Oliver Green - The Tube: Station to Station on the London Underground

Welcome to the Tube. The main escalator shaft from the street entrance at Holborn, 2010. Opened in 1933, this rebuilt interchange station was fitted with modern escalators in the 1990s.

The London Underground system is one of the worlds largest and busiest urban metros. From a modest Victorian steam railway 3.5 miles long with just six stations, it has grown and developed over 150 years into eleven modern electric lines covering more than 250 route miles and serving 270 stations across the capital. It is responsible for over 3.5 million passenger journeys a day, which added up to a record figure of 1.1 billion journeys in 201011, more than the total for the entire UK national rail network.

The Underground has an essential role in keeping London on the move and providing the vital travel arteries of the city. The famous features of the system, the red and blue roundel and the iconic Tube map, are recognised everywhere as key symbols of London, familiar guides and reference points to residents and visitors alike.

The entire environment of the Underground, both above and below ground, has a distinctive look and design about it that has evolved yet remained comfortingly consistent throughout the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, as part of Transport for London (TfL), the system has effectively grown to embrace the London Overground network of suburban lines, with a complete orbital service around the city in operation from 2012. The Docklands Light Railway (DLR) has also developed over the last twenty-five years from a cheap substitute for a new Tube into an essential adjunct to the Underground in serving and regenerating east and southeast London.

Modern art at a heritage station. A Platform for Art exhibition by Japanese pop artist Chiho Aoshima in 2006 on the walls of Gloucester Road station, built in 1868.

All three of these systems are now managed for the Mayor of London by TfL as part of an integrated multi-modal transport system for the capital. They all appear on the Tube map and use the same cashless Oyster card ticketing system. By 2018 new deep tunnels for Crossrail will be carrying mainline services from east to west below London. Technically Crossrail will not be part of the Underground, but all the new stations will have direct interchange with the Tube, and feel seamlessly integrated into Londons familiar underground travelling environment.

Contrasting Edwardian styles at South Kensington, 2012. On the left the arcade entrance to the Metropolitan & District station by George Sherrin (1907), still in daily use; on the right Leslie Greens Piccadilly Tube station building (1906), redundant since the 1970s.

Journeys and exploration on the Underground are almost like trips through time as well as space, although they rarely feel as though they are in chronological sequence. Different parts of the infrastructure have been enlarged, extended, opened, closed, abandoned and rebuilt almost continuously for 150 years, but never in a set order. You can still find stations and buildings from every one of those sixteen decades, reflecting the styles and design of each period, and the changes in Londons fortunes, but it is a complex picture to piece together.

More than seventy of the pre-war stations are now listed buildings, given statutory protection by English Heritage as an important part of the citys built environment. London Underground has the challenging task of maintaining and upgrading the Tubes historic features whilst keeping a busy transport system up to date and fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

Brixton Tube station, opened in 1971 as the southern terminus of the Victoria line. Refurbished and upgraded with improved access from 2001 and a dramatic new double height entrance faade designed by Chetwood Associates.

Since the late 1940s investment in new capital projects on the Underground has been modest and little was spent on new stations or refurbishment until the 1990s, when the Jubilee line extension brought a welcome return of high-quality architecture and design to the Tube. Some of these stations and other features will certainly become the listed buildings of the future, to be cherished as some of Londons best modern public architecture.

As a working system, none of it can remain unchanged. There is a constant need to modernise and improve capacity as use of the Tube continues to grow inexorably. The upgrade programme that has been under way for more than a decade now will have to continue for many years and will never really be finished. A sustainable city must constantly renew itself and without an evolving Tube, London would seize up.

This book is an introduction to the fascinating built environment of the Tube through what can be seen today for the price of a Travelcard. Even your daily commute may begin to appear in a new light when you look at its features more closely and see how they fit together.

The first section is a brief chronology of the Undergrounds development over 150 years. Section two is a series of journeys on the system through which aspects of that entire history can be glimpsed and explored. Although they are not part of the Underground itself, the DLR, London Overground and Crossrail are all included.

Purists will object that we have sometimes used the name Tube to refer to the whole system when technically only the deep-level lines run in tube tunnels. Until about thirty years ago London Transport was always careful to distinguish between its surface lines (the original steam underground lines of the Metropolitan and District) and the deep tube electric lines opened after 1890. We have opted for common usage here.

The word has been in popular use and become capitalised since the opening of the Twopenny Tube in 1900. Nowadays both TfL and the Underground itself use Tube as shorthand for the whole system, though the nickname has remained unique to London. Nowhere else in the world has a Tube, and every other citys urban railway is called a subway or a metro. Both of these expressions were first used in London but only caught on when systems developed elsewhere. As a final point to confuse the issue, remember that more than half the London Underground network is above ground anyway.

East Finchley, where the Northern line joined the overground steam branch line to High Barnet and electric Tube services were introduced in 193940. The new London Passenger Transport Board station by Charles Holden and Leonard Bucknell, which replaced the old LNER station of 1867, is now a listed building.