In today's Coronation-related post we'll be dropping by the four tube stations with the word KING in their name. See if you can work out what they are before we get there.
As part of celebrations to commemorate the Coronation, London's transport network has been decorated with "Crowndels" and commemorative posters. Charles and Camilla won't see them because they don't ride the tube but the rest of us can have something new to look at for a couple of weeks. The commemorative posters are all over the network.
They're nicely done.
The roundel is fully striped in a multiplicity of colours, 21 in total. Hours of fun can be had trying to identify which colour matches which mode ("no that green's the District line, this green's the trams, so that green must be the Waterloo & City"). It took me a while to work out why there are two yellows (one's the Circle line, one's for coaches), but like I said, hours of fun.
Or something like that.
But the Crowndels are more elusive. TfL have listed where they all are in a press release (Blackfriars, Bond Street, Charing Cross, Covent Garden, Embankment, Euston, Green Park, Hyde Park Corner, Leicester Square, Liverpool Street, London Bridge, King's Cross St Pancras, Marylebone, Oxford Circus, Paddington, Piccadilly Circus, Pimlico, Vauxhall, Victoria, Waterloo, Westminster), i.e. mostly the West End and rail termini. But just knowing the station doesn't always make them easy to find.
I started my Crowndel quest at King's Cross St Pancras. I started on the westbound Circle line platform - no sign - then tried the eastbound - ditto. Then I walked the full lengths of the Piccadilly, Northern and Victoria line platforms (this is not a task to be undertaken lightly) but still drew a complete blank. It is possible the Crowndels were elsewhere in the station, or more likely that nobody's got round to sticking them up yet. But don't go round trying to collect them all yourself, you'll be wasting your time.
What I did find, of course, were a heck of a lot of crowns on the Victoria line platforms. They're part of the suite of tiling patterns introduced when the line opened in the 1960s, this particular set by Tom Eckersley depicting five crowns in the shape of a cross. That's because King's Cross St Pancras is of course one of the four tube stations with the word KING in its name, the king in question being George IV, so well done if you remembered that one earlier. Three more to go.
To track down a proper Crowndel I headed for the nearest designated station with just two platforms, which was Covent Garden. Kerching, slap bang in the middle of the platform, indeed slap bang in the middle of both.
So a Crowndel is a normal roundel with a gold crown on top. I was hoping for the 21-striped rainbow model but no, it's just the usual roundel with a glittery topping. A full-on rainbow would have obscured the station name and we can't have that. A roundel's first task is to guide passengers, particularly those who need confirmation of the station they've just stopped at, although the correct name's not so important that it's stopped TfL from using doctored sponsored roundels in the past.
These are proper vinyl roundels, by the way, with the full design printed onto a white background and stuck over the normal roundel. But if you head down to Crossrail its Crowndels are just gold stickers plonked on top of the glass, because purple roundels are far too snazzy to be easily reproduced in full. Nobody was looking terribly excitedly at these.
According to the press release you'll find purple Crowndels at Paddington, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon and Liverpool Street, and I saw them at unlisted Bond Street too. Crowndels are also to be found on the Overground at Hoxton, Shepherd's Bush and White Hart Lane, a disparate trio who feel like their names were pulled from a lucky dip. Oh and we still haven't had any more stations with KING in their name, tube or otherwise, so you've still got time to think before I reveal all.
In non-Crowndel celebrations, TfL have also facilitated...
• commemorative Coronation bus wraps on selected vehicles on routes 11, 87, 111, 148, 160, 390
• bus shelters topped with St Edward's Crown at three stops on Oxford Street
Bus passengers who despise the monarchy should head to east London where none of the bus routes will be tainted with royal privilege. Monarchists should flock to Oxford Circus because those shelter-top crowns are properly ostentatious. Furious nihilists should note that TfL didn't pay for the bus wraps or the bus shelter crowns, only for the Crowndels which are essentially a few cheap stickers, so no significant funds have been wasted.
TfL are famously Royal-friendly, or alternatively toadying creeps, given that two of their lines are named after monarchs and another after a silver jubilee. But all three of these are named after Queens, indeed we also have queens across the tube map at Queensway, Queensbury and Queens Park. Kings don't yet have the same significance, nor is that likely to change in the near future. Much as TfL might want to name something after King Charles they don't currently have the money to build anything big, other than a belching tunnel under the Thames at Silvertown and I doubt he'd want to be commemorated by that.
But I would like to suggest that TfL have missed a trick by not installing Crowndels at the three other stations on the tube network with KING in their name. Scorecards at the ready.
Kingsbury is such an obvious fit it's amazing it was missed out. Admittedly it's in zone 4, and none of the other Crowndels are that far out, but it would have gone some way to balance the inner London bias. Barkingside is perhaps less obvious, but the crown would have been plonked right on top of the word KING so I reckon people would have worked it out. The problem with Barking is that it's famously roundel-less, being a National Rail-operated station, but a gold crown sticker can of course be stuck pretty much anywhere.
Also, had TfL's Roundel Department been more awake, all the other chief modes of transport could have got in on the act. There's one KING on the DLR, that's King George V. There's one KING on the trams, that's King Henry's Drive. There's one KING on Crossrail, that's Seven Kings. There's three KINGs on the Overground, the aforementioned Barking, the new Barking Riverside and the long-established Dalston Kingsland. They could've had a bit of fun with that but they didn't, they just tweaked a lot of roundels across zone 1.
Tweaking roundels appears to be TfL's default celebration these days. 160th birthday? Tweak a roundel. Remembrance Sunday coming up? Tweak a roundel. International Women's Day? Tweak a roundel. Night Tube being launched? Tweak a roundel. Pride month? Tweak a roundel.
It's clever because the roundel is a hugely-versatile world-class graphic icon so it always works. But it's also cheap - maximum publicity for minimum outlay - which is the way the financial bottom line works these days. Expect to see a lot more tweaked roundels in the future. But you might have to hunt carefully to find them this weekend.
