Is there anything more enticing on a rainy London evening than the glow of an Underground station? The luminous red lollipop roundel invites the weary pedestrian to enter the network and be whisked away on a clanking, disorientating journey under the metropolis.

I’ve nursed a long-standing fascination for the Underground since childhood. Regular day trips from my family home on the south coast to the capital were always a highlight, especially when we descended into the depths to ride the tube. The whirring escalators, sudden gusts of air, moquette seats, sliding doors, and those funny balls hanging from the carriage ceilings all transfixed me and cemented the tube in my subconscious as a strange and magical place.

As I grew older I began to pay more attention to the stations themselves, appreciating both the forms and decorative details that are so unique to the network. The London Underground currently has 270 stations, and while admittedly, all are on equal footing when functioning as portals to the trains, to me, they don’t all deliver on the same emotional level. Those from the last thirty years feel efficient but vacuous, and while the early examples are charming in a heritage railway vernacular, those from the 1930s tick all the right boxes as far as I’m concerned. They are now, as they were when first constructed, unique on the streets of London. A cubist family of structures that feel simultaneously historical and futuristic.

It is with all this in mind that I embarked on this photographic project. I aimed to capture each station designed and built during this innovative period in its best light. To showcase their street-facing ‘typology’ and give a flavour of interior features and the general atmosphere of these iconic stations in the twenty-first century.

This series is was published by ADM in 2022 as Tube Station Anthology 1924-1961. A revised second edition retitled London Tube Stations 1924-1961 will be published by FUEL in April 2023.