 diamond geezer
Thursday, May 13, 2004
 Silver Jubilee: St John's Wood
 Opened: Monday 20th November 1939
Distance from previous station: 900m
Platform: exit to the right of the train
You are now entering: the London Borough of Westminster
Fact file: St John's Wood is the only station on the Underground network that shares no letters with the word 'mackerel'. The station was nearly called Acacia Road but the name was changed just before opening (which is just as well otherwise there'd be no mackerel-free tube stations).
5 things I found outside the station: a circular ticket hall with high glass windows, seven floors of flats built above the station, a shrubbery complete with palm trees, the Abbey Road Café (it's tiny, but it has an informative website), hordes of Inter-Railers clutching Multimap printouts trying to work out where 'that' recording studo is.
Nearby (1): Abbey Road recording studios, opened by Sir Edward Elgar in 1931 but more famously home to the Beatles between 1962 and 1970. You can take a virtual visit here and watch that legendary zebra crossing on webcam here. Groups of young tourists still hang around outside wielding digital cameras, or crouching on the pavement writing messages on the walls in black marker pen.
Nearby (2): Lord's Cricket Ground, home to the Marylebone Cricket Club, the Ashes and some would argue of cricket itself. The ground takes up a large slice of northwest London, the new Media Centre looming over the area like an alien spaceship. You can visit the Lord's Museum, drink in the Lord's Tavern, shop in the Lord's shop, or just stay away and watch football instead.
Local history: St John's Wood was one of the first London suburbs, built in Victorian times to encourage the upper middle classes to move out of central London to the more rural outskirts. Well, they were rural at the time. Semi-detached villas and rows of apartment blocks line the leafy avenues, and almost every building has three to five storeys. NW8 still feels rather upmarket, but I suspect most addresses in the area start with the word 'Flat'.
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