THE TUBE-BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

AT THE Jubilee Line Extension station, Canary Wharf, I collared a man stepping off the escalator and asked him what he thought of the whole thing.

"Yeah," he said, "quite nice." Then, gazing up at the soaring ceiling, he suddenly upped the ante. "It's awesome," he said, "it's like a cathedral."

Everyone mentions that, but it's true; Canary Wharf is like a cathedral - albeit one that's just had a visit from the bailiffs because it is, like all the stations on the line, fashionably spartan.

This is the Tube, but not as we know it. At Canary Wharf there are 23 ticket barriers, standing like the advance guard of an army waiting for any carrier of an out-of-date Travelcard. On the mountainous escalator banks the signs tell you 15 times over to stand on the right. At an off-peak hour, I watched an old man riding up one of the escalators and he looked like an incidental detail, as if he was only there for scale.

You could fit the whole of the Canary Wharf Tower into Canary Wharf station.

But the next station on the line, North Greenwich, is even bigger - you could fit the QE2 into that. There again, though, they do say you could get 3.8 billion pints of beer into the Millennium Dome. But the point is: the Dome is not beautiful; the stations of the JLE are, and everyone is saying so.

The press officers concerned have been

quite light-headed since the line opened: they work for the Underground, yet they're not taking flak. It's disorientating for them.

As they show you around they're laughing, relaxed, for they know that these are stations from which the normal Underground anomalies have been banished. You don't have to mind the gap anywhere on the JLE - everything fits. And the depressing phenomenon of a person under a train ought not to occur at most JLE stations because of the glass barriers between the platforms and carriages. For regular Tube users it's almost sinister: a weird alternative universe in which the vending machines actually work, and the ticket machines answer back if you press too hard. ("A lighter touch is more effective," reads the slightly patronising message on the VDU).

My favourite JLE station is probably Southwark, with its wall of reflective blue glass putting you in mind of a vertical swimming pool. Or maybe the only other colourful station, North Greenwich, with its ovoid pillars of blue mosaic that make you feel as though you're in some, well subterranean blue forest.

So how did this triumph occur? Well, the expenditure of 3.5 billion is a factor; you ought to get something good for that. And out east there's a lot of space with which to impress. In keeping with the functional aesthetic, and to emphasise the scale of the stations, a lot of grey has been used. "What's it?" She seemed intimidated by its severity and scale.

These new stations are indeed so pristine that, when you see a scruffy station attendant, you think: why can't that guy get his beard sorted out? He doesn't belong here. Similarly, the Silver-link Metro - a name invented to disguise the extreme grunginess of what used to be the North London Line - seems to crawl very apologetically through its bit of the Stratford JLE station, under that much- praised oversailing glass roof, which is a stunning engineering coup by all accounts. The whole of Bermondsey now seems to be in need of a makeover in comparison with its new, sparkling glass box of a station.

At Canning Town there are modernistic steel chairs placed opp- wrong with a bit of colour?" a man at Canada Water asked me. "Some red here and there a bit of green wouldn't go amiss." At Canning Town, a multilevel concrete station of such extreme starkness and greyness that it's in danger of blending in with the nearby East Dock Road flyover, a woman from Poplar whispered to me: "It's so clean, isn't

osite some of the station's steel walls. The chairs are very chic, but it's hard to imagine anyone sitting on them and actually laughing. There seems to have been a slight sense of humour failure about some of the stations. You sense a buttocks-clenched determination to atone for years of skimped, underfunded projects.

Of course, the stations built in the 1930s by that acknowledged genius, Charles Holden, were radical in their day. Look at Arnos Grove: it's a brick spaceship, for heaven's sake. But Holden's stations were on a more human scale, and used warmer colours and textures than you'll find on the JLE - seen especially in his lambent, brass and wood ticket hall for Piccadilly Circus. In comparison, there's a slight sense, in some of the JLE stations, of standing inside an enormous, very beautiful fridge. But maybe that's not the issue. Perhaps the really important point was made to me by a woman from Millwall whom I spoke to at Canary Wharf station. "I love this station," she said. "Why?" I asked.

"Do you know how many buses it used to take me to get to the West End?"

she said.

"Four." And with that she scurried off to the trains.

lAndrew Martin writes the Tube talk column every Friday in ES magazine.

Copyright 2000
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