London: a random tube journey, part I

On another day killing time in London, riding from Edgware Road into town on the Bakerloo, my mind drifted to a game called “The London Game” that I played as a (weird, Tube-loving) child.  It’s a classic roll-and-move game; you try to reach six random Tube stations and get back to the mainline station where you started, before other players complete the same feat.  The catch is that some stations are “closed”, so you can’t even pass through them, and that if you want to change lines you have to pick up a “Hazard Card”, which is likely to send you to some far-flung corner of the board.¹

Date of trip: Tuesday 30th October 2018
Journey time: 1h10ish from Oxford to Marylebone
Fare: £20.55 (Off-Peak, with 16–25 Railcard, including Zones 1–6 Travelcard)

I started wondering whether I could play this in real life.  I decided that, with some modifications, I could.  Here are the rules:

1. Start at Charing Cross, the nominal “centre of London”.
2. At each station:
   • pick a random direction in which to travel, choosing each line and direction with equal probability;²
   • roll a six-sided die to decide how far to travel along that line.
3. The random direction chosen must only be along London Underground lines, using interchanges as shown on the Tube Map.³
4. Upon alighting at each station, find something to write about for the blog (not covered before, and preferably never visited before).
5. If a random move would take you to a station already visited and explored, it is not necessary to travel or alight there; carry out the next move(s) “virtually” and then travel to the first unreached station.  Similarly, non-Underground trains, or trains from other Underground lines, may be used to reach the appropriate station.

I’m quite a fan of random travel.  I think it forces you to explore places you’ve never been before, or to look at existing places in a new light.  (I decided to do this because I was bored of going to the same two places every time I went to London, there to spend money I didn’t have.)  It also appeals to me because it’s essentially a random walk on a graph, which are related to things I’ve studied—although I was glad I didn’t have to analyse this one.  I’m hoping I might be able to convince you to do likewise.⁴

So let’s explore.

Charing Cross

Bakerloo, three stops northbound, to:

Regent’s Park

Well this would be great if I hadn’t written about Regent’s Park already.  And unfortunately that’s the main thing for which Regent’s Park is the closest station.  So let’s talk about some minor local scandal instead.

The station itself is located in Park Crescent, a crescent of beautiful early-nineteenth-century terraced houses designed by John Nash, as the northern end of his grand boulevard scheme from Piccadilly Circus.  It therefore caused quite some outrage in some quarters (warning: that’s a link to the Daily Mail) when they announced that they’d be demolishing and rebuilding the western half.  I too was slightly scandalised when I heard about this, the crescent being Grade I listed.  Except…

The crescent was bombed in the Second World War and rebuilt in the 1960s, with modern buildings behind a replica façade.  What they’re doing now is the same again, demolishing the 1960s frontage and replacing it yet another copy, this one supposedly more historically accurate.  So, less major scandal, more a case of NIMBYs not wanting building works on their doorstep, I suspect.  Let’s move on.

Bakerloo, two stops northbound, to:

Marylebone

A problem with this random travel lark is that it can take you places you know very well.  Another is that, after my first stop, I’ve now hit two stations which are on the Bakerloo line and no others, trapping me on that line for at least one more “turn” each time.  And I hate the Bakerloo line.

I don’t have much to say about this, but I will say that there’s a convent nearby, that I saw for the first time, belonging to the Sisters of Mercy.  I’m still always a little surprised that convents still exist; thanks to Henry VIII, I tend to think of monasteries etc. as ruins rather than functioning institutions.  It looked rather like an Oxford college, with high walls surrounding what looked like a quad.

Bakerloo, six stops northbound, to:

Queen’s Park

Oh, for heaven’s sake.  My heart sank at this roll, because I knew I’d be heading deep into Bakerloo territory, and Paddington is that line’s last station where it interchanges with any other.  There was a certain appropriateness to this “move”, however, as the classic trick when playing the London game is, when given the chance, to send players to the station furthest away from central London—which, of those on the board, is Wembley Central, on this part of the Bakerloo.

And of course I’d intended this journey to take me places I’d never been, which this was, so I gave it a go.  The area appears to be a relatively affluent, and still multicultural, suburb of London, containing a high street and the eponymous park.  Like Hampstead Heath, this park is owned by the City of London Corporation, because that body has undue amounts of power and influence for what is essentially the local council for about four thousand people and some banks.  The park, despite its trapezoidal shape, is designed not to have any straight paths, and contains lawns, and a quiet flower garden, and trees, like most city parks.

So why am I bothering to tell you about it?  Because I stumbled upon its petting zoo.   While Westminster Abbey has Poets’ Corner, this park has Pets Corner, which is much preferable, I feel.  After all, when I set out from central London I wasn’t expecting to come face-to-face with a real life teeny tiny sheep.  (Please tell me it’s not just me that finds this idea exciting.)  They’re apparently re-displaying it at the moment to make it more thematic, as a sort of urban farm, so it seems there may be pygmy goats soon.  I am excited to go back—especially as it’s free.

Bakerloo, three stops northbound, to:

Harlesden

Another roll, another step deeper into suburbia.  Harlesden is another suburb, but unfortunately the actual “town centre” is closer to Willesden Junction station, so I knew I’d have to leave visiting the town for if I ended up at that station.  The Grand Union Canal is nearby, but I thought I’d better save that for if I was stuck for something to write about somewhere up or down the line, if I could; plus, my phone battery was low, and without using that I couldn’t work out how to get to the water.

The trick here was to engage another of my senses, and notice the sweet smell in the air, carried on the breeze.  Following it over the desolate railway bridge led to a factory, not open to the public—but with the name “McVitie’s” proudly displayed on the blue corrugated-metal walls.  This site has been manufacturing biscuits since 1902.  It’s now Europe’s largest biscuit factory.  (Incidentally, it’s a chocolate digestive, McVitie’s first chocolate biscuit, that appears on their website next to its cookie policy.)

There wasn’t much to see, so I just poked my camera through the railings, and walked straight back towards the Tube station.  At this point I happened upon a Metropolitan Police officer, and realised that walking out of a station, taking a picture of a factory, and going straight back looked suspicious of something, even if it wasn’t obvious what, and I realised that the truth—a sightseeing trip around the Tube, as guided by a pseudo-random number generator—wouldn’t sound hugely plausible as an explanation to this random policeman who didn’t know, well, me.  Luckily, he walked past, and my biggest hurdle was that my Travelcard had stopped working when I got to the station.

And we leave my journey here.  What other delights of surburbia will I discover?  Will I ever escape the Bakerloo line?  Tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion.

¹ If this sounds like fun to you, it’s still available, retitled “the London Board Game”.  We used to play it sometimes at the Board Games Soc, but it was retitled there too: this time to “Arbitrary Train Game”.

² The keen-eyed and/or geeky among you may have noticed that this rule is not well-defined, because it doesn’t specify how to deal with the fact that some lines branch.  I didn’t ever resolve which rule to use to deal with this, because it was never an issue.

³ So, for instance, Bank and Monument count as one station, and there are nine possible directions there: west- and eastbound Central, Waterloo & City, north- and southbound Northern, clockwise and anticlockwise Circle, and west- and eastbound District.  The DLR does not count as it is not a Tube line.

⁴ I should say that I owe a huge debt to the blogger Diamond Geezer for the idea for this post: as far as I know he’s never done this exact idea, but he’s done a lot of random travelling that he’s blogged about.