The Delights of Perivale and Cockfosters

Many years ago, I undertook a project of photographing every single tube station in London. It took around five years, and started out as simply a way of getting to know the city. I would travel to the end of a tube line – Epping, Upminster, Morden, Cockfosters – wander around a suburban hinterland of housing estates, light industry and sad, red-bricked parades of shops, and then make my way back into town stopping at each station along the way. Photographing each station was more an exercise of ticking them off than a studious interest in architecture, although I liked Charles Holden’s 1920s & 30s buildings, amongst others. Many were unremarkable, at best functional; some didn’t have anything to photograph at all, just a tube sign and some steps disappearing below street level; others were subsumed into railway stations or office blocks. 

I wondered what to do with them. They weren’t technically good enough to make a book, but reproduced as a huge grid of 272 tiny colour Xeroxes, looked quite impressive, so that’s what I did. It’s still hanging in our home.

The reason for the reminiscing is that I received an email today saying that a friend of a friend had heard about it and did I still have all the images?... digitized by chance? No, but there’s a box of negatives in a warehouse in Neasden which he's welcome to go through.