There is a wonderful emotion that hits you when something goes right. When you plan, and study, and plot, and it finally comes to fruition. The pure happiness that courses through your veins.
That was what swept over me as I left the train at Kivenlahti and was presented with this view.
Magic.
For a few moments I stood and took it all in. When it comes down to it, it's not complicated or difficult. One island platform. Two tracks. Some seats with lights above. But it looked incredible.
It shows the wonder you can make with the simplest of tools, too. They're glass poles with LED lights in them. It's nothing special or expensive or innovative. Hang them from the ceiling in an underground station though, and suddenly you've created an atmosphere. You've created art.
There is actually some proper art on the platform, a wooden sculpture called “Kulkijat” (Wanderers) by Kalle Mustonen. It's interesting. But it can't compete with that glowing, white mass of a ceiling. That's the real beauty of Kivenlahti.
The escalators were out of action, a nice way of Helsinki bringing me back down to earth with a bump, so I boarded the lift and took it up to the ticket hall. The doors opened and I heard shouts. There was an impassioned argument going on in Finnish somewhere. As I walked towards the exit, I saw the source: a man and a woman outside the doors screaming at one another. It was barely 9am on a Friday morning but this couple had clearly been partaking of some kind of substance, possibly illegal, possibly since the night before. Their argument was impassioned but edged with something, a feeling that it could go physical at any moment. They danced back and forth, sizing each other up, while a yellow jacketed security man stood inside the ticket hall and watched for them to enter.
I went forward and out the exit and straight past them. They were too busy in their own drama to pay me any mind. I crossed the plaza outside to a safe distance for the selfie shot. It was my first station picture of the trip and I didn't want it to be the one that put me in hospital and wrecked the rest.
I'm afraid you'll have to zoom in for the station sign back there, on the red strip above the door. If you do zoom in though you'll get to enjoy a glimpse of the pair's performance piece preserved forever.
Behind the square were blocks of flats, lined up against the hill and peppered with trees and public gardens. I began the climb. There was a long road winding back and forth in a gentle slope, but some steps had been provided to cut out the loops, and I ambitiously strode up them. About halfway my knees shouted "you've forgotten you're forty eight, haven't you?" and I had to pause and lean against the handrail for a bit to recover. I wondered if I should've done a bit more hill walking before I came out here. A bit of distance training rather than chucking myself at a suburb and expecting to be able to walk anywhere I wanted.
Kivenlahti seemed to still be asleep that morning, its streets empty of cars or people, the homes shuttered and curtained. Even the building sites were silent as I passed. It got even quieter as I took myself off the main road, onto a wide pedestrian footpath by a sports complex.
Now there were trees everywhere. A straight footpath took me through them, still carrying the moisture from a brief rainstorm we'd had. It was a place you'd expect to find joggers, dog walkers, but it was silent. Only my tramping footsteps making a sound.
Needless to say I was thrilled. Helsinki was easing me in gently with a bit of peace. It was letting me find my head and adjust to the new city.
The footpath turned me out onto a road, where I crossed behind two dads and their kids, excited, lively. I walked down the side of the church and discovered my second station, Espoonlahti, almost too quickly. I could've done with a little longer.
Espoonlahti is built within a shopping centre, Lippulaiva. The metro's arrival has meant a huge boom in construction throughout the city of Espoo, Helsinki's close neighbour, and the Lippulaiva is part of that: a massive complex of shops and restaurants with an inbuilt transport interchange. It does sadly mean that the station's street presence is secondary to the shopping mall.
I went inside and found the entrance to the metro.
The theme for this station seems to be "oven ready chicken", as there's a lot of shiny metal surfaces like it's been wrapped in aluminium foil. They've even put in a crinkle on the surface for the full effect.
There's an art piece at this station too, though whether you'll get to experience it or not is entirely the luck of the draw. Hans Rosenström’s
Varjot veden pinnalla is a piece of light and sound artwork. The ceiling is rippled with watery light and ghostly voices hum and sing - you can see the full effect
here.
That particular morning I was out of luck and didn't see it. A couple of days later, I came back, and I caught it. It's a weird, haunting piece, especially when you're the only person in the station. I sat on the platform not entirely enjoying it.
I'm all for art that confronts and disturbs and makes you think, but I also think that's probably best kept for galleries, where people are going out of their way to seek it out. Imagine being a poor old lady out for a day's shopping and suddenly she's hearing heavenly choirs. She'll think she's being taken up early.
Soukka goes back to using light as a feature and is far better for it; at no point did I think I was about to be accosted by demonic sirens. The rippling calls you to the exit, dragging you away from the platform.
A quick sidebar about the station names, by the way. Finland has two official languages, with Finnish (Suomi) spoken by the majority of the country but with a sizeable Swedish-speaking minority. As such, all the stations on the Metro have two names - one in Finnish, one in Swedish. For the purposes of this blog we'll be going with the Finnish names, because that seems polite, and also they're often more interesting. One fact I've always remembered about Finnish is that it's not part of the Indo-European family of languages, like the rest of the continent, but instead is Uralic and has more in common with the tongues of Siberia. It means it sounds utterly alien to my boring old British ears; there's very little familiarity slipped in there that lets you work out what's being said, unlike Swedish, which sometimes sounds like someone speaking English with a bingy-bongy accent.
(There are actually three stations on the Metro that also list their names in English on the signs. Which ones? Continue reading this interminable nonsense to find out!)
I ducked down a ramp to a small bus layby beneath a pedestrian bridge, then followed the road to a massive intersection. It was like something out of an American film, a crossroads where two dual carriageways met, taking up acres of real estate and controlled by traffic lights. Unlike an American intersection, though, there were barely any cars, and I crossed over it with ease to a country road.
I'd found myself following an older man who walked even faster than me, so fast in fact it could almost be called power walking. As I tracked behind, watching his buttocks work independently of one another, his hips swinging absurdly, I thought: is that what I look like from behind? Like Max Wall with a stick trapped between his arse cheeks? Here I was thinking I looked like a sophisticated urban hiker and there were probably small children stopping and pointing. On the plus side, walking this fast means they don't have time to catch up and pelt me with stones.
Incidentally, this is the advert on the bus stop up there. I had to take a picture because I genuinely couldn't work out what I was looking at. I know it's a sex toy of some kind, even though it looks like a clown shoe, but what's it resting on? It looks simultaneously obscene and very innocuous - a bit like a penis, but also those "pubes" are purple, and I really have no idea. I'm clearly too innocent for this kind of thing. Plus side it has a 100% Orgasm Guarantee, so if you fancy buying it and letting me know what it actually does, it'd be beneficial to both of us.
I could very easily convince myself I was in the countryside, which seemed strange since I was in an underground station about ten minutes before. Thick woods surrounded me and the homes looked like charming rural retreats. When I reached a lake, complete with a man setting up his fishing rods beside it, I was very much "yep, seems about right."
In amongst this rural beauty, Kaitaa station seemed even more alien, a grey box rising up out of the earth. It was a piece of the future crash landed into the backwoods.
I wandered across the road - again, the traffic was so light I didn't need to wait for the little green man - and took my sign pic.
I needed a wee and, somewhat surprisingly, Kaitaa was able to provide a public toilet. Helsinki's Metro stations are unstaffed and ungated which makes them feel a little eerie. You can wander in off the street and down to the platforms and onto a train without seeing another human soul; in fact even the trains were going to be automated at one point, until the cost of retrofitting the older stations put a stop to it. You can sit on a platform and hear nothing but the gentle thud of the escalators in their endless loop.
Given that context, you'd expect public toilets to be a rarity, because they run the risk of graffiti and vandalism. Instead, all the stations seemed to offer at least one, more usually two. To mitigate against damage though, the toilets have been borrowed from the Death Star.
Entering the stainless steel cubicle and hearing the door hiss shut behind you was a bit like entering some hi-tech death chamber; I was reminded of the silvery lift in Diamonds Are Forever that spews knockout gas. I attended to my necessaries and backed out, refusing the hand washing water which spurts out of the side of the wall and into the bowl. I'll stick to the hand sanitiser in my backpack thanks.
Incidentally it wasn't until my third day of using these facilities that I realised this wasn't a maintenance slot for some kind of hi-tech screwdriver, but was in fact a sharps bin for the disposal of drug needles. As I said: hopelessly naive.
I'm not a fan of Kaitaa below the surface, to be honest. "Juurtuminen" by Antti Tantu is meant to represent the underground roots of the trees above, writhing above your heads, but the purple she's picked is so alien it looks more like someone has spilled a
Grimace shake on the walls. Rather than dwelling on the majesty of nature above I found myself thinking it'd be a nightmare to clean off.
Finnoo, the next station on the line, holds a number of superlatives on the network. It's the deepest station, buried thirty five metres under mostly clay.
They've gone with a watery theme for the platform art here, with the blue on the left obviously representing the sea, and then, on the right, marine life marked out in laser cut metal.
Designed by Leena Nio, I can see what she's gone for, but it feels like the two sides are from completely different places. They don't seem to interact.
Perhaps if they had the same rippled blue backdrop as the watery side? I don't know.
Being the deepest station on the Metro means Finnoo needs a hell of a big escalator to get you to the surface: the longest escalator in Finland in fact. It's so long that when I walked around the corner and saw it I let out a "fuck me!" without thinking.
I'd planned on riding it in a stately fashion all the way to the top but to be frank I got bored halfway and walked the rest of the trip. It could do with being a little bit faster, what with it being so long and all.
Finnoo has been the centre of some controversy since it was built. The idea was that this would form the hub for a new town, housing around 17,000 people. However, the developers weren't keen to build here until the station was completed, and, with the delays in construction due to Covid and the usual engineering hassles, it meant that Finnoo opened in the middle of nowhere, with a building designed to form the base of another and so looking unfinished.
The top floor has a mezzanine leading to a footbridge that hasn't been built yet and so it doesn't go anywhere. Finnoo ended up being a sparkling new station on a speedy metro in a major European city that somehow got fewer daily passengers than Bebington on the Wirral Line.
Now that the Metro is here, however, the property magnates have broken out the cranes and started work on a dense network of apartments, shops and facilities. The roads were being churned up, footpaths were redirected, and the general feel was of a buzzing new place being created.
I was walking to the seaside, but it wasn't the fun, buckets and spades seaside; it was the grimy, industrial kind, the spot where they hid away things the city folks didn't want to be reminded about. A large boatyard was crammed with small speedboats and tugs; no luxury yachts or fine masted sailing ships. A hefty power station hummed beside me, its chimneys ready to belch out toxins, a kingfisher mural painted on one wall in a slightly pathetic attempt to make it less grimy.
A nature reserve was laid out next to the power station, with large ponds for nesting birds, but it felt like a spot that had been provided because nobody wanted to build on it, rather than because it was genuinely worth preserving. The grasses were scrubby and the trees were thinned with wild-growing bushes.
Soon enough I was back in the residential streets, with bare apartment towers laid out in grids. It's always remarkable to walk round European cities and realise how dense they are. In the UK this would be a network of cul-de-sacs and single family homes. Europe builds thick and builds high.
Another patch of trees behind some more blocks. I thought it was unremarkable until I spotted a sign, helpfully in Finnish and English, informing me that this was in fact an ancient cobbled beach uplifted during a tectonic movement. It is forbidden to pick up or move stones from the site, the sign warned me, which of course made me immediately want to take a stone. I didn't though because I am a good boy and also it's probably cursed.
I walked behind the apartment buildings noting the little details - the odd mural, the barber shop tucked away in one corner, the two brushes cemented into the pavement to clean your shoes with - then onto a large crossroads surrounded by apartments and offices. I'm going to urge you to
look at the Google Streetview perspective of this junction, by the way, and go through the dates: it's a stunning ten year transformation.
Matinkylä featured one of my favourite designs on the whole Länsimetro extension. Firstly, there's the tiled escalator pattern.
Let's take a closer look shall we?
Lovely. I might add that to my mood board next time I do up the bathroom.
The other thing Matinkylä has is an incredible ceiling on the platform level. The stations tend to use the space between the tracks as a void, into which the lighting is inserted; the ceiling itself is nothing special - in fact, you can barely see it.
At Matinkylä they've built this amazing curved mesh out of white aluminium. It twists and delights and makes the station feel exciting, like it's curving its way around you. It feels like it's moving, somehow.
Six stations done; one fifth of the entire Metro under my belt. We're bolting through this, aren't we? Let's pause now before you get bored. Or rather, even more bored.
