Today is the 100th birthday of one of London's smallest, busiest and most pointless tube stations. CoventGardenstation first opened on Thursday 11th April 1907, a few months later the rest of the central stretch of the Piccadilly line. This was only a small station, with a single staircase for entry and exit, sufficient to serve the local fruit and vegetable market and surounding West End backstreets. Leicester Square station was only 300 yards away, a mere four minute walk, but the line's owners still thought that opening a station at Covent Garden was a smart business move. They were right. Other "too close" stations on the Piccadilly line have long since closed (Down Street and York Road in 1932, and Brompton Road in 1934) but Covent Garden survives, and thrives.
Tourists love to travel to Covent Garden station. "Ooh," they think. "How wonderful that the fruit and vegetable market has been converted into a shopping centre full of expensive trinkets. We must go there straight away and see the gold-painted mime artists and the juggling unicyclists." And then they get out their tube maps and spot Covent Garden station, and then they take a train there - despite the fact that it would very probably be quicker to walk. Whenever a Piccadilly line train stops at Covent Garden station, unnecessary hordes of tourists rush for the doors and pour out onto the platform in large numbers. They don't stop to admire the original custard and marmalade tiling on the walls. Instead they shuffle along the platform to queue for the lifts (or, if they're very silly they take the 193-step spiral staircase up to the surface instead and drop dead of exhaustion halfway up). Most Londoners know that this is one of the deepest stations on the tube network, and that exiting here is sheer folly. But not tourists.
Covent Garden station is used by 18 million people each year. It's the busiest station on the network not to have escalators and it's a real bottleneck, especially in the evenings and at weekends. In fact it's so bad that Transport for London are running a major campaign to try to persuade people not to use Covent Garden station at all. They'd rather we all got off somewhere else and walked the last bit of the journey instead. Maybe off at Holborn, to be followed by a nine-minute walk through hard-to-follow uninteresting backstreets. Maybe off at Charing Cross, to walk up the Strand and through to the southern edge of the market area. Or maybe off at Leicester Square, to make that 300-yard four-minute walk up Long Acre. There are special "Don't Follow The Crowd" notices on trains, "Don't Follow The Crowd" posters in stations and even "Don't Follow The Crowd" leaflets at ticket offices. It's a ridiculous idea - please walk a bit further because it might be quite interesting - and only a particularly stupid tourist would fall for it. But, as we know, tourists are stupid enough to take the tube to Covent Garden anyway, so it might just work.
Covent Garden centenary
Today is the 100th birthday of one of London's smallest, busiest and most pointless tube stations. Covent Garden station first opened on Thursday 11th April 1907, a few months later the rest of the central stretch of the Piccadilly line. This was only a small station, with a single staircase for entry and exit, sufficient to serve the local fruit and vegetable market and surounding West End backstreets. Leicester Square station was only 300 yards away, a mere four minute walk, but the line's owners still thought that opening a station at Covent Garden was a smart business move. They were right. Other "too close" stations on the Piccadilly line have long since closed (Down Street and York Road in 1932, and Brompton Road in 1934) but Covent Garden survives, and thrives.
Tourists love to travel to Covent Garden station. "Ooh," they think. "How wonderful that the fruit and vegetable market has been converted into a shopping centre full of expensive trinkets. We must go there straight away and see the gold-painted mime artists and the juggling unicyclists." And then they get out their tube maps and spot Covent Garden station, and then they take a train there - despite the fact that it would very probably be quicker to walk. Whenever a Piccadilly line train stops at Covent Garden station, unnecessary hordes of tourists rush for the doors and pour out onto the platform in large numbers. They don't stop to admire the original custard and marmalade tiling on the walls. Instead they shuffle along the platform to queue for the lifts (or, if they're very silly they take the 193-step spiral staircase up to the surface instead and drop dead of exhaustion halfway up). Most Londoners know that this is one of the deepest stations on the tube network, and that exiting here is sheer folly. But not tourists.
Today is the 100th birthday of one of London's smallest, busiest and most pointless tube stations. 
Tourists love to travel to Covent Garden station. "Ooh," they think. "How wonderful that the fruit and vegetable market has been converted into a shopping centre full of expensive trinkets. We must go there straight away and see the gold-painted mime artists and the juggling unicyclists." And then they get out their tube maps and spot Covent Garden station, and then they take a train there - despite the fact that it would very probably be quicker to walk. Whenever a Piccadilly line train stops at Covent Garden station, unnecessary hordes of tourists rush for the doors and pour out onto the platform in large numbers. They don't stop to admire the original 