A new underground station

Text 1: Seeing My Shadow Underground, by Victor Amadi

An original twentieth-century article.

I have used the Underground every working day for twenty-six years, and I thought I knew what a station was: a tiled tube, a little too warm, a little too narrow, smelling faintly of hot dust and other people’s coats. So I was not prepared, on the morning the new line opened, to step off the escalator into a cavern of concrete and light.

The hall is enormous. It is perhaps forty metres high, a single grey space, its walls ribbed with columns that rise like the trunks of a petrified forest and vanish into a roof of glass. Daylight falls the whole way down from the street, pale and clean, so that for the first time in my life I stood underground and saw my own shadow. Everything is bare: no adverts, no tiles, no clutter, only concrete, steel and light.

It should be cold. It should be brutal. Several of my colleagues, who had seen the drawings, assured me that it would be. And yet the effect is strangely calm. Sound behaves differently here; the rattle of the trains, the slap of shoes, the announcements, all of it rises up into that great height and softens, like voices in a library. People who normally barge and elbow found themselves slowing down, looking up, pointing. A small boy beside me lay flat on his back on the floor to see the roof, and his mother, instead of scolding him, simply waited.

Down on the platform, the trains slide in behind a wall of glass doors that open only when the carriage arrives. Nobody can fall; nobody can be pushed. It is efficient, and safe, and ever so slightly eerie, like a station designed for a future in which nothing will ever go wrong.

I caught the 8.14 as usual. I was, for the first time in twenty-six years, a little sorry when it came.

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