Walk with the Ramblers from Checkendon, 7.5 miles

Sunday 21 January

Another walk with the Mid Berks group, organized by Robert, whom I’d chatted to on the Lower Earley walk a couple of weeks earlier. There were only four of us on this walk – me, Robert, Alison, who’d also been on the Lower Earley walk, and a guy of about my age called Douglas, who works in financial services for Bloomberg and commutes to their City office a couple of times a week. (I did comment that I’d been in the basement of his building and what a lovely job Bloomberg have done with the Mithraeum. I might be remembering wrong but I’m sure he said something about having had to do a Mithraeum Quiz as part of his induction. That might have been a joke, I suppose.)

This walk started and finished in Checkendon, a village about eight miles north of Caversham and about a 15-minute drive. We met in a small car park by a recreation ground. To get there, I made use of what3words for the first time – it worked very well.

From the car park, we crossed the road and took a path across a field, stopping to look back at Checkendon Court. We then took country lanes towards Hammond’s Wood, turning left before we got to it and crossing over the A4074. Before we got to the road, Robert pointed out John Buckley’s ‘Nuba Survival’ sculpture in the distance over at Hammond’s Farm.

Shortly afterwards we had a bit of a conundrum as the footpath is signed through the grounds of a property called Massey’s Pightle, but there was also an enticing sign next to it informing us that there were dogs running loose. We decided to skip that and carried on up the lane, which joined the footpath a short way on, though when we looked back the way we’d come there was a sign sternly saying “Field Cottage Only”. Clearly the two properties are fighting it out as to who likes walkers less.

Looking back at Checkendon Court

We followed footpaths through Woodcote and then took a path leading through the grounds of the Oratory School – in fact the right of way leads right past the front of the main school building. After passing the school buildings, we walked towards a bank of trees running alongside the A4074 and down a set of deep steps down to the road, which we crossed (again) and went up a set of steps on the other side. I’d guess these steps aren’t all that well used – I’d never noticed them when driving past (you wouldn’t, really; also, it’s a dangerous stretch of road and you’d do well to have your eyes on it) but did locate them on Google Maps/Street View later. Here are the ones on the Oratory School side of the road:

From Exlade Street we followed the path through fields up to Corker’s Lane and then turned right and into woodland, where we stopped and sat on a fallen tree trunk to eat lunch.

Field near Exlade Street

Woods

After lunch we carried on through the woods to Busgrove Lane, and then walked uphill through woodland towards Wyfold Court. Our route didn’t pass close by the house, though we did pause to get a glimpse through the trees of its turrety exuberance.

Wyfold Court just about visible through trees

Here’s a much closer-up picture that I took on a walk with Ray back in 2014.

We completed the walk via Basset Wood and Ipsden Wood back to Checkendon.

Route of the walk:

Walk with the Ramblers around Lower Earley and Earley, 4.4 miles

Sunday 7 January

I think I joined the Ramblers towards the end of the lockdown era, probably fired up with some desire to do some regular group activities, as well as discovering some new footpaths I wouldn’t have discovered by myself. However, although I’ve been enjoying receiving the quarterly magazine, with its invaluable sock rash tips, as at the start of 2024 I’d only actually been out on two walks, a pleasant ‘Caversham Byways’ walk with the Pang Valley group, in January 2022, and then another walk in September 2022 with the ‘Berkshire Weekend Walkers’, a rather faster-paced 10-mile country route from Kintbury via Inkpen (written up by the walk leader here as walk 537). But that’s managed to be it.

Copies of 'Walk', the Ramblers' quarterly magazine

The organization now seems to be known just as the ‘Ramblers’. Perhaps they felt the ‘Association’ bit was offputting for today’s younger folk - not that I have so far been on a Ramblers walk that included anyone much under about 45. I note in fairness that among the Berkshire groups there is one specifically for people in their 20s and 30s, which is probably a good idea in terms of attracting younger people - I don't suppose in my twenties I'd have wanted to go walking with a bunch of elderlies, much as you do meet some very interesting older people in the Ramblers.

Anyway, in a fit of New Year re-evaluating life/banging head against table etc, I decided I would try and make more use of my membership and actually get out for more group walks. The walk I chose was a gentle start, billed as ‘Leisurely’ and a modest length of only four and a half miles. This was a walk around Earley and Lower Earley, with the Mid Berks group. Lower Earley is an enormous housing development on the SE edge of Reading, apparently reckoned to be the largest private housing development in the UK at the time it was developed in the 80s/90s. (Indeed, this Wikimapia page reckons it was the biggest in western Europe, but it's hard to verify these sorts of stats.) I lived there for a year in the early 1990s in a rented house share with my sister Hannah. Here I am in the doorway of the house we rented (I appear to be wearing just a shirt and tights, but I suspect I had a short skirt on – ah, far off youth). It was quite a nice house and a pleasant enough area.

Me outside our rented house in Beighton Close, Lower Earley

For this walk we met in a car park by Chalfont Park in Lower Earley, near the Asda complex. I turned up early – having chosen to get the bus and therefore been limited to its timings – and a youngish (40s) chap also waiting in the car park eventually sidled up to me and we established that we were both there for the walk. Eventually around 10-12 people turned up for the walk, led by a spry 70-something lady called Jean, who has lived in the Earley area around 50 years and therefore seen the whole Lower Earley development be built up. She was able to tell us lots of interesting stuff including niche stuff such as which footpaths used to be through roads, which is exactly the sort of info I like.

We started off by walking past Asda and out onto Elm Lane, one of several former roads that are now no longer through routes for cars. Then crossed Rushey Way and proceeded partly along paths and partly along quiet estate roads to the Laurel Park recreation ground, which we walked along the edge of and then into the Maiden Erlegh Nature Reserve, which includes a lake. I assume that this nature reserve was originally part of the grounds of Maiden Erlegh House.

Maiden Erlegh Lake

After the lake we turned back towards Lower Earley, taking in Radstock Lane, another former road now partly footpath. Towards the end of the walk we did a circuit of Redhatch Copse and walked through the newish housing that’s been built on the site of the former Sibly Hall, one of Reading University’s halls of residence and somewhere I lived for a term while I was studying there in the 1990s (being on some sort of quest for the first half of that decade of pointlessly moving house as often as possible). Sibly was a somewhat bleak building that rose like some sort of beacon among the sea of housing that surrounded it. It was demolished around ten years ago and the company responsible posted a video on YouTube of the demolition - somewhat tastelessly to my mind, but I guess they need to advertise their services.

Another view of the lake

Definitely felt afterwards as though I'd taken part in some constructive activity/mixing, so we'll see if this continues. 

Route of the walk:

More books read recently

'A Favourite of the Gods' by Sybille Bedford

I had never heard of Sybille Bedford until Ruth picked up a biography of her a while back (Selina Hastings' An Appetite for Life) after reading a review of it. At around the same time, Mum’s book group read this novel as one of their book choices. Ruth recommends the biography, but as it doesn’t make much sense to me to read a biography of a writer without having read any of their books, I thought I would read this first. I seem to have written far too long and rambling a review of this moderately dull novel, but I can’t be bothered to edit any further so here it is.

The novel opens in the late 1920s. 15-year-old Flavia and her mother Constanza are on a train, travelling from Italy to Brussels. They have just crossed into France, where they are planning to change at Nice to pick up the express train, when Constanza discovers she has lost a ruby ring she was wearing. Seemingly most of the train’s staff get involved in looking for the ring, while Flavia and Constanza miss their stop at Nice (because Constanza refuses to get off the train without her ring) and carry on through various stops along the French coast. They eventually get off at a small unnamed coastal town where they book in to the local hotel. At Brussels, Constanza was to meet up with Lewis, the man she was due to marry, while Flavia was to carry on to England for educational purposes. However, the Prologue ends with Flavia noting that they stayed where they were for eleven years.

Part I is set in Rome and looks back over Flavia’s American grandmother Anna’s marriage to her father, a prince. It details, somewhat tediously, Anna’s wealth, beauty and abilities to charm anyone she comes across, and also relates how beautiful, spirited and clever her daughter Constanza was. Part I ends with Anna, having finally been told of her husband’s 20-year-long affair of which everyone else in Rome already knew, seeking legal advice and leaving Rome for London. She leaves her younger child Giorgio with his father, but takes Constanza with her, additionally setting up some legal thing that prevents Constanza’s father Rico from having any access to his daughter. Constanza has to say goodbye to her father, who has been a decent enough man to risk losing his daughter rather than use her as a bargaining chip. We feel sorry for Rico – at least, I did.

Part II is set in London, where Anna and Constanza have now settled. Constanza throws herself into London social life and has a good time. (We later learn that even Rico’s daughter knew about the affair of which her mother was oblivious.) In due course Constanza meets a young Englishman, Simon Herbert, who has lived in Rome and is acquainted with her father. World War I breaks out. After the end of the war, Simon asks Constanza for a divorce in order to marry his lover (Constanza has been taking lovers for a while now, but doesn’t seem about to request a divorce on the strength of that. Perhaps that was being Italian for you).

In Part III, Constanza flits about Europe. Anna continues taking a different house according to the season, before eventually settling back in Italy after the war ends. The story ends by joining up with the Prologue, with Constanza and Flavia living at the (possibly fictional) French fishing port of St-Jean-le-Sauveur. This section is pleasantly atmospheric, with talk of villas, sardines, red wine – and ends with Constanza meeting yet another new beau. (I admired Constanza’s distaste for being anyone’s wife, and unwillingness to be tied down – desires that, presumably, wealth would have made it much easier to indulge.)

I reasonably liked the book – in the sense that it’s well written, nothing wrong with it, etc – but it stops only just short of being quite boring. Bedford litters the novel with a number of Italian (and occasionally French) words that necessitated a pause while I asked Google to translate them. And even a few English words – while I consider myself to have a good vocabulary, I was stumped on “persiflage”.

I assume the title of the book refers to Constanza, the more-or-less heroine, though Constanza’s mother Anna also plays a significant part in the novel. Anna is the most atrocious person – she manipulates those around her by sulking, taking to her bed and refusing to eat whenever she is annoyed at something. She spitefully burns a letter from Rico seeking a brief audience with Constanza in London, threatening a court injunction to prevent him having access to his daughter, leaving Constanza to draw the conclusion that her father simply does not want to see her. After her death in the later stages of the novel, she delivers a coup de grâce by having hand-delivered to Constanza an envelope containing what turns out to be a revised version of her will leaving all of her considerable estate to Constanza’s feckless brother Giorgio as a last act of spite. I liked Constanza on the whole, though I wanted to shake her for some of her decision-making – she irritatingly agrees to be the Guilty Party in the divorce in order to save Simon’s fledgling parliamentary career when it is Simon who has requested the divorce and loses custody of Flavia to her mother as a result, and, more horrifically, when presented with Anna’s revised will after Anna’s death, considers that it is legal and she must abide by her mother’s wishes, even though it would have left her more or less destitute. Luckily, only Constanza and Flavia know about the revised will and, sensing her mother’s indecision, Flavia burns it and tells her mother it blew off the veranda into the sea. Thank God for Flavia.

A Favourite of the Gods was published in 1963. Sybille Bedford was born in 1911 in Germany, to wealthy parents, but seems to have lived most of her life elsewhere. This Spectator review of Hastings' biography calls it a soundtrack “to one version of the 20th century”, a reference to Bedford's privileged background and lifestyle. This novel’s moneyed heroines, who take houses and flats in whichever European city takes their fancy with no concern for the cost, seem to fit with that.

'Remarkable Creatures' by Tracy Chevalier

Enjoyable story based on the real-life fossil-hunting activities of Mary Anning in and around Lyme Regis in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chevalier outlines in a postscript which bits of the story are based on fact and where artistic licence was taken. The story focuses on the friendship between Anning and fellow fossil-hunter Elizabeth Philpot and is told from their alternating perspectives.

Elizabeth Philpot is one of three unmarried sisters living together in a cottage in Lyme Regis, funded by an allowance from their married brother John, a solicitor. The sisters have been obliged to leave London to live somewhere that will enable a reasonable standard of living; John is evidently under obligation to provide an annual allowance for them but this would not have stretched far in the capital. The younger Mary Anning is a working-class girl, the daughter of a cabinet-maker who dies prematurely leaving the family in poverty. Philpot first meets her outside Mary’s father’s workshop, tending a table of fossils to be sold as curiosities (“curies”). Despite their age and class difference, the two strike up a friendship based on their shared interest in fossils. Elizabeth focuses on collecting fossils of fish, to add to her personal collection; Mary, unable to indulge in such hobbies as collecting, looks for anything she might be able to sell to improve her family’s finances.

One day Mary finds what seems to be the skull of a much larger creature, an icthyosaurus (though Mary initially terms it a crocodile, and later an “ichie”), which attracts the attention of people beyond Lyme Regis. Much of the rest of the story focuses on Elizabeth’s attempts to ensure Mary gets fairly paid for her finds, which are by now enhancing others’ collections, and to get Mary recognition from the men-only world of fossil collecting and the scientific study of fossils; this culminates in Elizabeth stoutly travelling alone to London and trying to gain entry to a Geological Society meeting (women aren’t allowed in) in order to defend Mary against an accusation that she has faked a plesiosaurus skeleton by sticking together bits of two separate creatures.

It hadn't occurred to me that the question of what fossils represented might have raised thorny and controversial issues vis à vis Christian belief: if fossils were the bodies of creatures that no longer existed, did that mean that God could think better of some of his creations and allow them to die out? Her faith a bit shaken, Elizabeth consults the local vicar, who won’t have any truck with such notions and advises her that God placed the fossils in the rocks when he made them, in order to test people’s faith. Elizabeth leaves unconvinced, but with her faith in the vicar a bit shaken.

'The Rake's Mistress' by Nicola Cornick

A Mills & Boon Historical romance.

It’s 1803. Rebecca Raleigh is a glass engraver, living alone above her workshop in Clerkenwell. Rebecca learned her trade from her uncle, who ran the workshop and died a few months before the story opens. Since her uncle’s death, the business has lost custom and Rebecca has fallen on increasingly hard times. Her friend Nan gets her a lifeline in the form of a lucrative engraving commission from the Archangel Club, an exclusive London club for gentlemen of “exotic tastes”. After a meeting at the Archangel to discuss the commission, Rebecca is being driven home in one of the club’s coaches when she runs across Lord Stephen Kestrel, an upper-crust young man who has been the victim of a prank that has resulted in him being stranded in the street in a state of partial undress. Through this encounter with Stephen, Rebecca meets Stephen’s older brother Lucas, who initially wrongly assumes Rebecca to be a courtesan who has seduced his brother, leading to their having a fiery exchange within the carriage. Turning up at Rebecca’s workshop the next day to return the cloak she’d lent Stephen to cover himself, Lucas ends up placing an order for some engraved glass as a wedding present for another of his brothers. Lucas and Rebecca are increasingly overtaken by strong feelings for each other and, after rescuing Rebecca from a masked ball at which she has rejected the advances of the unpleasant Lord Fremantle, they spend a passionate night together.

However, although Lucas’ attraction to Rebecca is real enough, he has an additional motivation in pursuing an acquaintance with her. He and his brothers, led by their oldest brother Justin, Duke of Kestrel (yes, I know) are engaged in trying to crack a spy ring operating from the Suffolk ‘Midwinter’ villages, where the Kestrels’ home is. The spy ring communicates via a pictorial code and the code’s cipher is engraved on glass. Lucas has been doing the rounds of London’s glass engravers to try to identify the style of engraving that will match the examples of the code that the Kestrels have in their possession. In Rebecca’s workshop, he spots what he is pretty sure is the style of engraving they are looking for, on some pieces engraved by Rebecca’s late uncle George Provost. The Kestrels need to trace the identity of the person who placed those orders with the studio. Feeling guilty, and under pressure from the Duke to get more use out of Rebecca as she seems to be their only possible link to the spy ring, Lucas fesses up to Rebecca regarding his underlying motive to gain information from her. Rebecca is angry and lobs a good many fiery words at him. Lucas also declares that he wishes to marry her, and Rebecca tells him not to be so ridiculous. Lucas takes her by force to the Kestrels’ townhouse in Mayfair for a discussion with the Duke and the Kestrels’ friends Lord and Lady Newlyn. The outcome of these discussions is that Rebecca agrees to accompany the party to Suffolk, posing as a cousin of the Duke.

Lucas is convinced that Rebecca is telling the truth about her ignorance of anything to do with the spy ring, but senses that she is holding back information about her family background. Rebecca becomes agitated when questioned by Lucas about her brother Daniel, disclosing that Daniel is at sea but allowing Lucas to think that he is in the Navy when Lucas suspects this not to be the case. Additionally, both Lucas and Justin spot that Rebecca’s manner and level of assurance while in the Kestrels’ London home is not consistent with her being from a working background. In due course the Kestrel brothers find out that Rebecca’s family name is De Lancey, that her father was English gentry who married a French Huguenot girl and assumed her name as a way of sticking two fingers to his Parliamentarian father and that Rebecca's brother Daniel is a privateer and possible French spy. Lucas reacts badly to this and challenges Rebecca angrily, and they have another falling out.

The following day, while out in a nearby harbour town, Rebecca gets herself abducted by local gent Sir John Horton who is evidently aware of her true identity. Turns out John, plus local couple Lord and Lady Benedict, are the actual spies. They set sail in a yacht with Rebecca locked downstairs, but there’s heavy mist and the yacht runs aground. In a splendidly ridiculous sequence, Rebecca unscrews the glass of one of the portholes with her engraving scribe, climbs out, jumps into the water just as the yacht capsizes, and swims for it; as luck would have it, she is rescued by her brother’s ship which appears out of the mist in the nick of time and throws down a rope for her to climb up, which she manages to do despite presumably being weighed down by long skirts. Onboard, Daniel – who doesn’t spy for the French, he’s just an excitingly free-spirited outlaw – persuades Rebecca that Lucas is known to be an OK chap and that marrying him would probably be a good idea given that she’s poor and alone and all, and he (Daniel) is away at sea. On Rebecca's arrival back at Kestrel Court, Lucas declares his love for her and proposes again, and this time Rebecca agrees.

I enjoy the occasional romance novel and this isn’t a bad one. Lucas is a pretty attractive hero and the epilogue, in which Cornick additionally provides the austere Duke with a bit of romance, is a nice touch. TRM was apparently the third book in the ‘Bluestocking Brides’ series, the earlier two being The Notorious Lord (about Cory Newlyn) and One Night of Scandal (about the second Kestrel brother, Richard). (We learn on page thirteen of The Rake’s Mistress that Stephen Kestrel has two sisters in addition to his three brothers, but the sisters do not appear in the novel at any point. Maybe they do in the others. Or maybe I shouldn’t be too exacting towards a M&B). A close friend of mine may have just ordered both from the Amazon Marketplace. Well, these winter evenings are long and dark.

Urban footpaths walk with Ray, 7 miles

Sunday 3 September

Back in September, but just sorting through some photos.

This was a walk around Green Park followed by walking back into Reading via the Coley water meadows. Much of this was on footpaths I’d never been on before, not all very attractive - but always interesting to discover new paths.

Following my earlier train ride to the new Green Park station back in July, Ray fancied a ride out to it too, so we took the train there from Reading. We started with a breakfast sandwich at the Triple Two café – the café’s in a nice setting but the service and presentation were distinctly limp. Our sausage sandwiches were well filled but in some remarkably dry sourdough bread that needed some application to get through.

After the café we crossed Longwater Avenue and joined the path straight opposite. We turned off past the Thales UK building and walked down the west side of the central ‘Longwater’ lake, coming out further down Longwater Avenue. We paused by the somewhat pointless-seeming mini-roundabout in the SW corner of the business park, near where Kybes Lane/Kirtons Farm Road crosses the M4. A lane leads off the roundabout, under the road bridge and into what looks from Google Maps to be an area of undeveloped land. I have a feeling that the original plan for Green Park was never fully realized – perhaps it was originally supposed to extend into this area? No idea what the plan is for this land now.

The pointless roundabout

Lane leading under bridge to undeveloped area

It's the land in this 2009 photo published by a Geograph contributor. I'm not sure it's much further on now in terms of development.

We continued along Longwater Avenue and then along South Oak way, past the Green Park Mast. Further on we were briefly diverted by the massive queue of cars waiting to get into Costco. Just before Costco, we turned left onto a secluded path leading alongside a small waterway (or possibly just a ditch) and round the back of the Lime Square development. We crossed Brook Drive and the Foudry Brook and made our way back out to Longwater Avenue.

The secluded path

The end of the path

The Foudry Brook rises in north Hampshire and joins the river Kennet at Whitley, in an unglamorous spot between the A33 and a retail park. This poor little stream evidently suffers from poor water quality due to receiving treated effluent from several sewage works along its route. The ever-charming Thames Water were "criticised" earlier this year for pumping sewage into the brook. A few harsher penalties wouldn't go amiss.

We left Green Park via Smallmead Road, coming out on the bend where Kybes Lane becomes Kirton's Farm Road. There's a derelict house on this corner - some research involving the invaluable Geograph suggests that it's Smallmead Cottages.

The derelict house(s)

Street View image of the other side

Since this 2013 Geograph picture, the tree/plant growth has been cleared and the door and ground floor windows have been boarded up. Wonder what its future is - and when it was last occupied.

After looking at the cottages we crossed the bridge over the railway line and a bit further on turned right off the road onto Cottage Lane, which leads north past fishing lakes to the River Kennet. It's a surfaced road for the first stretch, becoming a footpath further on.

Cottage Lane

After it becomes a footpath

The path eventually joined the Kennet towpath near Southcote Lock. We turned right and headed in the Reading direction, past Fobney Island, which has the River Kennet flowing to its south and a canalised stretch to the north, as per the pic.

Following the canal towpath towards Fobney Lock

At Fobney Lock we crossed the bridge that leads past the old pumping station and then turned left onto a wet footpath with a high fence on both sides - this cuts through the Fobney Water Treatment Works. This path isn't too pleasant and was flooded at one point - Ray managed to construct us a makeshift crossing by kicking a handy fence panel, plank or similar (I've forgotten) into position. It was a relief to come out onto meadow.

The path by the water treatment works

Crossing the water meadows

We followed a path across Fobney Meadow and the Coley water meadows that leads to a band of trees that excitingly conceals a stretch of disused railway line, complete with old bridge. This was the Coley branch line.

Bridge that carried the Coley branch line

Looking towards Coley Park

We continued following the path across meadow until it reaches the Holy Brook on the southern edge of Coley Park. I had had enough of meadows and little-used footpaths by this point and would happily have walked back into Reading along roads via Coley Park, but Ray wanted to follow a footpath leading towards Reading along the Holy Brook. I think he fairly swiftly regretted this decision - after a pleasant initial bit it became extremely overgrown with stinging nettles and he was wearing shorts. The footpath (such as it is) reaches an abrupt end at the Reading Link Retail Park and gets re-routed, kind of, around the end of the retail park and then up onto the main road.

Pretty gardens by the Holy Brook, before the overgrown bit

The overgrown bit

Walking around the end of the retail park

We had a brief bit of walking along the A33 before cutting back down off the road, past the 'Holy Brook Nook' and through the subway to come out by the Kennet, where we turned left into town.

Brief bit of A33 walk

Passing County Lock near the town centre

Our route below:

'Hidden London'

Friday 20 October

I had been aware for a while of the ‘Hidden London’ tours run by the London Transport Museum, as part of general interest in disused stuff, as per this walk with Ray in 2019 spotting former tube stations. Ruth offered to treat me to one as this year’s birthday gift, so I had a bit of a peruse and picked ‘Euston: the Lost Tunnels’. The earliest date we could get was in October, so we booked it in.

We were asked to meet at the south entrance of Euston Square station, on the corner of Euston Road and Gower Street and to be carrying photo ID, wearing sensible shoes and not carrying any enormous and oddly-shapen items of luggage. About 15-20 of us mustered for the tour, led by an exuberantly camp young man with two colleagues there for backup and to stop us wandering off and falling over things. We all showed our ID and said where we’d come from and were issued with lanyards – I was a bit disappointed with this as I’d been hoping for hi-vis vests as per pictures online. Maybe they’d lost too many through people making off with them afterwards.

Me making the best of my lanyard

People in 'Hidden London' hi-vis vests
Courtesy of BusAndTrainUser

We were initially led down into a room within Euston Square station for a bit of PowerPoint and an inspection of our shoes, which were duly pronounced extremely sensible. Then we were led through the subway under Euston Road and up North Gower Street. Our first stop was the Leslie Green dark-red-tiled building on the corner of Melton Street and Drummond Street. I don’t think I’d ever clocked this before, but in any case it’s now fenced off and scheduled for demolition as part of the HS2 debacle project. The building has been closed since 1914 but was formerly the entrance building for the Euston underground station – in fact one of two, as there used to be another, strikingly ornate and long since demolished, over the other side of Euston mainline station. The presence of two buildings was explained by the presence of two rival train companies operating at the time; all is explained on Wikipedia.

Former Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway station building at Euston

After that we walked into Euston station and down to the Northern Line platforms. We were taken first to be shown what's now the extra-wide platform resulting from filling in of redundant Northern Line trackbed when reconstruction took place in the 1960s to incorporate the new Victoria Line. Prior to this, there had been an island platform here in between the two tracks of the Northern Line City branch. Island platforms are evidently a dying breed - there are currently only two remaining on the tube network (at Clapham North and Clapham Common) and I gathered from our tour guides that both these are due to be got rid of. They're evidently regarded as dangerous when crowded, which I can kind of see.

Our tour proceeding along the platform

The really wide platform

There used to be two separate sets of underground platforms at Euston for the two separate train companies (the City & South London Railway and the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway) that both used to run Underground services here. The island platform was on the C&SLR section. It’s now the Northern Line Bank branch southbound platform. Platform 6, I think (we were given the platform number before descending in case we got lost).

After this we were led down to the end of the same platform and, excitingly, through a locked door and up a flight of steps. This fantastic page has a photo from 1979 showing a grilled gate, but this has evidently been replaced with something a bit more opaque. The steps lead up to what was the connecting passageway between the two rival companies' platforms. The connecting passageway closed in 1962 as part of work on the new Victoria Line, and a big draw of the tour are the vintage advertising posters dating from when the tunnels were closed. The posters are all dirty and tatty to varying degrees, but as they've never been papered over they're still readable enough to be interesting.

Another draw of the tour is this darling little deep level ticket office, apparently the only one of its kind on the whole underground network. If you wanted to use the other train company’s services, you had to buy a different ticket here before proceeding. Curiously, in the 2009 photos at this link, the ticket office window looks blocked up, whereas it was open at the time we saw it, allowing us to pose for a photo if we wished, as several of us did.

Other stuff we saw: this former lift shaft, now a ventilation shaft:

Some tunnel views:

A former door - I forget where they said it led to

We got to look down on the Victoria Line platforms. We were warned not to drop our phones or they'd risk being carried off to Brixton or to Walthamstow Central:

Looking down on a Victoria Line train

The whole thing was fascinating. These tours seem a real winning idea for the LTM – our tickets cost us £44 each and clearly there’s no shortage of vaguely geeky types wanting to be allowed into dusty old tunnels for an hour. The tunnels are hot and dimly lit in parts. I found a number of blog posts by people (e.g. here and here) who’ve done this tour, plus an episode of Yesterday’s ‘Secrets of the Underground’ covers roughly the same ground. Also this page has some interesting photos.

Emerging back onto the platform

The PowerPoint at the start of the tour showed us some of the architecture of Euston overground station before the wholesale 1960s rebuild. Unlike, seemingly, most people, I don't actually hate the 60s building, though the concourse has often been unappealingly crowded when I've taken trains to Milton Keynes from it and it feels more hemmed-in than e.g. Paddington's concourse does. I quite like the ceiling effect though. I asked Dad last weekend if he remembered seeing the Doric Arch at Euston. He did. Given that almost all the comment you see online is along the lines of how criminal it was to demolish it and how there’s nothing nice been built since (which for some is then a short step to It Was All Much Better Back Then), Dad voiced some amusingly unexpected comments on it. I think the gist was: “Ridiculous thing. It was massive and in the middle of the bloody road.” Followed by something about how the Victorians did a lot of this extravagant show off stuff.

After the tour finished, I had been intending to drag Ruth over to the newish branch of Kimchee behind Kings Cross, but we were waylaid by a darling little row of places on Chalton Street, including Cheezelo, a cheese-themed deli, where we ended up having lunch. For such a little place it had an impressively extensive wine list, though we didn't indulge at lunchtime.

Cheezelo, our lunch spot