Ghost Stations of the London Underground

About a year ago, I did two things in quick succession – I went to London (after not visiting England since I left at the age of 4, some 23 years ago), and then pretty quickly afterwards I read Neverwhere, a Neil Gaiman novel set in a fictionalised London Underground, using some of the shut down stations for its inspiration (among other things).

Ever since then, I’ve been really fascinated by the whole concept of all these shut down stations, and am slowly learning just how many have been shut down, for what reasons, and what has become of them. Earlier today I discovered some articles on the extremely interesting londonist.com that looked into this very topic, and found this amazing picture:

Click to see the full size. Created by Dylan Maryk, this tube station map is labelled only with tube stations which no longer exist – time capsules of the era in which they were used. For more information on it, visit http://londonist.com/2013/06/alternative-tube-maps-ghost-stations-on-the-london-underground.php which is also where I found this image.

Pretty impressive, huh?

Many of these old tube stations are now bricked off and difficult to access, looking perhaps a little like this inside:

Looks vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? Taken from http://londonist.com/2011/08/inside-a-ghost-tube-station-brompton-road.php?showpage=13#gallery-1

I also found this page – http://londonist.com/2011/02/what-shall-we-do-with-the-old-tube-station.php – to be quite interesting, as it looks at a few different stations and what they have become since they closed down. I’d love to go to some of these places and visit them, see if it is easy to recognise the station architecture still.

My interest in what lies beneath London will only grow though, and one book that has caught my interest is Peter Ackroyd’s London Under. This book looks at not just the tube stations but all the history lying underneath the great city, from Roman amphitheatres to Victorian sewers, Bronze Age trackways, the monastery of Whitefriars and so much more. I haven’t yet got my hands on this one, but when I do I suspect I’ll gobble it up in a single sitting.

It’s really no wonder that so many stories can and do come from the London Underground, with so much history there. When I think of how many other cities around the world must have their own stories to tell…it makes me yearn to put on both my historian and writer caps, and start seeing these things with my own eyes!

What stories do you know of the London Underground? What about any cities where you live – do they have their own hidden pasts?

Neverwhere: the lure of Neil Gaiman’s mesmerising ‘London Below’

For quite a while I’ve been saying I want to read more novels by Neil Gaiman. I read Stardust at some point last year and was swept away by it, but then I became distracted, as you do, by various other also amazing authors and books. Then, a couple of months ago maybe, I noticed a lot of Gaiman’s books were cheap where I usually buy my books, and I immediately ordered the rest of his novels, as well as his short story collections.

Faced then with the decision of where to begin, I was drawn to Neverwhere, his quirky fantasy set in “London Below”, a city beneath a city. Perhaps it was my recent visit to London (which is a big thing when your closest city normally is Sydney), perhaps it was simply the idea of a whole secret dwelling place underground that most people could never even dream of, but something grabbed me about the idea.

The whole concept is that London Below is where the people who have “fallen between the cracks” in society go. These people, when they do walk London Above, are not even seen by most Londoners (who are too busy in their lives to notice such insignificance). But London Below has more than this, teeming with huge dangerous monsters, angels, knights, jesters, talking rats, murderers, assassins and personalities galore. And when Richard Mayhew, a young businessman plodding away through his seemingly average life, stops to help out someone in need, he finds himself inexorably pulled into this world below his own, where he is drawn into an increasingly intricate story involving murder, revenge, mystery and deceit.

There is so much to love about the way Gaiman has written this book. The descriptions of the various parts of London Below is brilliant, and has been informed by research – indeed Gaiman wandered down into the sewers to gain some understanding of how they looked, smelt, and were connected to one another (he was so impressed by them that he changed the perceptions one of his characters had of them). Many of the places are based on old unused Underground stations from the tube system, and many more are based on stations that are used, as he twists the meaning of the place names – in many cases interpreting them literally. There are places like the Floating Market, a market which moves around from place to place, only opening at night and only for the people of London Below, and the story returns to the bizarre stalls of this place more than once throughout the novel.

Then there are the brilliant characters. You do spend the majority of the story feeling sorry for Richard, but without him becoming too whiny (which is always a risk with such protagonists). Door is clever and cunning, and often is the most impressive at the most pivotal moments of the story, indicating an intelligence and forethought that is quite charming. Then there are characters like Hunter, and the Marquis de Carabas, both of whom are well developed yet are surrounded with a certain amount of mystery until the end of the story. And of course there are the bad guys, in particular the gruesome Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, both of whom, with their nightmarish tendencies, put your average bad guys to shame.

A book that is full of imagination and yet feels somewhat familiar, I could recommend this to anybody and everybody – Gaiman appeals to my adult imagination in the same way Roald Dahl appealed to my childhood imagination (and that is a pretty big call coming from me). Gaiman is a genius and a master storyteller, and I simply cannot wait to go and dive into one of his other novels.

Have you read Neverwhere, or any other novel by Neil Gaiman? What are your thoughts?

The England Trip Part 4: London

I spent about half of my time in England in London, and found myself visiting lots of places. Out of the hundreds of photos I took, the following are a few that show some of the places that meant a lot to me as we travelled. Many of them aren’t your typical tourist destinations, but little places we found when roaming around.

We visited these cafes and restaurants in Covent Garden on more than one occasion (particularly before seeing The Lion King Musical and Swan Lake, both of which were in the area). This group of classical musicians were particularly entertaining – as people walked by they would swarm around and play just to that person, with varying results. The Opera singers who sung here were amazing as well.

The Tower Of London was one of my must-see destinations, simply because of the rich history of the building. It was fascinating and definitely worth the time and money. While I enjoyed the exhibition inside, the building itself interested me the most.

I’m pretty sure this was Hampstead Heath, though my memory might be playing tricks on me. Anyway, I thought this view was just stunning. The whole area was amazing and we spent a long time walking around, until we were soaked with rain. At which point we found ourselves utterly lost, of course.

This is now my favourite pub in the world. It’s sort of hidden in Hammersmith, right on the Thames, and had an amazing atmosphere inside, plus some great drinks, and the world’s smallest bar. We ended up visiting a second time on our last night in London. One day I will definitely return here.

This tiny, sectioned off part of The Dove is officially the world’s smallest bar. What you see in this photo is it – this is the whole room. It was almost always full, and so we just drank in the main parts of the pub, but I still loved the fact that this pub owns this record.

We stumbled across this place by accident, and instantly fell in love with it. What was meant to be a quick drink turned into a several hour stay, drinking most of the whiskey they had. They regularly have poetry readings in here, and the place is filled with poetry books and poems on the walls and that kind of thing. A lovely place that I would also like to revisit.

We didn’t manage to see anything here, but it was nice to finally see The Globe with my own eyes, if nothing else. As an English teacher, I absolutely had to see this.

This sign is hard to read, but it lists fruit cocktails that this particular pub sold, and at the bottom says “possibly 1 of your 5 a day”. I love the sense of humour that is so prevalent throughout pubs in England.

I could have shared so many more photos of so many other places that I adored, but I’ll end it here. I also think I’ll end this England Trip series of posts here – a lot of the remaining photos are more personal ones that might not be as interesting to others as they are to me, and I feel like I’ve managed to cover the main places I visited in England (that I have decent photos of, at least).

Have you visited any of these places in London? If so, what are your experiences?