'Going Underground'

It began, as these things often do, with an idea…

It's actually something that occurred to me years ago as a fun thing to do, but I never got round to it. But here it is....

Try and get round the entire London Underground system in a single day. Obviously you wouldn’t have time to actually stop and get out at any of the stations – you’d just kind of wave at them as you sat on the train waiting to pull out again. But it's do-able. In fact, it's become the subject of several Guinness World Record attempts. So much so that it does rather seem futile to do it myself. Obviously there would be the kudos of breaking the record, but I suspect you'd need to be a bit of an athlete between platforms and stations for that. Then there's the option of just doing it for the hell of it, just to say I have - which is tempting.

Or, and here's where it might get interesting, instead of doing it in a day and simply passing through all these stations, how about actually visiting them all? What if you actually got out and had a look "up top" at each station? How long would that take? If you include all of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and London Overground stations (and I think you have to really, if you’re going to do it properly) there are, by my calculations, 368 stations on the London Underground map (as at December 2013). Now that's a project sized number if ever I heard one!

A further (and for someone like me, inevitable) development of the idea would be to visit each of these 368 stations on the London Underground system… in alphabetical order. Yeah, I know - sounds a lark, eh?

In fact it won’t be quite that many, as some stations (like Edgware Road) are listed twice, where they serve different underground lines, and since the idea is to have a look at the environs of each station, I’m going to count these separate listings as one. I’m not that daft!

Naturally you can't do them all in one day, so there's no attempt at speed records here. But it has a more "long-term" quality to it that appeals to me. I can take days, or even weeks, off between “jaunts”, visit as many or as few stations in a day as I feel like, and generally just see how things go. It would, of course, be interesting to see how long it will actually take me, but time is definitely not of the essence!

 

I've also got a couple of books that might offer some interesting insights into the history and idiosyncrasies of the London Underground. These are:

 

"What's In A Name?" by Cyril M. Harris - all about the origins of the station names.

"The Little Book Of The London Underground" by David Long - quirky facts and figures about the Tube Network

So, I'm going to soup up my Oyster Card, wrap up warm and head out tomorrow to station number one: Abbey Road (no, not that one – Messrs Lennon, McCartney, et al, crossed an entirely different Abbey Road over in St. John’s Wood).

Bon voyage...