London: a random Tube journey, part III

For what is likely to be my last actual-going-somewhere post of the year, I found myself in London, and decided to continue my random journey around the Tube.  When we left off, my random movements had left me struggling to escape the murky brown clutches of the Bakerloo line, and abandoning ship when it tried to send me to ruddy Harlesden again.  Will I ever escape?¹

Date of trip: Friday 14th December 2018
Journey time: 1h10ish from Oxford to Marylebone
Fare: £20.55 (Off-Peak, with 16–25 Railcard, including Zones 1–6 Travelcard)

But first, a recap of 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;
   • 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.
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.
6. If a random move asks you to move a number of stations that would take you beyond the end of the line, re-roll the entire move, including choosing the direction.

Rule 6 is new, and is included because I first had to deal with this on Friday.  But I’m not going to spell out every move this time, because of rule 5; given that I started on the Bakerloo, and had visited, at this point, every station but one between Queen’s Park and North Wembley, you can imagine that a lot of virtual moves might occur, and you’d be right.  I’ll show my working in a comment if you want to do any statistical tests on my random number generator.

Let’s go.

Bakerloo, four stops southbound, to

Kilburn Park

For the first time in many moves, a properly underground Underground station, which is a short walk from the Kilburn High Road. Or, to give it its somewhat older name, Watling Street—this is near the start of the Roman road to Holyhead, and runs for miles through London in an almost perfect straight line, from Marble Arch to Edgware.

These days, it’s mostly just a congested shopping street, so I’m going to have to dive into the history for something to say.  I can tell you, for instance, that Kilburn was founded around a spring, and that the pub where people came to take the waters, the Old Bell, is still there.  Or I can tell you that it became home to much of London’s Irish community (though now only about 5% of the population are Irish), and that during the Troubles the loyalist Ulster Defence Association planted a bomb at Biddy Mulligan’s pub, accusing it of being a hotbed of IRA support, and injured five.  Or that it was home to one of London’s mega-cinemas, part of the Gaumont chain, which still stands but, in a predictable pattern, became a bingo hall with the decline of cinemas, and then a charismatic church with the decline of bingo.

In the present day, I mostly wandered up and down the High Road trying to find something to write about, and mostly failing.  So I moved on.

Bakerloo, (aggregate) six stops northbound, to

Wembley Central

This station was the bane of my childhood games of the London Game, being the furthest station shown on the furthest-out line.  You didn’t want to get sent here.  On Friday, I didn’t want to get sent here.

So what was there?  The fiery pits of hell?  A room full of copies of Percy Sledge singing “When a Man Loves a Woman?”²  Well, er, no.  Just a fairly nondescript shopping centre. So I took a walk towards Wembley’s most famous building, a major pull for people from across London and indeed the country.  That’s right: I went to London Designer Outlet, passing some big arched building along the way.

(Also on the way, I passed an apartment building called “Jenga House”, where presumably residents are afraid to do any minor DIY in case the whole building collapses.  I also passed a restaurant called “Fatburger”, and given that London faces a major problem with “fatbergs”, and that these are very much not appetising, I have some questions.)

So, yeah, I couldn’t actually work out how to get anywhere near the Stadium through the large amount of building works; I think access might be easier from Wembley Park station, but I was on the wrong line for that.  So I made do with the designer outlet, which is a fairly standard retail village, hosting outlet branches of M&S, Hamley’s, Gap, Haribo, H&M, Clarks…

If you paused at “Haribo” in that list, I’m with you.  This is an actual shop selling exclusively Haribo, and related merchandise.  I don’t think there can have been more than fifteen different kind of sweet on display, so filling a whole shop was quite impressive.  I passed on the Haribo Goldbear t-shirts, and the glass bowl, contained in a box marked with the original German version of Haribo’s “kids and grown-ups…” slogan.³

Clutching instead a paper Haribo bag, imprinted with a giant Goldbear, that was far too big for the six types of vegetarian sweet I managed to find, I walked back to Wembley Central.  On the way, I got stuck in the middle of a street called Park Lane—not recommended, as it cost me £35 just to wait there for a few minutes until it was my turn to move.

Bakerloo, (aggregate) ten stops southbound, to

Edgware Road (Bakerloo)

There are two stations called “Edgware Road”, helpfully.⁴  There have been various proposals to change the name of one or the other, but that involves replacing countless line diagrams and signs at every station on the relevant line or lines, and TfL doesn’t have the money for that kind of thing at the moment when they’re trying to build a deep tunnelled railway that they’ve run out of money for, again.  (They did rename the Hammersmith & City line station at Shepherd’s Bush, but only because they opened an Overground station also called Shepherd’s Bush, which is next to but—again—physically separate from the Central line station, and having three stations with that name would be a step too far.)

So at the Bakerloo line station, I went for a walk up Edgware Road, which is Watling Street again.  Seeing Scrabble-like signs for Church Street Market, I had a wander down Church Street, which seemed to be, well, a street market of the kind you find in towns across the country.  Nothing to write home about, and not much to write a blog post about either.  More intriguingly, a street sign said “Church Street: to antiques shops”, so I wandered the length of it.

Turns out it’s a bit of an antiques centre.  The reason seems to be Alfies Antique Market, which set up there in a former department store in 1976; I didn’t realise its significance at the time, so I never thought to venture in, but apparently it’s London’s largest market of its type.  The other shops have mostly set up outside having outgrown their premises in the market.

And this was where I stopped my random journey.  The reason was that my next move, when all the “virtual” moves were aggregated, was…

Bakerloo, (aggregate) fourteen stops northbound, to

Harrow & Wealdstone

… and, with the failing light, and the fact that I’d already travelled that long stretch of line twice that day, I gave up.

So it will hopefully be next time, when I finally escape the aforementioned murky brown clutches.  But I will come back to this, because I will get myself off the Bakerloo line.

¹ Yes: that’s a result from third-year Applied Probability.

² I hated that song as a child.

³ „Haribo macht Kinder froh, und Erwachsene ebenso“—Haribo makes children happy, and grown-ups also.

⁴ There are also two stations called “Hammersmith”, and the two tube stations at Paddington are only interlinked via the mainline station.  For the purposes of this random walk, I’m going to count each of those as one station, using the justification that in each case the station name only appears once on the Tube map.