The devil's own tube station
There are several post drafts I feel I should be working on but prompted by Laura Michet's The most dehumanizing train station I regularly visit I decided to procrastinate regarding the devil's own tube station: Bank.
Bank is a monstrous, sprawling thing, built by the devil himself. Bank is a lie. You can walk for miles. I suspect just round in a circle. The person putting up the signage apparently did so at random. Up and down stairs, crossing over paths you just came along. Why? Because the devil said so.
It smells, it is hot, it is crowded. It is especially crowded with the kinds of yuppies who will trample grannies to get on the train when there's one every two minutes and they could just wait. It isn't even aesthetically pleasing in the way some tube stations are. The most notable design feature is one of the biggest "Please mind the gap between the train and the platform" of at least thirty centimetres. This also means it's not accessible.
Unfortunately it is also a major tube station and for several years I lived one stop away so I went through Bank almost every day. At no point did it ever make more sense, only ever less. Labyrinthine. To complicate matters further it is conjoined with Monument though I can't recall ever going to or through Monument. It is possible Monument does not actually exist.
It's one of those stations you could easily never go out of, just through. I have seen the outside though. I got on there once, walking from somewhere else. Otherwise I wouldn't entirely believe it had an outside. That it wasn't just a circle of hell.
Wikipedia backs me up:
One of the busiest on the London Underground network, the station complex was previously rated the Underground's worst station in passenger surveys. A substantial upgrade and expansion was completed in 2023 after seven years of construction. The station has 31 escalators and 4 moving walkways, the most of any station on the Underground.
And from the BBC: Londoners say Bank Tube station is capital's worst. 10% of people surveyed said Bank was the worst station. There are 272 to choose from and one in ten people went for Bank.
Overall I think the tube network - all of Transport for London really - is nothing short of a miracle. Yes it could be a horror and more than once I've been trapped on a stuck train for over an hour. Everyone has such stories. But the fact it all runs at all is testament to fantastic organising and people and I appreciate that. Some stations, some lines, are marvels. But Bank is not one of them.