Down into Down Street
Started: 2024-09-07 22:18:44
Submitted: 2024-09-08 22:03:21
Visibility: World-readable
Making the most of my last day in London: the Vagina Museum, the Young V&A, and touring the disused Down Street station on the Piccadilly Line
The first thing I did on the morning of my last day in London was to take the tube (Northern line, Bank branch) south from Camden Town to Kings Cross, walked past the still-under-construction Google Landscraper (two years after it topped out, and a year after I last saw it, the shell looked complete but it was still surrounded by construction fences) and across the Regent's Canal to Dishoom for breakfast.
I ate chili-cheese toast with fried egg and ketchup, plus chai, which was a great way to start the day.
I caught the sub-surface lines east to Liverpool Street, then changed to the Central line one stop east to Benthal Green to visit the Vagina Museum, tucked into a railway arch under a viaduct leading out of Liverpool Street station. (I follow the museum on Mastodon where they post about weird and interesting things, so one could claim that I have a parasocial relationship with the museum.)
The ground floor of the museum featured the "Museum of Mankind", an exhibit deliberately misinterpreting modern artifacts (from the "plastic age") in the same way that archeology misunderstands artifacts by projecting its own biases on societies that we can't observe directly. Most of the exhibits were like this Oyster card, misinterpreted as a "proposition card".
Upstairs in the tiny railway arch were ordinary exhibits interpreting and explaining gynecological anatomy and health, including a wall covered in close-up pictures of vulvas to demonstrate the breadth and variety of human anatomy.
Around the corner from the Vagina Museum in Benthal Green was the Young V&A, as outpost of the V&A that was targeted towards children and their families. Their website, and the reviews, played up their features as a children's museum, which was not precisely what I was looking for in a museum.
What I found inside was part artifacts in display cases, part children's museum (with significant spaces dedicated to play areas; there was also a dedicated play area just for kids under two years old). From a curatorial perspective, I was interested in the way that the artifacts on display were selected and interpreted. The museum took artifacts from the V&A's extensive collection and used them to illustrate (often totally different) themes that they wanted to highlight. One display case had real samurai armor, with text encouraging the museum's young visitors to imagine the story behind the armor and the stories they might tell about the armor. Other artifacts on display bridged the space between history and children; the costume the mannequin is wearing to the right of the samurai armor came from a stage presentation of Peter Pan, and the mannequin is holding a remote control for a drone suspended out of the picture at the top of the display case.
Other displays presented toys from various points in modern history, grouped by type: hundred-year-old dollhouses sat next to more modern sets, and the interpretive signs talked about how each dollhouse reflected the societal context in which it was built and the roles they expected children to take in society. One gallery was dedicated to games, and had some early prototypes of Settlers of Catan (which I neglected to photograph); plus a long display of game consoles and video games with some highlights I remember from the 1980s.
Some of the pieces on display were just interesting works of art. I especially enjoyed the display "Planetarium" imagining several different small-scale mini-planets, one packed with traffic on the two-lane road running all the way around the little world.
Upstairs there were exhibits that more directly referenced the V&A's main focus of industrial design, with one gallery packed with all of the techniques that can be used to create materials and form them into usable artifacts, illustrated with videos demonstrating the processes and static displays showing the output. The adjacent galleries discussed sustainable production, with demonstrations of recycling. There was an exhibit presenting clothing for children that expands to fit children as they grow. The whole museum was modest in size but I thought it was an interesting distillation of the V&A into a size and format accessible to children (and still interesting to adults).
I ate lunch at the museum cafe on the ground floor, under the atrium of the historic building that had been repurposed into the current museum. I headed to South Kensington to visit the full-sized V&A via a more-convoluted-than-necessary route so I could hit more transit lines. I walked to Cambridge Heath and caught an Overground train to Liverpool Street (traveling on the railway viaduct over the Vagina Museum's railway arch), then caught the Elizabeth Line a couple of stops to Bond Street.
At Bond Street I changed trains again to the Jubilee Line to Westminster, emerging in the deep-level platforms far below Portcullis House where giant columns support the building above, looking like it belongs on the screen of a (probably dystopian) sci-fi movie. I boarded a crowded District Line train heading towards South Kensington, but the train stayed on the platform with the doors open while more people arrived and crowded onto the train. While we waited the driver made a couple of announcements indicating that there was a train ahead of us that seemed to be having trouble with its doors. At some length we departed and eventually arrived in South Kensington.
The pedestrian subway that connects the tube station to the museums along Exhibition Road was closed, so I exited the station at ground level and walked to the V&A. When I reached the museum the line was out the door and stretching to the end of the building, populated with a high density of people wearing Taylor Swift apparel, waiting to take the Taylor Swift Songbook Trail throughout the museum. (I had been seeing Taylor Swift apparel all weekend long, which I only belatedly realized was because Taylor Swift was playing multiple shows in London.)
It was the middle of the afternoon and I did not think I could make it through the line in a reasonable amount of time so I kept walking and eventually found my way through some back alleys and a spot marked on Google Maps as "The Hole in the Wall" (which proved to be a fairly apt description of the narrow pedestrian-only passage through a wall at the far end of an alley) and made my way to Hyde Park. I found a sign standing in the park inviting me to "Take a trip back in time" to see the Crystal Palace via an augmented reality app on my phone. This is an idea that I've thought about multiple times as I'm walking through various historic sites, but I don't think I've actually seen it implemented, so I decided to give it a shot. I installed the app, and looking through my phone as if it were a window to a history, I saw a giant glass facade appear in front of me.
The compass on my iPhone is a bit off, and I haven't looked up how to recalibrate it, so the image I saw on my screen, with a rendered Crystal Palace superimposed over the view from my phone's camera, didn't quite line up with the real scenery. (I think the view above is supposed to be looking along the long axis of the building, which is now the long axis of the park; but it's rotated so it's looking along the short axis of the park so the building runs into the trees in ways it's not supposed to.) I found the nearest set of doors and walked into the building, which worked well enough; and then I was inside the building and I could look down the long axis of the building to see the rendered representation of the iron-and-glass exhibition hall. (I couldn't climb the stairs, because those didn't exist in real life.)
The whole effect was an interesting experience, and I'd like to see more of it in the future.
I got iced coffee in the middle of Hyde Park, then walked along The Serpentine, which was crowded with people enjoying the bright summer weekend, including paddle-boating on the lake. I walked out of the park and met the Hidden London tour to explore
We assembled in small hotel conference room to get hard hats, lanyards with nametags identifying us as tour guests, and flashlights attached to the lanyard. The guides drilled us on turning off our lights when asked, because we were not supposed to shine lights near active trains so that the drivers didn't misinterpret the lights that they were not expecting in the tunnels deep underground. Our guides led us out to Down Street, a side road leading away from Piccadilly, and we got a good look at the station, designed by Leslie Green and looking like so many other stations built at the beginning of the twentieth century.
We entered the station through the door in the brick wall and immediately descended a full flight of stairs to platform at the top of a spiral staircase descending further underground. The Piccadilly line tunnels ran under the main road, but the rail company hadn't been able to acquire land on the main road for their station, so they ended up building the station tucked away on the side road. They dropped two shafts down into the ground, one carrying a staircase for emergencies (the shaft we were standing in) and the other carrying elevators. The elevators used to reach ground level behind the ticket hall, which was now the mini-mart we saw at street level.
While we were waiting for the tour group to assemble I studied the space I found myself in. The spiral staircase we were standing on was more recent than the shaft, and when it was installed the old staircase had been removed, revealing the cast iron segments lining the wall of the shaft sunk into the ground, and the new staircase had been mounted on brackets that had been bolted onto the wall. The tile on the wall was original tile designed for passenger-visible areas of the station; I think it was supposed to be a deep red (maybe even the same ox-blood red as the tiles on the station facade), but in the pale yellow light of the shaft the colored tiles looked brown. Above the level of the stairs the wall had been plastered, except for spaces where the plaster had been removed to gain access to the cast iron segments of the shaft lining.
In the middle of the shaft was a tiny elevator that had been retrofitted into the shaft during its second life as a wartime railway operations headquarters.
We descended the shaft, giving me the opportunity to see the bottom of the new staircase that had been installed so that the shaft could be used as an emergency exit for the modern Underground.
At the bottom of the shaft a tunnel stretched out in front of us, stretching out to the side road on the surface, then turning to the right to reach the train tunnels under the main road. The lengthy journey from the station entrance to the platforms in the running tunnels, combined with the low foot traffic from the , and the reorientation of the stations on either side (Hyde Park Corner and Green Park) all doomed the station to closure in 1932, twenty-five years after it opened.
Here in the tunnel that had once carried passengers to the trains we saw signs of the tunnel's wartime reuse, and our guides stopped to discuss them at length, including posters with pictures from the tunnels to help explain what were seeing. The gently sloping floor had been filled with concrete to make it level, and walls had been built to enclose rooms for the wartime offices of the Railway Executive Committee, formed to coordinate operations between the surface rail companies to deliver supplies and troops for the war. Most tunnels, including this one, were subdivided with narrow passing corridors just large enough for a twenty-inch-wide railroad catering trolley. This corridor was occupied by the typing pool; around the corner was the boardroom where all of the highest-level meetings took place between the railway executives.
We took a side corridor leading into relief corridor built between the two corridors carrying passengers to and from the station platforms, which had been required as a safety feature when the station was first built. When the station was repurposed during the war the extra space turned out to be useful. Here the wartime walls were still in place, forcing us to walk single-file along the narrow hallway and glance into the darkened rooms that we passed, which our guides told us had held toilets and showers for the staff working here.
The corridor climbed a flight of stairs and turned a corner to emerge from a door we had walked past on our descent down the spiral staircase, perched on a landing one flight above the bottom of the shaft. We were back in the corridors still designated for emergency evacuation, so the lights were as bright as any lights we saw in the entire station.
We took the stairs back down to the passenger corridor we'd already started down, past the typing pool and the executive conference room, and continued to the island platforms located between the two running tunnels. At the bottom of the last flight of stairs our guides pointed out the more-modern direction sign, used by Underground engineering staff to locate find where they were in the station and identify where they needed to be.
Offices required telecom and power, and the phone switches were still sitting in the little room on what had once been a tube platform. They had been abandoned in place at the end of the war, and no one had needed the space since then.
On the other side of the platform (adjacent to the tracks running west), the Railway Executive Committee had walled off the station platforms and subdivided them into rooms with bunks for sleeping, though this was right on the platform and it wasn't clear how much sleep one would get that close to the running trains if one had an overnight shift and one were trying to sleep during the day. (We were told that the staff would work underground for a couple of weeks at a time, then return to the surface.)
As we walked around the cramped corridors deep underground, a tube train came by on the tracks every couple of minutes. We'd turn off our lights and wait for it to pass before we could resume talking. Most of the time I could hear the train (and usually feel the breeze as it displaced air around it). Once I was standing in the right place to see the well-lit train zip past, packed with passengers waiting for their station, just a few meters away from me, and they had no idea I was there or even that there was a disused station hidden between two of the real stations on their map.
At the end of the old platform there was a little space that was actually open to the track and could be used as a real platform to actually board the train. The Railway Executive Committee used this to move their executives into the station; they could signal the driver of an oncoming train, who would stop for them and let them into the driver's cab and carry on their way. The passengers would notice that the train had stopped in the middle of a tunnel, but trains stop in the middle of tunnels all the time so it wouldn't be especially unusual. Our guides carried a special red light that they could use to signal a train in the event that our normal route to the surface was somehow blocked and we needed an alternate escape route.
We ascended the stairs from the platform to head back to the surface via the other main passenger corridor. During the war this corridor had been kept mostly intact to maintain ventilation in the tunnels, but there was a tiny alcove in one side that had been built during the war but its true purpose remains opaque.
The last thing we saw was the bottom of the elevator shaft, which had originally been equipped with two trapezoidal elevator cars to fit the space inside the circular shaft, which opened on each end to guide passengers into and out of the one-way corridors to and from the platform. The inside of the shaft was never intended to be visible so it had not been finished, giving me a view of the cast iron segments that made up the wall of the shaft. The elevators had been removed after the station was closed, but the shaft had been used for ventilation and had been equipped with large shutter that could be closed during air raids, forming a plug just visible as a dark presence at the top of the picture.
We returned to the spiral staircase in the stair shaft and climbed back to the surface, emerging into the street, after an hour-and-a-half underground exploring a fascinating disused station with a secret role in the last global total war against fascism.
I walked to Hyde Park Corner station and caught a Piccadilly line east, past Down Street. I watched the black tunnel walls intently and saw a brief flash of light half-way to Green Park, where I had recently been standing on the old tube platform.
By this point it was 19:30 and I needed to eat supper. The Piccadilly line is not yet blessed with mobile coverage in the tunnels, but the the stations do have wifi so I nipped off the train at Leicester Square to figure out where to eat. I took the Northern line (Charing Cross branch) to Waterloo and ate at Comptoir Libanais in Southbank (I had a delightful aubergine tagine), then took the tube back to my hotel in Camden Town to pack and prepare to fly home the next day.
I took a few more pictures than I included above; they're all at Photos on 2024-08-18.
