Near some of the city’s most famous museums and many a Kensington and Hyde Park hotel, London’s South Kensington station is a familiar stop for many visitors to the city. It’s an old stop on the London Underground and has been through many changes, as exemplified in these old photos:
(South Kensington c.1890)
(The Piccadilly Line station building, 1910)
(Booking hall, 1928)
(A view of the now-disused Eastbound near-surface platform, 1949)
...and a writer.
I write plays, poems, stories, articles and other things in between. I also run, cook, enthuse about board games and make a lot of lists. (There is a song about me making lists). I'm the Digital Producer and Editor for the Free Word Centre, of which more shenanigans here.
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A photograph of the old Angel station from the 1980s, before it was remodelled in 1992.
(Source: hamishreid)
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I had forgotten about this.
While the BBC’s current documentary series about the London Underground is very good, this 40 minute documentary from 1989 is an electric example of terrific documentary filmmaking, as well as a fascinating snapshot of London. I tracked it down in the BFI’s videoteque suite a couple of years ago for some research, but I’m thrilled to find it’s wangled its way to YouTube. Award winning director Molly Dineen casts her camera silently, brilliantly and entirely without judgement at a group of people getting on with their lives. And by god it’s interesting.
Some things to note: there is no voiceover. There is no ‘I’m on a mission’. No framework or repetition. There’s juxtaposition, colour, atmosphere, and place that tells its own story.
Forget that it’s about the tube: this is a truly brilliant film. The first 60 seconds will make you realise everything that’s wrong with contemporary documentary. It’s a raw historical artefact. It’s funny. It’s compelling. It’s heartbreaking. And it’s about something that should be completely mundane. Watch it.
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The London Underground, the 1890s.
I love this photograph. Wooden floorboards. Umbrellas. Old adverts. It makes me think how strange the everyday is. How strange today will seem, tomorrow.
(Source: the-randy-dandy)
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Being a fanatic of the Underground, I have of course been watching the recent BBC documentary series The Tube. You should too. It’s great.
But this is not, oddly, a post about how awesome the tube is - I’m here to extol the virtues of the well-made documentary, a dying breed in the world of mission-docs, edu-tainment and reality tv. There’s something… nice about ‘The Tube’. Whether it’s meeting the cleaner who used to be a professional cyclist, the man who changes the lightbulbs in signals, or seeing the dozens of passed-out revellers waking up bleary-eyed at the end of the Northern Line, it finds modest beauty in the small stories of ordinary people and everyday things. It doesn’t poke fun at its subjects, it doesn’t tell you what to think, and it doesn’t try and construct a story for you to digest. I’m a huge fan of storytelling, but there’s a simple glory to pointing a camera at something and showing it to you. ‘Hey. Look at that: isn’t it interesting?’
Like the best design, cleaner and simpler documentaries tend to be better documentaries. The Tube is one of them. Take a look.
(Source: itsallrandominmyhead)
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WEST SILVERTOWN – The air tasted of sugar and cement. I drew blood checking the sharpness of a pencil.
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These are cute, clean, simple and true.
Underground Annoyances
Uni project on journey, these are some quick responses I made after asking people what annoys them most on the London Underground.
(Source: thomasjamesdesign)
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OXFORD CIRCUS – I drowned in the crowd, and lost my footing: scraped my wrist. I’d gone to buy shoes.
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BERMONDSEY – She dropped an earring in the moonlight, waving down a cab. I went to pick it up but she got there first, and disappeared. (W)
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HIGHGATE: I spent an hour in the cemetery, looking for George Eliot, but I found Karl Marx instead.
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Daily Mail tube map
Ankle cancer, paedophiles and blizzards.
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Poster(s) from Underground.
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It takes two tonnes of paint to coat a tube train. To save money in the 1960s, London Transport manufactured unpainted aluminium trains to run along most of the tube lines, not forseeing what potential this offered to a new generation of graffiti artists.
I actually quite like the sparseness of these old trains, still seen up until around 2000, but nothing compares to the wood-panelled 1930s stock long since made redundant. Why does every kind of public transport have to be made in bright primary colours? Why can’t design be just as important a part of trains and buses as it is in the motor industry?
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Anagram Tube Map
It’s an old map but it’s still fun.
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I want this on a T-shirt.
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Old Photos of South Kensington Station
