Edgware Road: The interchange from hell

In the 1990s, I worked in Kensington High Street and lived north of King's Cross. Every evening, I would wait on the platform at High Street Ken station hoping the indicator board would show "Circle line via King's Cross". That would be like getting three cherries on the fruit machine. But invariably I got one cherry, a banana and an orange: in other words, a District line train terminating at Edgware Road.

I was spending a significant portion of my life at Edgware Road, either changing from the District or being thrown off a Circle line train, since, while these were billed as going via King's Cross, they frequently didn't make it. There would be a long, tense pause at Edgware Road while the train throbbed with the doors open and the controllers at the station thought about whether to chuck us off.

"Andrew Martin is on this train," I imagined them saying to each other. "He's expecting to go all the way round to King's Cross. At this very minute he's congratulating himself on not having to waste time on our freezing, bleak platforms ..."

Well, it was often too much for the poor chaps to resist. One announcement began: "The train on platform one that was a Circle line train is now a District line train. Will passengers waiting for the Circle line please disembark ..."

I remember thinking it would be useful if I could get to like Edgware Road, since I spent so much time there, and will come back to its attractive features (if any) in a moment. But let's start by noting that increasing numbers of us are going to become acquainted with the station owing to "the Circle line extension".

This sounds like a good thing, probably because of that word "extension", but then the question arises: how, geometrically speaking, do you extend a circle without ... well ... ruining it? The new Circle is a circle with a tail. It looks like the start of a spiral or, as a friend of mine ominously noted, a snail. The extension shadows the western bit of the Hammersmith & City line. Circle line trains travel along it from Hammersmith to Edgware Road. From there, they go clockwise around the circle then anticlockwise, then bugger off back to Hammersmith.

Formerly, trains would approach the Circle from a variety of points in the morning - a process once described as being like the Red Arrows converging from different counties for an air display, only more boring - and then just kept going around it all day, or at least until the driver's tea break.

A driver running late will now be able to knock off duty - as he must after a set number of hours - at the Hammersmith depot rather than somewhere in the middle of the Circle, which is under-equipped with sidings. That's because the Circle line does not actually exist: it is a concept, a route rather than a line, and its trains run over the tracks of the District, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines, hence the difficulty of operating it.

The result of the extension was supposed to be "a better service between Edgware and Hammersmith and a better regulated Circle line" (albeit with fewer trains) - and a lot more time for everyone at you-know-where.

The Circle has been broken, and the breaking point is Edgware Road. Anyone wanting to go round the north- western "corner" of the Circle in either direction will always have to change at the station, where they will join old Edgware Road hands, namely passengers chucked off terminating District line trains, and passengers paused on Hammersmith & City line trains - since this is a duty changeover point for drivers on that line.

So what is to be said in favour of the station? Well, let's be clear that the Edgware Road we are concerned with is not to be confused (although it frequently is) with Edgware Road station on the Bakerloo line, which is about 500m away. The Bakerloo line station is much more straightforward than its namesake. Its users tend not to have to spend large parts of their lives there - they just pass through. It is also much warmer, because it is underground. Our Edgware Road is one of the just-below-surface "cut and cover" stations. It is essentially two island platforms surrounded by sidings and set in a cutting that's very good at funnelling icy winds.

Edgware Road is surely the coldest station on the system, but it is also one of the oldest, opened on 10 January 1863 to serve the Metropolitan line between Paddington and Farringdon Street - the world's first underground railway. There are rail freaks in Japan who would give a lot to be standing shivering with you on those platforms.

I admit that when I paid a visit to Edgware Road shortly after the new Circle was launched, nobody was looking at it with a historian's eye. It was just full of people frustrated in their attempt to get home. Business as usual, in other words.

There were people sitting on trains with the doors open, listening to announcements. Some were resigned to their fate. Others were poised by the doors, thinking of dashing onto one of the other trains with its doors open. Every so often a person bolted across the footbridge, then bolted back the other way. A man uttered that time-honoured cliché into his mobile phone: "I'm on a train," before adding exasperatedly, "how do I know which train?"

I asked a suave-looking chap how he thought the new line was working, "Well, there's a London Underground man over there," he said, pointing to a throng of people, "whose job is to advise confused passengers. He's pretty busy, as you can see."

Was he a regular user of the station? I wondered. "I am," he said, distractedly, since he was watching the train indicator, where developments were occurring. And did he like the station? "What?" he said incredulously, then turned away in disgust.

I walked upstairs into the ticket hall, which is a pleasantly airy space (and freezing cold, obviously). There are pink steel tubs containing well-tended plants - a memorial to the six people killed in the station by one of the terrorist attacks on 7 July 2005.

A few years ago there was another, more eccentric garden at Edgware Road. It was on the opposite side of the tracks from platform one: an ornamental pond with an arrangement of garden gnomes around it. I once asked a guard at the station about them. "What gnomes?" he said, testily. He then remembered and said they had been put there by a female member of staff, currently off duty. Every Christmas, the gnomes used to have tinsel on them, but this year I couldn't see them at all. I asked a booking hall attendant about them."I don't know about the gnomes, but you can't see the pond because it's winter."

Do ponds necessarily disappear in wintepr? They do at Edgware Road.

There's not much left of the Victorian station since it was remodelled in the 1920s, and unfortunately not all of that remodelling survives. The corridor leading from the ticket hall to the exit features a patch of beautiful blue-green mosaic that once covered the entire interior. It's by an alcove surmounted by a sign reading "Telephones". (Someone should take the "s" off, since there's only one there now.) This corridor used to be an arcade, and there also used to be shops inset into the exterior of the station building. What with everyone having to spend so much time there, it would be an idea to have at least one café or kiosk restored to Edgware Road, and a London Underground official told me this is not out of the question.

I stepped out of the station and found myself disorientated, as if I'd emerged from Doctor Who's Tardis. This is always the effect of leaving Edgware Road, no matter how often one does it. Slowly, I got my bearings. I was somewhere in west London. I was in a side-street - Chapel Street - which acts as a refuge from a much bigger and more thunderous one: Edgware Road itself. There isn't much in Chapel Street besides the back end of a Marks & Spencer. The station is handy, in fact, for the M&S Food Hall, where there are always good offers on wine. This, I feel, will prove the best option for those caught in the new, improved Edgware Road vortex.