Orbital goblins ahoy
It initially gladdened my heart to see this press release from TfL on Wednesday. ELL extension work to be brought forward! Proper through running from Highbury to New Cross by 2010! EIGHT trains an hour! Mr Livingstone fully understanding the needs of Islington residents such as myself to visit atommickbrane and mrs_leroy_brown in New Cross! Hurrahs all round! Yet after a bit of close reading I was left with a medium-sized qualm about the plans.
Ken has always liked the NLL. There was a medium sized beef about its inclusion on the Tube Map back in the old GLC days: Ken was in favour, LRT were not. He won at first, but after the abolition of the GLC it kept intermittently disappearing from the map. Much of this battle is documented in Underground Maps After Beck, written by the immensely pompous Maxwell J.Roberts. A lot of the stuff Mr Roberts says about the NLL and its sister lines is snobbish t0ss, but the one thing he is bang on the money about is the lack of connections to other lines.
Once the excitement of seeing the West London Line on a Tube Map wore off, the apparent lack of anything being done to address the this lack started to annoy me. Admittedly, some of the potential interchanges would be difficult or impossible to achieve. For example, I can't see how the Piccadilly at Caledonian Road or the Northern Line at Kentish town could be altered to allow NLL <-> Tube connections. But in other places, Something Should Clearly Be Done. The South London Line still travels right over the top of Brixton train and tube stations. Tufnell Park tube is right underneath the Goblin. In both these cases there was once a stop where the lines cross, and could easily be again. Similarly, if they are serious about all the lines in question being a coherent network, they should re-open the Primrose Hill section between Camden Road and South Hampstead, which would give a West Hampstead style change between Chalk Farm and Primrose Hill as well as allowing through journeys from NW to SE London. And I'm not even going to get started on the daftness of not building a new station where the ELLE and the Central Line cross.
Don't get me wrong. I am totally in favour of all the improvements to stations, and 8tph across the network will be blimming brilliant. But it would be nice if, once and for all, a real effort was made to integrate the London orbital lines into the rest of the metro system.
Ken has always liked the NLL. There was a medium sized beef about its inclusion on the Tube Map back in the old GLC days: Ken was in favour, LRT were not. He won at first, but after the abolition of the GLC it kept intermittently disappearing from the map. Much of this battle is documented in Underground Maps After Beck, written by the immensely pompous Maxwell J.Roberts. A lot of the stuff Mr Roberts says about the NLL and its sister lines is snobbish t0ss, but the one thing he is bang on the money about is the lack of connections to other lines.
Once the excitement of seeing the West London Line on a Tube Map wore off, the apparent lack of anything being done to address the this lack started to annoy me. Admittedly, some of the potential interchanges would be difficult or impossible to achieve. For example, I can't see how the Piccadilly at Caledonian Road or the Northern Line at Kentish town could be altered to allow NLL <-> Tube connections. But in other places, Something Should Clearly Be Done. The South London Line still travels right over the top of Brixton train and tube stations. Tufnell Park tube is right underneath the Goblin. In both these cases there was once a stop where the lines cross, and could easily be again. Similarly, if they are serious about all the lines in question being a coherent network, they should re-open the Primrose Hill section between Camden Road and South Hampstead, which would give a West Hampstead style change between Chalk Farm and Primrose Hill as well as allowing through journeys from NW to SE London. And I'm not even going to get started on the daftness of not building a new station where the ELLE and the Central Line cross.
Don't get me wrong. I am totally in favour of all the improvements to stations, and 8tph across the network will be blimming brilliant. But it would be nice if, once and for all, a real effort was made to integrate the London orbital lines into the rest of the metro system.