Playing With Myself

Look, it's me playing with toys on video again!

Do you ever think you may have too much time on your hands?

Thank you again to anyone who donated to my Ko-fi and made this video possible.  I'm sure you regret it now.

The Let Down

I was, briefly, in That London last week.  The ostensible reason was so I could cross off seeing the Abba holograms.  I was one of the few homosexuals in Britain who still hadn't seen it and they were threatening to make me a straight if I didn't hurry up.  The actual, secret, main reason I was going to London was so I could visit Crossrail the Elizabeth Line.

I have been following the Crossrail Project for literally decades.  I remember seeing reports of it on Newsroom SouthEast, back when it was being proposed by British Rail (I may not be young).  I've watched it slowly crawl through Government and TfL until a spade went in the ground.  I visited an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects all about the design of the station.  I watched, enviously, as bloggers and Twitter users and people I actually know in real life travelled down to London and experienced the new shiny world of Crossrail. 

I planned my route.  I was staying in a hotel near Stratford International station, at the back of Westfield.  A moment, by the way, to say that the area around there - the former Olympic village - is a completely desolate space.  It reminds me of when I visited Canary Wharf back in the early 90s.  It's a lot of tall buildings with very few people; impeccably manicured lawns and nobody to use them.  Anyway, I decided I would do the patented Merseytart exploration of the line: 

    STRATFORD →→→ WHITECHAPEL

    walk

    LIVERPOOL STREET →→→ FARRINGDON

    walk

    TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD →→→ BOND STREET

    walk

    PADDINGTON →→→ CANARY WHARF

That way I'd cover the core tunnels, plus I'd visit the huge Canary Wharf station.  If I had time I'd jump back on the train and visit Woolwich, because I'd been there when it was just a big hole in the ground so it'd be good to compare and contrast, but the main part was visiting the central underground stations.  

I walked to Stratford station.  It's a much sadder station than I remembered.  In my head it's the gleaming steel and ambition of the Jubilee Line Extension, the crowning glory at the end of the route.  That massive ticket hall appeared on all the literature and in all the pieces promoting the new Tube line.  The addition of new routes, plus the millions more people who use the station, has left it tired and confused.  There are passageways and footbridges everywhere, but it all feels illogical, as you'd expect from a station that's been cobbled together over a century.  The DLR goes from here, unless you want to go to that destination, in which case it's in a completely separate part of the station.  The Central Line and the Jubilee Line are miles apart, and the platform numbering seems to have been pulled off a board randomly by Rachel Riley.  At some point they'll have to start all over again with it and try and make it make sense.

Still, at least there's those lovely purple line trains to travel on.  I marched through the ticket gate and directly to the platform, but the first train was going to Liverpool Street only; it wasn't even stopping at Whitechapel en route.  A bit annoying, but thanks to diamondgeezer I was aware that the linking up of the sides of Crossrail was a long and drawn out process, so presumably this was part of that.  

The train came and went and I looked up to the departure board and... that one was going to Liverpool Street only, too.  Was I perhaps on the wrong platform?  Was there an underground one for trains through the centre?  Then I heard the announcement. "mumble mumble industrial action mutter Elizabeth Line whisper stammer trains restart at six thirty Friday morning."

Fucksocks.

Now, this blog is very much pro-union and pro-industrial action.  If circumstances are such that the withdrawal of labour is your only resort then it is a desperate state of affairs and it is sometimes the only means of action a worker has against their boss.  Trade unions got many of the rights and privileges we currently enjoy as employees, often through strikes; do you think women would get six months maternity leave purely through the generosity of their bosses?  Of course not.  And strike action should be disruptive.  You need to demonstrate why your work is so valuable to both your employers and the public at large.

On the other hand, couldn't you have picked one of the other 364 days in the year folks?

I was incredibly disappointed.  Getting down to London is a rarity for me these days - in fact, as you may have noticed, doing anything is a rarity for me these days.  I've been trapped under a huge project at home and haven't been able to have the time off to gallivant on the trains.  This was a rare opportunity for me to see something new and exciting, a rare example of this country investing in transport and the future rather than banging on about the good old days.

I sadly boarded the train.  They're nice enough - not a very satisfying noise, I'll be honest - but they were clean and open.  Passengers were taking them for granted.  I was the only idiot looking at them.

When you have a plan you were really excited about, having it taken away leaves you a little hollow.  You can't really think of an alternative.  I was in London, one of the greatest cities on earth, and I couldn't think of what to do with myself.  I eventually decided to do a little bit of transport exploring.

The Battersea extension to the Tube opened in 2021 but again, that was after I'd last been in the capital.  I headed down the Northern Line to take a look.

My main impression?  Nice enough.  I mean, it does the job.  Perhaps it was my general feeling of let-down but I was a bit "is that it?"  The Jubilee Line Extension spoilt us all.  It made us think new underground lines should be palaces.  There should be huge open spaces and gleaming technology and art.  In reality, this is all you need for an underground station.  Two platforms, some escalators, a ticket hall.  Job done.

Outside was rain and a building site.  Again, the station building is nothing special; a glass box with a different coloured roof to provide a moment of interest.  You can see what it's for and it attracts the eye.  On a dark night it'll be a glowing and inviting beacon.  

It's just not... special.  I want the Tube - all new stations - to be special.  They're important focuses for people.  They're hubs for communities.  I guess I care about them more than other people.  

Of course I had a look inside the Power Station itself, and of course I was underwhelmed.  It's been beautifully restored.  They've clearly spent an absolute bomb on it.  But it is, at the end of the day, a shopping mall, and not even one for the likes of me, one for people with too much money.  Calvin Klein and L'Occitaine and Mulberry.  When Reiss and Marks and Spencer are the low-end retailers I back away slowly, that working class chip on my shoulder calling out to me.  

Outside meanwhile there are canyons of anonymous apartments at prices that make me gag (one bed studios still available starting at £450,000).  They're not even very nice; they're so closely packed that an awful lot of people are going to be staring at one another across the narrow pedestrianised alleyways.  And again, there was nobody about.  Admittedly it was raining but it didn't feel like a place.  It felt like a dormitory.

Still, Abba were good.  So there's that.

Do Your Palms Ever Itch?

Despite being forty years old and a massive nerd, I had never in my life been to a fan convention.  Not for James Bond, nor Doctor Who, not one of those weird "Autograph Festivals" featuring Caroline Munro, Madeline Smith and the boy from George & Mildred.  I've not even been to a Star Trek convention, and I own a hoodie which is specifically designed to look like the Next Generation command uniform.  (That emotion you're experiencing right now is jealousy). 

So when my friend Jennie suggested we go to a Twin Peaks fan festival in London, I was a little trepidatious.  Twin Peaks is, of course, one of the finest television shows to ever grace the airwaves; three series and a film of comprehensive, insane headfucking, mixed with generous lashings of humour and sex.  I imagined it would be somewhat... unusual.  However, Jennie offered up the clinching factor: Sherilyn Fenn would be there.  Audrey Horne.

I loved Audrey.  I loved her fun, her cruelty, her intelligence.  She was astonishingly beautiful.  And while she was shortchanged by Twin Peaks: The Return, the opportunity to be in the same room as Ms Horne was too good to pass up.

It meant travelling to London, which meant using the Underground.  As I have posted many times on here before, the London Underground is my one true love.  I get a thrill just from using the escalators.  I find it all tremendously exciting.  Of course Jennie didn't find it quite so adrenaline inducing so on the Sunday morning, before the festival started, I got up early for a little bit of station collecting.

We were staying at the Travelodge on the Wood Green High Road, a resolutely unlovely strip of London commerce.  Sometime in the Seventies a great brick slab of a building, the "Shopping City", crashed into the centre of Wood Green and blocked out the light.  It dominated the street and the local district, sucking in all the chain stores and leaving the main road to be populated with pound shops and bargain stores.  It was a grim walk, the pavements still being scrubbed of the Saturday night's messes, and there was very little to rescue it.  Until the Underground came along.

Just a glimpse of roundel can raise my spirits, but Turnpike Lane did more than that.  It was a singular ray of joy after the grime of the High Road.

Turnpike Lane was opened in 1932 as part of the Piccadilly Line extension to Cockfosters.  It was designed by architectural genius Charles Holden and the care and attention to detail is obvious throughout.  Look at this subway entrance, for example:

It leads you into a small area beneath the roadway with this circulation space at its centre.  It's charming and well lit, with the glowing column to draw your eye and move you on to the station.

That takes you into the station proper.  Holden's signature design was the box - a high vaulted cube that housed the ticket office.  It made the station feel bright and airy, while also providing a landmark in the street to attract attention and passengers.  I'd been to another Holden Box station, Acton Town, and this was similar, but different enough to make it your station.  Churn out a series of identikit railway buildings and it becomes anonymous; the trick is put in enough slight modifications to make your station your station.

Light streamed in through the high windows, illuminating what could have been a dark space with a dramatic glow straight out of a Spielberg film.  It was joyous.  

I wafted my Oyster card at the ticket barriers.  I love the smooth electric swipe, the swift check and the clatter of the gates, but there's a little piece of me that regrets the loss of the Tube's passimeters, mainly because passimeter is such a fantastic word.  On the escalator I found another delight: uplighters!

I'm not sure if they're original or modern facsimiles but either way, they're beautiful.   It's weird how uplighters are such a simple, effective way of lighting escalator banks, but no-one seems to do it any more, favouring harsher strip lights instead.  Merseyrail would look a lot sexier with lighting like this.  It'd also stop idiots from trying to slide all the way down, unless they fancied getting their groin bisected by a pole.

One quick whizz on the Piccadilly Line back the way I came, and I was at Wood Green.  If Turnpike Lane is a glittering tiara, Wood Green is costume jewellery.  It's fine, and it looks ok.  These ornate vents on the platform, for example, are a delight:

And a combination roundel/Way Out arrow is something that will always make me cheery:

But the rest of it is just Holden standard.  Which is a very fine standard of course, one of the best, but still not exemplary.  When the bar is set so high, it becomes harder to clear it.

It does form a distinctive and attractive presence on the corner.  I headed back to the hotel, ready for a shower and the day ahead.  As I climbed the stairs I felt the rumble of an Underground train beneath my feet.  It'll never fail to thrill me.

P.S. Yes, pedants, these photos were take on two separate occasions; I forgot to take a photo of Turnpike Lane because I was too busy swooning.  Hence my completely different outfit.

P.P.S.  The Twin Peaks Festival was good fun, though marred by the fact that I spent much of the day wracked with anxiety which made it hard for me to enjoy stuff quite so much.  I DID meet Sherilyn Fenn, though:

...and I got her autograph:

Unfortunately during the Q&A she was kind of bitchy and sullen, which was a disappointment.  The rest of the panel were a delight.  Never meet your heroes, folks.

The Elizabeth Line Is A Terrible Name

Right now, under London, a railway is coming together.  Huge, state of the art stations are connected by vast tunnels formed by colossal boring machines.  Fast, powerful electric trains will one day connect modern stations with glass platform doors and air conditioning and full disabled access.  It's a railway that crosses London, a route suitable for the 21st century.

So why the flipping heck are we renaming Crossrail the Elizabeth Line?  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

I mean, let's just start with the fact that it's not a line.  A line is a subdivision of a larger network.  The Bakerloo Line is a route of the Underground.  The Wirral Line is a route of Merseyrail.  The Elizabeth Line is a route of... what?  It's not the Underground, it's not the Overground, it's a route all on its own.  That's why they called it Crossrail and gave it its own roundel and everything.  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

And Elizabeth is a clunky word anyway, too many syllables*.  It's even got a Z in it, a letter only suitable for use in alien planets in Doctor Who.  For hundreds of years we've invented nicknames for Elizabeths, Liz and Betty and Beth and Liza, precisely because it's such a misshapen word.  There's a reason why "QE2" is a far more popular name for ships and hospitals and bridges named after the Queen.  QE2 also includes the fact that, yes, there are actually two Queen Elizabeths, and is specifying that it is named after the second one.  It's already being shortened to the Liz Line by internet "wags", which shows how badly it fits in the mouth: by contrast, no-one shortens the Metropolitan Line, because Metropolitan is a good, nice word.  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

To return to my earlier point, though: Crossrail (as was) represented a rare moment of large scale investment in this country.  An actual piece of forward thinking, built at great expense, to make life better for the residents of our capital city.  It's exactly the future we should be looking towards.  And now it's saddled with a name that drips with feudal obedience, with a thousand years of monarchy and privilege.  People from other countries are going to come to London and giggle behind their hands at us.  Having a Queen is bad enough, but you know, we're just too nice to ask her to leave; an actual revolution would be a bit common and not-British.  But to still be naming stuff after this woman, to continue to pay homage to a little old lady just because one of her great-great-great(x30)-grandparents killed another man on a battlefield and said that God did it?  That's just embarrassing.  It's taking everything that said "Britain is modern", chucking it in the skip, and replacing it with "weren't the old days great?".  You may as well have done the stations out with mock Tudor beams, or run steam trains on the tracks.  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

But the thing that makes me angriest about it, and the real reason I've been festering over it all day, is it represents how rubbish the United Kingdom has become over the last few years, and how awful its future looks.  Important pieces of public infrastructure are subject to the whims of idiots with ridiculous ideas.  Concepts that have taken workers and designers and engineers thousands of hours to craft and construct have been overridden by politicians desperate to leave a tribute to their own ego.  Ideas that worked are being tinkered with or destroyed for random ideologies - not because they're failing, but because people in power  just don't like them.  It's the NHS, it's Network Rail, it's local councils, it's parks and libraries and buses.  It's all the little things you liked about this country being ground into the dirt because some of some shithead in London.  It's Crap Britain, and every day it gets worse, and every day it makes me more and more depressed.  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

*with apologies to my mum, whose middle name is Elizabeth.

Cool

On a hot day in June, there aren't many places you can escape the sun in London.  Air conditioning still hasn't really caught on in this country.  The parks are packed.  The Tube is a stuffy nightmare.  I had to go somewhere.  I escaped underground.

Crossrail finally completed its tunnel works, and to celebrate, they invited locals in to have a look round.  They also mentioned it on their Twitter feed, and as usual, the free tickets were gone in seconds.  But I was very, very lucky.  I happened to be on Twitter right at that moment, and I managed to claim one ticket.  One hastily booked train journey - and one lunch at the Barbican with Ian - later, I was walking through a metal detector to get into what will one day be Woolwich Crossrail station.

Woolwich was scrubbed off the list of new stations at the "value for money" stage.  However, Berkeley Homes intervened.  They'd won the right to redevelop the Royal Arsenal, a huge stretch of former Ministry of Defence land between the town centre and the river.  Right now, it takes about 20 minutes to get to Canary Wharf from Woolwich, changing from the DLR to the Jubilee Line at Canning Town.  Crossrail will transform that into a single train journey taking just 8 minutes.  That sort of transport gain was worth Berkeley paying to build the station box out of their own pocket.

It'll turn what is, at present, a slightly soulless, slightly desolate collection of flats into a hub.  And since Woolwich town centre is just over the road, the money will hopefully spread further into the town.

I stood over looking the hole in the ground and waited for the rest of my tour party to come through security.  There were twenty of us, a pleasingly random collection of Londoners.  They were a microcosm of the insane variety of people the city is home to.  Two aging hippies with long grey hair.  A neat middle-class woman in a leather jacket.  An enthusiastic Scot and her Chinese boyfriend, accompanied by their tall English friend.  A Sikh couple.  Two teenagers with neon coloured hair and tattoos.  And my favourite type of Londoner, Hot Jewish Guy With A Bubble Butt And A T-Shirt You Could See His Nipples Through.

Plus, of course, me: the fat railway nerd.

There was a brief talk about the engineering achievement from Mick, the project leader.  He proudly told us that the handover date for installing the railway had been set at June 10th, 2015, in their original tender documents, and that date would be met.  Then we descended into the station down a flight of metal steps, accompanied by our guides, Patrick and Thibault (see?  Diversity).

We were now in the station box, stood close to the island platform.  The metal posts hanging from the ceiling are for the platform edge doors.  Unlike on the Jubilee Line, the whole rail area will be screened off from the passenger part, creating sealed areas.  I peeked into the distance but I could only just see the distant end of the colossal station.

A few more steps and we were at track level for the walking part of our tour.  We were going to actually walk from one side of the Thames to the other through the Crossrail tunnel.

The air was cool, and it got cooler as we entered the tunnel mouth.  We fell almost reverentially silent.

It's hard to describe the excitement I was feeling as I advanced down the tunnel.  It was the thrill of being underground, then, under the water.  

There was the thrill of knowing that hardly anyone had made this trip before, or ever would again.  There was the thrill of Crossrail actually being a real thing that has happened and been built, after so many years of false starts and broken promises.

The tunnel was made by huge boring machines, and the concrete segments were then laid into the wall behind it.  They are locked together; each one was pushed in place, and a keystone holds them tight.  There's no need for any further reinforcement, except for round the cross passages, where steel beams are needed to hold them together as the hole in the wall breaks the tessellation.

The cross passages are there for evacuation of the trains in an emergency.  When the tunnel is fitted out, there will be a walkway at the level of the bottomof the cross passage, to enable you to get out of the trains and walk to safety.  It was strange to stand on the floor of the tunnel and be looking up to the floor height of the train; it's easy to forget just how huge they'll be.

The deepest point of the tunnel is, weirdly, not the halfway point; that was a few metres further down.  I'm sure there's a perfectly logical engineering reason for this.

Apologies for the crappiness of some of these pictures by the way.  We were told that bags would not be allowed in the tunnel, so I couldn't bring my camera, and had to use my phone to take all the shots.  However, some of the women had handbags and bum bags, and they were let in, not that I'm bitter and annoyed or anything.

After what seemed like only a few moments, we were passing a sign saying End of the Thames.  Without any other reference points, it was impossible to gauge how far we'd walked, or how fast.  It was a long, undulating curve of grey concrete.  I placed my hand on one of the tunnel segments and was shocked at how cold it was; it almost felt damp.

Then the literal light at the end of the tunnel.  It was astonishingly bright, and impossible for us to see beyond.  It was a bit like coming out of the womb.  The curved walls gave way to a larger chamber, built for emergency access and ventilation.  

All that was left was the last few metres walk out of the tunnel and into the sunshine.  But why tell you about it, when I can actually show you what it was like through the medium of poorly shot iPhone video?

Why yes, I am available to film all your important life events.  E-mail me for prices.

In the bare sunlight, the bases of emergency stairs took on a surreal, almost artistic quality.

Another building company will be in soon to finish what has been started but until then, they were a Rachel Whiteread installation.

Slowly the floor rose to take us up to ground level.  On the north bank of the river, Crossrail has taken over the old North London Line.  That was cut back to Stratford in 2006; the section from there to Canning Town became the DLR, and now Crossrail is using its route to get to Custom House.

Suddenly there was noise again, and buses, and the huge hulks of sugar refineries looming over our heads.  London was reasserting itself.

A tiny stand had been set up, and two friendly volunteers handed out leaflets about the tunnel and Crossrail, and we all got a badge.  I don't know where I'd ever wear the badge, but I'll add it to my Station Master and I Get Around By Merseyrail Underground ones.  I left the railway behind, heading up to London City Airport DLR station with a big stupid grin on my face.  It was a wonderful hour of fun, and something I will remember for a long time.  I can't wait for Crossrail to open in 2018, just so I can take a train through here and tell the person sitting next to me, "I walked through this tunnel once, you know."

Then that person will change seats.