Saturday 29 December 2007

How Green Park works

"What on earth is this horrendous tunnel for?" you sigh to yourself, as you once again make the mistake of changing between lines at Green Park. In an effort to figure out exactly how bad interchange here is, I've done a few laps of the station and come up with this diagram.

It turns out interchange between the Jubilee and Victoria is perfectly reasonable, but anything involving the Piccadilly Line sends you down one of the long tunnels. Changing between the Victoria and the Piccadilly you can avoid a long walk by going up to the ticket hall and back. But between the Jubilee and the Piccadilly a long walk is inevitable and you should avoid journeys that need it (unless you need to use lifts, because then it's the only interchange you can do here). The Jubilee Line is also long trek from the street.

A few notes: I used the Green Park drawing from here as a starting point, so while the Piccadilly and Victoria lines are likely to be accurate the Jubilee Line location is pure guesswork. The parallel grey lines are escalators, the stripey bits are stairs and the black squares are lifts. If it isn't obvious, all escalators go down in the direction away from the ticket hall.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

A sneaky way to get accurate plans of stations is to find the fire alarm control panel; it's usually exposed to public view, and has a plan of the station stuck to it. I don't know if this is the case at Green Park, nor how staff would respond to you taking a photo of it!

-- tom

Anonymous said...

One can still change between the Piccadilly and Jubilee Lines via the ticket hall. Indeed, this is how one used to have to make the interchange, before the Jubilee extension opened and, with it, the long interchange tunnel.

Anonymous said...

Have you ever noticed the mosaic tiling on the Jube-Piccadilly tunnel? At the Jubilee end, all the tiles are either grey or white. At the Piccadilly end, they're Piccadilly blue or white. As you walk between the ends, the proportion of blue to grey tiles changes.

Cunning, eh?

Anonymous said...

Thanks for bringing this up:

There are some weird things underground in the area - given its proximity to who knows what hush hush buildings - this might explain the eccentric routing.

Also, it always always smells of 'old moppets' - dishcloths which have gone off - whenever I've used it.