Walking the Circle Line

The 19th century philosopher Xavier De Maistre, in his insightful Journey Around My Bedroom, suggests we should try to notice what we have already seen. And where better to test this idea in London than by walking round the Circle Line? Not only does the enigmatically slow 14-mile circuit shuffle round 27 stations that we probably think of as drearily familiar – Victoria, King’s Cross, Liverpool Street – but the chances are we’ve never even pondered its or their existence in the first place.

First, a little backstory. The idea of an ‘inner circuit’ round London was first proposed in 1863 after the success of what is now the Hammersmith & City Line, connecting Paddington and Farringdon with the more southerly stations in Zone 1. In the clockwise direction, the original 1863 line was extended east to Moorgate in 1865, Liverpool Street in 1875, and finally in 1884 to Tower Hill, which the ‘anti-clockwise' direction reached at the same time, creating the Circle as we know it – although its name was only awarded in 1949 (before then being simply a service run on the Met & District Lines). It is technically a ‘sub-surface line’, rather than a ‘tube’, running not much deeper than the basement of surrounding buildings.

But why does Circle grip the imaginations of so many? After all, Antipodeans and students use it for pub crawls, a shot at every station. Flash mobbers have held parties, most famously in 2003 when 600 protesters snuck on at Liverpool Street station for two circuits (‘At least one man was seen naked,’ reported The Guardian). A book of Circle Line stories, ‘From Here To Here’, was published in 2005. A knitting club has been known to hold knit-ins. And it’s even admired by Peter Ackroyd, who, in ‘London: The Biography’, celebrates it as ‘adventurous and breezy’ (unlike the ‘somehow desperate’ Northern Line).

Walking the route over ground might, I hoped, throw up a clue or two. And, if nothing else, it would at least lend a fresh perspective to the eclectic neighbourhoods around Zone 1.
Choice of time and day seemed important, so we started clockwise from King’s Cross at 730am on an atypical morning, the Easter bank holiday. But as we stood on the Euston Road, the icy winds made it hard to care about the station’s illustrious history: that it had opened in 1863, and has witnessed fires, bombs and terrorist attacks.

But gradually we warmed up and the empty streets allowed our eyes to focus on what would normally be un-extraordinary details: tourists forever bumping suitcases on wheels down steps; a neon-jacketed cleaner plucking an empty bottle from the kerb, St Paul’s poking through warehouse buildings, the Barbican tower’s teeth-like balconies grimy against the granite sky, the rhythmical sound of a sweeper, as soothing as the tide. And as we passed elegant 18th century church St Botolph Without Aldgate, a stone’s throw from where Jack The Ripper murdered Catherine Eddowes, I realized how eerie the City seems off-peak. Even the roads around Liverpool Street, one of the busiest stations in the UK with 123 million visitors a year, were bare, with Starbucks and Prêt closed, the taxi rank and piazza deserted. ‘It used to be a mental hospital’, said my brother, about the site’s 14th century usage, and somehow the logic between its original identity as Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem – or Bedlam – and current incarnation, as high-stress transport hub, seemed strangely consistent.

The silent streets enabled us to contemplate the stations’ rich history of crashes and bombs, too: Moorgate witnessed the tube’s second greatest loss of life in peacetime in a 1975 crash which killed 43 people, whilst Liverpool Street was the first place in WW1 to be hit by German aircraft in May 1917, killing 162. Aldgate and Cannon Street were badly damaged in WWII, but Monument suffered most with 56 killed in its ticket hall. And of course no-one will ever forget July 7 2005, when a bomb was detonated on a Circle train close to Aldgate. Pounding the streets against the wind, the history seeping out underground, we realized how our everyday lives barely skim the surface of the city we live in.

There were unexpected discoveries too. Opposite Cannon Street, behind an iron grille, we passed the unassuming London Stone, a fragment of an original 3000 year old piece of limestone that for years was recognized – in a much larger state – as the symbolic heart of London. Mentioned in Shakespeare, William Blake and Dickens – there’s even a myth suggesting the Stone's safety is linked to that of the city itself – it is, however, strangely unromantic, and was peddling its worth quietly that morning, as wide-eyed ravers shrieked and smoked fags outside the eponymous pub next door.

From Blackfriars the Circle runs parallel to a major Victorian sewer, and here purple-cheeked joggers bobbed beside the khaki-coloured Thames towards Temple, the only Underground name shared with the Paris Metro. Soon we were in the heart of the tourist throng at Westminster, the lowest point of the line beneath us, at 13 ft below high tide (the highest is Edgware -103 ft above).

History is everywhere in London, of course, but minor stations seemed to conceal the more fascinating stories: when Sloane Square was constructed in 1868, the river Westbourne (which runs through Hyde Park as the Serpentine Lake) was carried above the platform in a large iron pipe suspended from girders (still in place today). It was also the only tube station ever to have a built-in pub – the Hole in the Wall – which closed in 1985. And, sadly, it was where Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for Peter Pan, threw himself under the train in 1960, after years of resenting his association with the character.

As we edged further round, Rolls Royces, elegant Georgian terraces and roof gardens with palms blowing in the wind gave way to shabby Notting Hill hotels with chipped pillars, the football-screen pubs and fast food outlets of Paddington, and hundreds of tourists hovering on the pavement outside Madame Tussauds. Worth a return trip are unexpectedly characterful neighbourhoods like little France in South Ken, and the Greek community on Moscow Road near Bayswater, with its Athenian stores and tavernas.

Finally we arrived back in King’s Cross. The hike had taken 7 hours, with two breaks of 1 ½ hours in total. But the experiment seemed incomplete without riding at least one entire loop underground. A circuit in theory takes 47 minutes, but because the Circle shares most of the track with three other lines, meaning trains can only arrive every 7 ½ minutes, it often has to wait between stations, bumping up the average journey to around 52 minutes.

Just a handful of people were in the front carriage when, on a Tuesday lunchtime, I boarded at King’s Cross: a man, flinging The Times to one side, sighed; another, dangling a plastic bag, stood gobbling a sandwich, and a woman stretched out, as if on an armchair at home. I wondered whether anyone else on the train, like me, was riding without destination – which itself felt luxurious – but as we descended into what Ackroyd calls the ‘ever deeper levels of anonymity and oblivion’, the carriage grew so shudderingly empty, the only sound that of the computerized female station announcer, that I was pleased for the rush of prams, suitcases and children at Baker Street.

Disembarking at King’s Cross after a 62 minute loop – 10 minutes’ late, alas – I realized that the tube, like London, needs its bustle. We don’t do ‘empty’. Just as we don’t, perhaps, stop and stare at our city in our rush to get to work. And, as I stood blinking in the funereal half-light of the Euston Road, it seemed impossible to make any glib conclusions about the Circle line, and why it grips the imaginations of so many, but perhaps GK Chesterton had the answer when he noticed, in awe, that the stations below St James’ Park, Westminster, Embankment, Temple, and Blackfriars ‘are really the foundation stones of London’.