The Exits at Bank Station part 2

Well, that was interesting. I went down to Whitechapel for some sage guidance from the wise Adam Brichto of brickwallfilms (doing all sorts of exciting things in films), and on the way back I thought I'd spend a few minutes making a little guide to what happens when the unwitting traveller tries to leave Bank station. I'd love to say it was an easy undertaking, but quite frankly what happened was even more bizarre than I could have imagined. Having spent an entire hour going from exit to exit underground in the rush hour, I can attest the following with absolute certainty:

1) Once you get off the train, the only sane course of action is to head for the nearest exit. However long the traffic lights take to change above ground, you will never save time going underground. Unless it's raining fire, there's just no excuse. I have checked. It's just not worth it.

2) The morons who built the subway system for Bank station were both very evil and very very stupid, masters of the blind alley, the misleading sign and the completely purposeless line drawing. They hate you.

3) There is only one document in the entire world that explains what to do at Bank Station. And you can only get it in one place. Bank Station. It's called "Continuing your journey from Bank" which is nice. It's by no means perfect, but it does show you where the exits are, more or less.

I'm sure this breaches some copyright laws, but I'm putting it up on this site. Only not yet, because the blog is buggering around. I'll try again later. And after that, I'll put up a little sub-site showing what you actually see when you walk out of Bank Station.

You lucky people.

The Exits at Bank Station

This is just infuriating. I'm doing a walk this Sunday for the City of London Guides, and most of the nearby Underground Stations are closed. So I'm trying to direct people from Bank station, but it's nearly impossible because nobody has a list of where the exits from Bank station are. There are 9 of them, and for the uninitiated or those with no sense of direction, it can be very confusing. It's bad enough that Bank is an evil, twisting spaghetti junction underground. But this apparent refusal to allow people to leave in the direction they would like is simply wrong.

So here, for the benefit of anyone who wants to know, and because it's taken me a long time that I could easily have spent doing something much more useful, is the complete (as far as I know) list of exits from the Bank station booking hall.

Exit 1:....

actually I can't do this. I can't find it. I'm going to have to go to Bank and check. and take photos. and report back. But I will. And I'm going to do it for all the other exits from Tube stations in the City as well. Because quite frankly, this is annoying me.

to digress for a moment...

"Again they walked on in silence. They were nearing Clerkenwell Close, and had to pass a corner of the prison in a dark lane, where the wind moaned drearily. The line of the high blank wall was relieved in colourless gloom against a sky of sheer night. Opposite, the shapes of poverty-eaten houses and grimy workshops stood huddling in the obscurity. From near at hand came shrill voices of children chasing each other about--children playing at midnight between slum and gaol."

The Nether World by George Gissing, an almost unrelentingly miserable novel, yet beautiful, written by a man who married twice and very ill-advisedly, and was dead before the age of 50 from emphysema.

This Saturday I am undertaking a walk through Clerkenwell, the setting of the Nether World, an area of London that resonates with sadness and misery, and it's a place I really have a huge fondness for. Having just read The Nether World, I am even more caught up in the shoddy romance of the place. Hopefully, some of this partiality will come across this weekend, and I can feel that I have satisfied the rigours of my craft and entertained my audience. The most difficult thing is to fulfill one's own expectations. I want to cram into two hours some of the fascination with which I regard this corner of the city, the awe in which I hold its winding alleys and misshapen walls, and if not those then at least the joy in its strange stories and the lives of its endlessly fascinating inhabitants. And yet I fear that all I can convey is something vaguely entertaining about a history too remote to grasp. Perhaps I should have a watchword, so that I can muster, from the damp bricks of Corporation Row, from the curving path of Ray Street and the sunlight streaming down on Mount Pleasant some sense of the long and torrid path human experience has taken in these streets and fields, of the closeness of their lives to our own. Perhaps it should be "Gissing", as a tribute to the great man's grasp on the Hogarthian, effortlessly Londonish grime of Clerkenwell. Thanks George.

My walk is at Farringdon Station, 2pm this Saturday.