Yes, they really are closing a central London tube line for four months of 2022
One last bit of non-festive content.
Our third and final end of year trips into the archive. You can read the first, Day of the Tunnel Boring Machine, here, and the second, The Adventures of the Bolivian Navy, here.
Before the pandemic, around a quarter of a billion journeys were taken every year on the Northern line of the London Underground, making it busier than any line except the Central. It was also by far the most over-crowded: as of 2019, in the morning peak, it was running at 130% of capacity. (The next on the list, the Central and Jubilee, run at a mere 115% of capacity.)
Anyway, Transport for London has decided to close a large chunk of it for four months next year.
Actually, despite the wave of panic that flew through London Twitter in November when the commuting public finally noticed, this has been on the cards for ages. The Bank/Monument station complex, the third busiest interchange on the network, is currently in the middle of a massive expansion to cope with, well, the fact it’s the third busiest on the network. Most of the work has been happening with the station remaining open; part of it can’t be.
So from January until May, the Bank branch of Northern line will terminate at Moorgate. “Our proposals follow public consultations held in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014,” reads the final line of TfL’s official explanation of the scheme. You hardly need the Enigma machine to work out the hidden subtext of that.
But a lot of people are very angry about this, and more than one of them asked me what the hell was going on, and I know an opportunity for an explainer when I see one, so here we go.
What the hell is going on?
Short version is, TfL wants to increase the passenger capacity of the Bank-Monument complex (they’re two stations on the map, but one in actually existing reality) by 40%. That means adding several new escalators, a new entrance to the station on Cannon Street (with 11 floors!), plus a couple of moving walkways to bring the various far-flung bits of the complex closer together.
A summary of the plans. Image: TfL.
The big change, though, will be the much bigger new southbound platform for the Northern line, which will make interchanges shorter and create more space for passengers. Creating that requires building an entirely new tunnel for this stretch of the line. If you’ve ever wondered about the doors to nowhere on the wrong side of the platform, they’re part of this grand plan.
Image: TfL, via Ian Visits.
Most of this tunnel has already been dug – but the old track needs to be taken up and converted into platform space, with the help of some extra concrete, before it can be linked up and used by trains. At the same time, that new platform needs to be fitted out with information points, advertising hoardings, and all the other things we expect tube stations to have without particularly paying attention to them. All this takes time, and can’t be done with trains running or passengers milling about, so the line is closing. For 17 weeks.
What will this do to services?
The city branch will still run, sort of. But it’ll terminate at Moorgate, one stop north of Bank and the only point on that section of the line where trains can reverse. That means four stations (Bank, London Bridge, Borough, Elephant & Castle) will have no Northern line services at all for four months.
There’ll also be fewer trains on what is left of the City branch, since there’ll be less demand. More will run on the West End/Charing Cross branch instead.
Is this going to screw commuters?
Well, for those whose commute actually ends in the City, probably not too badly. From the north, you can walk from Moorgate easily enough. From the south, there are other routes available via the West End branch (Jubilee or mainline to London Bridge, say, or Central to Bank). And TfL is anyway laying on an extra bus replacement route, the 733 from Oval to the City. Basically, if your commute only involved the Northern line, you’re fine.
The problem is, a lot of people’s commutes don’t only involve the Northern line. If you use it and then change to another line running east or west, you could be in trouble. Sure, they’re laying on more trains on the West End branch, but it isn’t going to be twice as many. It’s going to get cosy.
The TfL website suggests that 21 stations will be busy, 10 as very busy, and four (Embankment, Tottenham Court Road, Waterloo, London Bridge) as exceptionally busy. All these last, you’ll notice, are interchange stations. Good luck.
That same page, incidentally, proposes a range of alternative options. Some (cycle more, you lardarse) are sensible if scary. Some (going to Canary Wharf? Try the DLR via Bank, which no longer has a Northern line) are baffling.
Why couldn’t they do it during the pandemic?
This is not an entirely silly question. The country did shut down for months on end, but transport workers were considered key workers. So why didn’t this happen then, too?
The short answer is, even if transport workers were still going to work, construction workers – the people who’d actually have to build this thing – were not. This is entirely sensible, given that sticking a lot of people close together in an enclosed space is basically the quickest way to generate a superspreader event.
“But the Battersea extension continued!” some people have argued. It didn’t – a “safe stop” was implemented, just as with Bank/Monument. The reason it finished earlier is because it’s a less complicated project.
TfL’s line, though its press team are polite enough not to put it in quite these terms, is basically that the comfort of Londoners’ commuters isn’t quite as important as not giving a lot of construction workers covid. And fair enough.
How many stations is Bank/Monument, exactly?
The standard assumption, drawn from the tube map, is that it’s two different but linked stations. Operationally, though, Transport for London treats it as one, single complex on the grounds that, well, it’s actually one, single complex. Because I’m so bleedin’ special, though, I don’t agree with either of these. I think it’s actually three – and that it might make more sense on the map if we brought in a fourth.
To explain this, here’s our map, with a link to a larger version.
A plan of the complex. Full version available here. Image: TfL.
On the left are the Central line platforms, which lie under Bank junction. Just below/to the west of that is the Waterloo & City line. Moving to the right, you can see the Northern and DLR platforms, and then in the top right/south east is Monument.
Here’s a much stripped down version, courtesy of Andrew Godwin:
Image: Andrew Godwin/creative commons, via Londonist.
Based on the station’s actual layout, as opposed to the names we call things because we’ve always used them, I would say it would make more sense to think of this as three stations: Bank (the Central & Waterloo & City lines), Monument (the District and Circle) and Bank/Monument (the Northern line and DLR, which physically connect the other two). Actually describing them as such would give more of a sense of how to navigate the station’s eternally confusing layout, and warn people that it’s generally a bad idea to try to change from, say, the District to the Central.
Things are about to get even more complicated, however. The new entrance to Bank station – which, you’ll recall, is one of the things all the current closure hullabaloo is actually about – will be on Cannon Street, a mere 150 metres from (this’ll shock you) Cannon Street station, the next stop round the Circle line from Monument. That brings a bunch of suburban and regional rail services into contention, too. Or it would, except the entrance to Bank station on Walbrook is actually even closer. That’s been open for some time, only I can never remember which lines it’s actually useful for – Waterloo & City, as it turns out – and if you get the wrong one you’re stuffed.
The new plans at ground level. The big pink block in the middle is the new entrance. Image: TfL.
In fact, Cannon Street tube station – which is suspiciously close to both Monument and Mansion House, and quite obviously only exists because someone built a main line rail terminal on top of it – is actually closer as the crow flies to Bank than Monument is. As things stand, this connection is already recognised by the ticketing system – you can change from national rail to tube on a single ticket using a so-called OSI (out of station interchange). It is not recognised by the map, however, even though it’s incredibly useful if you’re travelling from Canary Wharf to, say, Kent.
This is not the most complex station in the world. Châtelet–Les Halles is the name of a Parisian RER station, but is informally used to label an entire complex served by three RER lines and five metro lines, and containing both the RER station and two metro ones. Both Châtelet and Les Halles metro stations are actually on line 4, which means that you can, if you want, get a train within the station. You'd be able to do that in London, too, if Cannon Street were ever properly connected to Bank/Monument – or, indeed, if Crossrail 2 with its threat of a Euston/St Pancras station beneath the British Library comes to pass. In fact, you'd be able to do it via more than one line. Which is just showing off.
Anyway. The addition of a new entrance to Bank seems to me to be a good moment to rethink how TfL shows the entire Bank/Monument/Cannon Street thing on the map, positioning blobs to make it clear which changes are easy and which to be avoided at all costs. If they had any sense, they’d also rename some bits of the station Bank/Monument to aid with that, too, but since, in the event it ever opens, the artist formerly known as Crossrail will have a Liverpool Street station that also connects to Moorgate and a Farringdon one with a Barbican exit, I don’t imagine they will.
No one ever listens to me.
That’s the last of this year’s Christmas specials: next week, our normal service, of weekly emails for paying subscribers and monthly-ish ones for everybody else, resumes.
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Either way, happy new year to you and yours. I hope 2022 is… well, a bit better, really.