A couple of weeks back, I went on a virtual journey. I took a tour round Brompton Road tube station. Never heard of it? It's not surprising. It was probably before your time. But if you ever travel between Knightsbridge and South Kensington on the Piccadilly line, you pass along what’s left of its platform. Which is the only way to get to what’s left of the station. Other than virtually.
Brompton Road’s life as a tube station was brief. It opened in 1906 and closed less than 20 years later. It was never busy. And after a while, it was attracting so few customers that it became a request stop. But there weren’t many requests. So on leaving either South Kensington or Knightsbridge (depending on whether you were travelling east or west), you’d more often than not hear the conductor call out “Passing Brompton Road” to let you know that the train wouldn’t be stopping at the next station.
The phrase "Passing Brompton Road" passed into common London parlance as a metaphor for life passing one by. It even spawned a play of that name which ran at the Criterion Theatre. A “light bright farce” said the Daily Mail's theatre critic, about a woman whose life wasn’t turning out as she’d hoped and who decided to take dramatic steps to change things.
At times, this year, I’ve felt a bit like Brompton Road. Lots of exciting plans. None turning out as I expected. Life passing me by. I decided to turn my enforced sabbatical from work into an exciting opportunity to experiment with creative writing. But I started things. And abandoned them. Or didn't feel like writing at all. I doubted I'd produce anything remotely creative. And lay on the sofa watching box sets. Then I got enthusiastic about another idea. Only to decide that wasn’t going anywhere either.
But creativity is a bit like that. You just have to keep trying things out. Going through the process until something worthwhile comes along. The thing was, I was expecting this thing to be a novel. Or a piece of non-fiction. Or a newspaper column. But actually, it had very little to do with writing at all. Among all this start-stop stuff, an interest sneaked up on me. Something I saw as a distraction from what I was "meant" to be doing.
It really began a couple of years ago when I wanted to do something different for my friend Vikki’s 60th birthday (and funnily enough it was Vikki who gave me the Brompton Road virtual tour for my 60th birthday). I created a personalised walking tour around Holland Park and Ladbroke Grove digging out weird and wonderful stories both recent and historical. Since then, I’ve developed several of these walks – covering the East End, Southwark, Ealing, my local stretch of the Grand Union Canal and a pan-London music tour. And there are more in the pipeline. It’s not the straight history of a place that inspires me. It’s the odd facts and unusual tales. Like the one about the Brompton Road. Life hadn't been passing me by after all.
And actually, life didn’t pass Brompton Road by either. Three years after it closed, war broke out. And the War Office turned it into the headquarters of London’s anti-aircraft defences. A giant wall map of London, showing the position of the anti-aircraft batteries, still adorns the wall. Various military organisations continued to use it right up until the 50s. And now it provides virtual entertainment for people like me. I’m not sure whether I'll end up doing anything with my walks. But they are fun. And if a tube station can morph into a defence hub, anything is possible.