Isn’t there still no interchange between Bank and Monument? I’ve been living in London for a year now and I’ve never been able to change there.
The Jubilee line in NW London is lovely in the mornings (at least, until Baker Street – not sure how it is once you get into the city centre). I used to have to take the Victoria Line into work, from Victoria station. NEVER AGAIN.
I work within close walking distance of the DLR station, although I’d prefer not to openly identify my employer as I do not wish my personal views to be seen as representing them in any way and things are a bit sensitive right now as you might imagine.
I can say that while I don’t work for Lehman Brothers, we do rent a floor over there and it is reportedly “very quiet these days”.
I used to love Bank’s Central Line platforms:
Mind The Gap!
When the escalator is working (is it working again yet?) changing from the Northern Line at Bank to the District/Circle at Monument is a whole lot easier than from the Northern to Central lines all within Bank.
IIRC - though I probably don’t, because I haven’t been in London for two years* - you can in theory get from any one line to any other within the Bank/Monument clusterfuck. I believe that I once in fact managed to visit every damn platform within the station(s) in an attempt to change lines (forget which ones).
I also believe that it’s a pain in the ass no matter what.
*goddamnit, I miss that city and want to go back.
No, I know there theoretically is, but every time I take the Central or C&D lines, the conductor reminds us that there’s no interchange between Bank and Monument and to “plan alternative routes”.
Ah! Here we go: No interchange between Bank and Monument stations (March 2008):
I hate walking around that area, too – some of the least attractive buildings in London, IMO.
Look, you posted this on a Monday (GMT, of course) and I don’t want to have to call foul, but certainly this qualifies for a plaid-purple card.
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Kew Gardens
Oh, old railway companies on stations and infrastructure, that’s all over the place. But on the trains? I’m talking about the late 1980s, and Wikipedia confirms that I’m not going mad!
With the on-going escalator work screwing the whole place up, in my experience they’ve been shutting Bank entirely on average about one rushhour a week recently.
However what I find daily annoying is the whole current detour for getting from the DLR to the Northern Line. What is usually just up the two (albeit narrow) stairs has been turned into up the escalators, round into the hallway that they seem to be funnelling everything through and queuing to get back down again. The one interchange in the station that doesn’t normally involve any escalators at all is being made appalling by the work on them elsewhere in the station.
I do see that the decision was made to avoid conflicting flows around what are now the only escalators up from the DLR, but it does have the annoying side effect of forcibly moving the one set of interchanging passengers whose normal flow isn’t part of the current blocked parts directly into an area where we do become part of the extra congestion.
Yes but why is it only Bank which is to use that quaint Americanism; a clusterfuck. Why not Kings Cross or Waterloo both of which are bigger.
Is this a game of Morning Crescent?
I’m still PMSL at this. Brilliant.
I guess it doesn’t do me any favors to admit I was aiming for being called out on a whoosh? I figured if I mentioned the name of the station three times in a row then it’d be just a little obvious. 
Oh man, I just saw this. Priceless!
That, as GorillaMan alluded to, is largely a matter of history. Four out of the five lines involved were built into or through the City essentially independently and the current station is largely an amalgam of the stations built for those. The Wikipedia entry goes through when the different bits were built. The exception is the much later DLR and its platforms are extremely close to the Northern line ones - it’s the bit built knowing that it was part of a larger scheme.
Now, while it’s equally true that most of the lines passing through Kings Cross and Waterloo developed in a similar fashion, in those cases there were the existing mainline railway stations. All the different lines were aiming for their stations to be in the same narrow area. That made the eventual amalgamation much easier. The centre of the City was a much vaguer target when the different developers were originally deciding where to deliver their passengers to. (And Kings Cross-St Pancras is still really two underground stations that developed based on the two adjacent mainline stations. Remember, it’s only in the last year that you can get between the two halves underground seamlessly.)
As for the current particular mess of the escalator upgrade, Kings Cross doesn’t need that because its are all only twenty years old and hence relatively new. But that was because of the fire.
Holborn is another example of two stations becoming one. Ever wondered why it’s a mile-long walk to change lines? Because the Central Line used to have a British Museum station instead, the original platforms of which are still visible from the train.
Entirely incidentally, while on the subject of “lost” platforms at Holborn …
As someone with the interest in the history of physics, the bit of the station I’d like to see is the area used by Patrick Blackett and others for cosmic ray observations. From this obituary of John Barton:
A small nitpick but more precisely you can see the big gap where the tunnel suddenly widens to show where the platforms originally stood - the platforms themselves are long gone. Plus, the orginal white tiles on the wall are still there (as I’m sure you know), now almost totally obscured by soot.
I love looking out for the ghost stations on the London Undergound 
Good nitpick
Not all that long ago you could occasionally go stand on the platform at Holborn for the Aldwych line, and it was frequently used for filming. It was interesting to see all the old pre-closure adverts on the walls.
