Day 90
Uxbridge - Vauxhall - Victoria
So, having only just failed to complete the letter U last time, and with only two "Vs" to visit, today promises to be the day I cross off two letters of the alphabet in one fell swoop.
I start the day with a jaunt out west, to the final "U" - Uxbridge. It's the terminus of both the Piccadilly Line and Metropolitan Line (although both have other branches terminating elsewhere) and is another station designed by that old friend of ours - Charles Holden.
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| Uxbridge |
Not that you'd immediately spot this fact, or indeed (without the give-away blue signage) that the station is actually a station at all.
The entrance is tucked into the middle of a crescent-shaped façade of shop fronts, and if it weren't for the ornate scrolls on the top of the building and the blue Underground sign over the doorway, you be forgiven for assuming it was the entrance to the public lavatories or something.
Inside the station is another minor oddity - time in the form of some stained glass windows designed by the late Hungarian artist, Ervin Bossányi (1891-1975), who - among other places - also made stained glass for York Minster, Canterbury Cathedral, the Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
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| Stained Glass in the station |
Immediately outside the station is a sculpture by Anita Lafford called 'Anticipation'. It was unveiled by the Queen when she visited in 2002 for her Golden Jubilee, and presumably the anticipation in question is that of waiting to see Her Majesty - rather than being dragged around M&S with your mum yet again...
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| "Anticipation" |
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| Plaque on the sculpture |
Beyond the sculpture the station opens out onto a pedestrianised High Street that runs north to south and has two large shopping centres on it, as well as a variety of other outlets.
It's a strange mix of the old and new, with ancient-looking buildings nestling between the gleaming glass and steel of modern office blocks and shopping centres.
The place has certainly seen some history - most notably the (failed) attempt to reach an agreement between the Royalists and Parliamentarians in the English Civil War in 1645. Uxbridge lay between the King's stronghold in Oxford and the Roundheads' base in London, and the venue for the meeting was The Crown (now The Crown and Treaty) pub just north of the town centre.
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| Crown & Treaty Pub |
The pub is just by the Grand Union Canal and I spend a pleasant few minutes walking along the towpath. Again the quaintly painted narrow-boats are reminiscent of the past, while behind them the modern world intrudes in the shape of business parks and air-conditioned offices.
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| Grand Union Canal |
Strolling back southwards through the town the mixture of old and new is quite striking.
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| High Street - and St. Margaret's Church |
The church just off the High Street is St. Margaret's (the original parish church) which has been here since at least 1245..... It's now tucked away behind one of the High Street's many coffee shops.
Other old buildings are now given over to restaurant chains or accountancy firms and have become little more than picturesque façades.
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| Ye Olde Zizzi |
Having therefore exhausted the charms of Uxbridge's High Street, I cross the final "U" off my list and head once more into central London to the first of the "Vs".
***
Both Vauxhall and the second (and last) "V" station, Victoria, are on the Victoria Line and are only two stops apart - separated by Pimlico.
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| Vauxhall |
Vauxhall is not - as you may have supposed - named after a Luton-based car manufacturer, but instead gets its name from a certain Falkes (or Fawkes) de Breauté - a high ranking soldier who served King John in the 13th Century.
His home in this part of London was called Fawkes Hall, which later became corrupted to Vauxhall.
In fact, the car company was originally founded in this part of town, so gets its name from the area - rather than the other way round - and its Griffin logo comes from the heraldic device of the aforementioned de Breauté.
The word 'Vauxhall' has also, for some strange reason, been adopted by the Russian language as the standard word for a train station - "Вокза́л" (pronounced "Vokzal"). There are various suggestions as to why this might be, the simplest being that some visiting Russians saw the word above the station entrance and assumed it was the generic term, rather than the specific name of this station.
On the other hand, the word is also used in Russian to mean a 'pleasure garden' and Vauxhall Pleasure Garden is just around the corner from here (as we shall shortly see) so it may have come from that first.
Either way, the connection with Russia is in many ways ironic, since the major landmark in the area is the huge building known as Vauxhall Cross - or the headquarters of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
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| SIS HQ |
I first showed you this building from across the river, when I visited Pimlico, but it's equally distinctive from what is (presumably) its front entrance on Albert Embankment. Which is odd, when you come to think about it, because surely such a secret organisation would be trying very hard not to be distinctive. However, given the number of movies the building has now appeared in, that doesn't seem to bother them all that much.
Around the corner are the aforementioned Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens - one of two main parks in this area.
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| Entrance to the gardens |
The sign at the entrance informs me that the gardens were first laid out in 1661 and were a popular place to dine, listen to music and see the visual arts, as well as to be seen yourself.
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| Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens today |
To be honest, these days it doesn't look all that much to write home about - it's a large open space, with a few trees lining the paths, and some hanging baskets on the lamp-posts. None of the ornately decorated buildings you can see in the historic pictures on the sign above. It seems modern life has eroded the historical landscape as much here as it has in Uxbridge.
There's also, to one side of the park, a city farm.
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| City Farm |
This too is rather uninspiring, certainly compared with the one I saw not too long ago at Stepney Green. There seem to be only a few donkeys mooching about in a couple of the fields outside the main building (which looks like a former church) and the rest of the fields are empty.
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| Columns at the park entrance |
I leave the park, mildly disappointed, and head to the other park which is to the south of this one - pausing only to take a photo of the two 18m high columns which mark the entrance to the pleasure gardens and which, frankly, are the most impressive thing about it.
The second park in Vauxhall is called (wait for it...) Vauxhall Park.
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| Vauxhall Park |
This too is just your basic bit of greenery - though with rather more trees than the Pleasure Gardens - and with an unusual little collection of model houses in one corner.
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| Model Houses |
These were the work of one Edgar Wilson of Norwood in 1949, who seemed to make a habit of modelling little houses. Another set of his works can be found in (of all places) Melbourne, Australia.
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| Information on the models |
It's all a bit twee and a bit odd. Apparently Mr Wilson made many sets of such houses, but only the ones here and in Melbourne survive. Were the others vandalised? Lost in transit? Or did developers move in and build a model office block on top of them? Who knows...
I head back to Vauxhall station to head north to Victoria, but before I leave I take a wider-view photo of the station to include the bus depot that sits above the underground station, and the two enormous solar panels that jut upwards from this.
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| Vauxhall Bus Depot |
They provide a large part of the electricity for the bus depot, which is admirable - but I have to say that to me the whole thing resembles a pair of chopsticks resting in a bowl of Chinese food...
***
And finally, just a couple of stops along the Victoria Line, I reach the station of the same name.
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| Victoria |
In fact the station, the street it's on and the whole surrounding area are all of course named after Queen Victoria.
Unlike many of the places I've visited, there are actually quite a few points of interest within the station itself, rather than in the wider area (though there are those too).
Firstly the station is not just an underground station but also a Main Line Railway Station, opened in 1860 to provide a terminus north of the river Thames for services from the south of the country. Previously these had stopped south of the river.
Then there's the fact that Victoria Station is the London Terminus of the world famous Orient Express train. It leaves here (apparently) from Platform 2 - though there's no sign of it while I'm here.
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| Plaque to The Unknown Warrior |
Finally, just around the corner from another platform - number 8 - is a plaque commemorating a very special (and final) journey taken by one traveller following the end of the First World War.
The 'Unknown Warrior' is buried in Westminster Abbey "amongst the kings" to represent the thousands of British soldiers killed in the first war.
It was the idea of an army chaplain - the Rev. David Railton - who had served at the front and seen a grave marked in pencil with the phrase 'an unknown British soldier'. The plan met with the support of the Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the soldier - selected at random - was brought to England via Dover.
The train carrying the coffin arrived at Victoria on the 10th November 1920 and remained there overnight before the coffin was taken to Westminster Abbey for burial the following day.
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| Victoria lines... |
In the station concourse the floor is covered with a network of coloured lines - reminiscent of the tube map - which are actually easily followed directions to the various areas of the station. This is a great idea - far easier than trying to locate the elusive overhead signs you normally get, which invariably lead you in one direction, before another sign points you down a completely contradictory path. I don't know why Victoria is the only station to have this system, but I'd love to see it adopted elsewhere.
The underground part of Victoria Station is - in fact - two connected stations built over 100 years apart. The District and Circle Line station first opened in 1868, while the Victoria Line section opened in 1969.
Outside the station the area is largely taken up with gleaming office blocks - though even among these temples of modernity there are one or two historical curiosities.
For instance, in front of the Victoria Palace Theatre (currently being refurbished behind huge screens) is this diminutive version of one of London's most famous landmarks.
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| Little Ben |
"Little Ben" was erected in 1892, taken down for an extended period of restoration in the 60s, and finally replaced here in 1981.
The restoration was undertaken with sponsorship from a French Oil Company - ELF Aquitaine - "as a gesture of Franco-British friendship", and the hands of the clock are set permanently for Daylight Saving (British Summer) Time, which means that during the winter months the time is correct for France, while in summer it is correct for the UK.
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| History of Little Ben |
"My hands you may retard or may advance
My heart beats true for England as for France"
The clock was once again removed and restored between 2012 and 2016, while work was also being undertaken at Victoria Station.
Around the corner from both the station and Little Ben is another example of a more historic building struggling to avoid being crowded out by all the gleaming modern offices.
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| Westminster Cathedral |
Westminster Cathedral is the main Catholic Cathedral in England and Wales (whereas the Abbey is a Church of England edifice). It was built at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries, opening in 1903, and was designed by the architect John Francis Bentley in the Byzantine style of the east, centred around Constantinople.
The building is striking with its striped brickwork and ornate mosaics - both inside and out.
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| Front Entrance |
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| Looking inside |
In front of the cathedral is a large paved square with tables and chairs dotted around, at which - it seems - the local office-workers take their lunchtime breaks.
I don't join them - my day is done and I'm happy to leave this concrete and glass jungle and head back home.
There's a more modern entrance to the tube station nearby which seems, for some unfathomable reason, to have been covered in Braille.
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| The new entrance, with its hidden message... |
I have no idea what the outside of the building is telling me, nor indeed how anyone is supposed to read it, since many of the panels are higher than most people can reach.
Of course, this means I can give my imagination free reign and assume that it says something very rude about all the tourists passing obliviously by. Of course, it could equally be an injunction to 'pick up litter' or 'mind the gap' - who knows...
In any case, leaving yet another clashing mixture of ancient history and modern commerce behind me, I head home at the end of a very successful day. I've crossed off two letters of the alphabet, and am - or will be next time - very firmly in the home straight! Woo-hoo!
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