Walking the Circle Line: Barbican to Moorgate
I am walking London Underground’s Circle Line. On the tube it ordinarily it takes a little over an hour. I’ll be doing it on foot, taking slow pinhole photographs, between two stations at a time, so figure that it may take 26 days spread over several months.
The official map hides a fundamental lie: the Circle Line is not a circle. In reality it twists and turns, dives and rises, meanders around the London in anything but a neat oval. As one of the earliest built lines, it runs very shallow and in many parts is open to the air. So I will walk the real route, interested in seeing if I can tell where the line was made to follow the road, or where roads were made above the line. Of course I can not walk on the actual line, the goal is to take photographs no more than 50 yards from it.
I start my journey at Barbican, aiming for Moorgate several hundred yards away. As I’m taking my first photograph a couple stops to chat about the strange contraption that I use to take these photos.
The Barbican is a special place on the line. Firstly, I live in the eponymous building complex that straddles the Circle line at this point. The complex has a well-reknowned arts centre inside, but since the raised paths (Highwalks) are a labyrinth even to locals, some method had to be found to direct visitors. So 2-inch wide bright yellow lines offer the way. Convenient for me, because it somewhat follows the underground.
Almost directly under the location of the previous photo, above is the Beech street tunnel. Using a pinhole camera is a slow affair. This exposure is a good 15 minutes. Several hundred cars pass, leaving no trace on the film. People pass and stare. Every 60 seconds or so I feel the rumble under my feet of a train passing.
I notice the scene below, and wonder if the tube is trying to work its way above ground.
The Blitz in WWII was not kind to this area. Many plans to rejuvenate the area were advanced, but the common element to all was that the Circle Line must remain running through the area. Photographs taken during construction show the tube as an artery under surgery. An ingenious solution was found to the potential noise problem. First, raise the Barbican a good 20-40ft from the ground, and most importantly, build a lake over the top. The photograph below shows the Barbican Lake directly above the Circle Line. I watch several ducks while four minutes pass and the sheet of film exposes.
The yellow line eventually leads you out toward Moorgate station, past gangs of skateboarders armed with digital video cameras.
My destination this afternoon, Moorgate Station.
It seems like an anorak thing to do, but I’ve put the photos on the map below. It seems strange to me that photographers are so guarded about the locations in which they take their photographs. Few will admit it, but finding a Decisive Location is as precious as wandering across a Decisive Moment.
Someone in the comments wondered exactly where the old (pre-barbican) and new (post-barbican) underground lines were. I’ve scanned in a photo from a great book I have, ‘Barbican: Penthouse over the city’ (David Heathcote), the photo is uncredited. The photo shows the barbican under construction when the line was diverted slightly. I’ve shown where the above photos were taken and where the Lake is now. This is the view from Moorgate looking back to Barbican. David Heathcote’s caption is that the new underground section "should be capable of carrying an armoured train and that the passage of trains should be as silent as possible, which led the engineer to deisgn a suspension system for the track". There you go then.
