above, and while I know they're far from comprehensive, and they do give a sense of the building, they can't really convey what it was like to stand between it and the Thames, to see it from London Bridge at sunset or Guy's at night. If demolition has to happen, then I'd welcome better archiving of buildings than we have (try finding an image of Euston's old ticket hall, or even the arch), but it's hardly a replacement for the building itself.

Building Design is currently running a petition to save the Gardens, but I fear what's really needed is the same cultural change that makes casually bashing modernist buildings as unacceptable as denigrating Victorian buildings is now.

There's a discussion going on over at Flickr's Guess Where London? group about London books, which prompted me to look through my collection and pick out some of my favourites.

So, here's the six (well, eight really, but I'll pair some of them) I'd recommend most. Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory is difficult to slog through, but worth dipping into, and unlike London Orbital, is actually set largely in the centre (albeit with an East End bias). His collaboration with Marc Atkins, Liquid City, has more pictures to break up the flow. For members of london-alt and Humming Giants.

Chris Robert's Cross River Traffic is an eccentrically-organised look at London's river crossings; the obvious group is London Bridges. Similarly, London Tube members should seek out Ken Garland's book, Mr Beck's Underground Map, covering the history of the diagram from 1933 to 1964 and beyond (although those deeply interested in the modern map are recommended to seek out the sequel, Underground Maps After Beck.)

For a snapshot in time, Stephen Inwood's City of Cities documents one of London's periods of most rapid change, 1880-1914; as the subtitle says, it is "The Birth Of Modern London". Recommended for aspiring Edwardians- and I'll have to think about the Flickr group. For the architecture specific choice, and showing my own predelicitions, Kenneth Powell's 30 St Mary Axe documents the building of that now-iconic tower. London - The Square Mile, perhaps?

Finally, the cover-all book is Ed Glinert's The London Compendium, which covers the centre of the city in bite-sized chunks. For Guess Where London, perhaps?

Four years ago (so long?) I wrote about Finisterre, the film by Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans, sountracked by Saint Etienne, about London. Today I finally got to see a film they acknowledge as an influence, and whose source book is quoted during the film: The London Nobody Knows.

Filmed in 1967, and featuring, as Phil Gyford put it, "James Mason wandering around in flat cap and jacket, pointing at things with a rolled umbrella" as a "guide/narrator" (unlke Finisterre, which relies on a disembodied voiceover from Michael Jayston), the film looks around parts of Victorian - and older - London that were in the process of being lost as part of the great upheavals of the 1960s. (Oddly, London seems more vulnerable to rebuilding than disasters; most of the buildings that are now being lost, like Drapers Gardens and Mondial House, date not from the immediate post-war years, but from the 1960s, while the 1950s buildings that more closely followed pre-war styles are left alone.)

However, the nostalgia for a vanishing London is tempered not just by Mason's commentary, which seems to veer from celebrating things like the music hall and steam trains to dismissing them in a heartbeat, but also by the people featured. There's a close look at men staying at the Salvation Army's hostels, followed by those even more down on their luck, drinking meths and fighting on the streets.

Forty years on, though, and as well as things you don't miss, there are things you do. Camden's Roundhouse is surrounded by a goods yard, presumably on the point of closing down. The south bank of the Thames is featured a couple of times; there's a humourous diversion into an Egg Breaking Plant, and Mason looks down Cardinal Cap Alley, beside the house Christopher Wren never actually saw. Of course, that house is still there, but the power station lurking behind - which isn't mentioned - is now an art gallery (where, oddly, we were actually watching the film).

Then there are the parts of London that are still with us, but changed somewhat. A segment on Spitalfields shows kids running and play-fighting in the streets, while Mason describes it as "once for the wealthy, but now down at heel". Chapel Market's shops are featured; there's still a Sainsbury's there, but it's moved down the road, and the market's more about cheap socks than fruit and veg, and the pie shop presumably no longer sells live eels. (I'd like to watch the film again just to make sure the old gentleman really does put chilli sauce on his pie and mash.) The very start of the film shows the towers along London Wall being built, and the area around there, as I've lamented before, is not what it was.

As we emerged from the auditorium, I was wondering if any other cities inspire such a tradition of film-making - for as well as these two, there's also Patrick Keiller's London, and those are merely the ones that are regulars on the London art films circuit. Perhaps this is my London-centricity at work, but I don't think they do. Tokyo has inspired Wim Wenders, but perhaps this is a sign of its (for Westerners) otherworldliness; do the Japanese care as much? New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all strike me as finding more life as fictional settings than as real cities for documentaries.

Sadly the film isn't (yet?) released on DVD. As I say, though, it is a regular at venues such as the ICA, who showed it with a perfect partner for padding to release length, Every Day Except Christmas. Obviously, though, I'd recommend it as worth watching, if you can catch it, and I hope that there's a way to liberate it from its current availability limbo.

I try not to talk about politics too much here, but this article takes the biscuit. Here are some quotes from BBC News: Leafy Kensington shows its anger

Michelle Weininger is also desperate to deny that the campaign is about rich people making life easier for themselves.

"It is the politics of envy. It is totally wrong. This borough is very, very mixed, there are a lot of people on low incomes in north Kensington. They will all be hit by this."

How do people who are on low incomes afford cars? Here's a hint: they don't. The congestion charge means fewer cars on the road, and money for public transport, which adds up to more, faster buses. Which, you know, poor people actually use.

Mrs Weininger says: "If that dictator is shoving us onto public transport why is he not using it himself?"

Maybe if Mrs Wieninger ever used the Tube she'd notice that Ken Livingstone uses it to commute.

Gordon Taylor, chairman of the West London Residents' Association, is in possession of the facts on congestion charging and they have made him a very cross man.

"[The charge] is a blunder, which acts as the Berlin Wall and cuts communities in two."