happy dot gif

 

Vårberg's art leapt out at you, giant hands positioned along the platforms.  Called I våra bänder (In Our Hands) by Maria Ängquist Klyvare, it was only added in 1996, nearly thirty years after the station itself was opened.  It's good that The Art they picked fits in so seamlessly with the stark concrete of the station.  It doesn't jump out at you as alien, but fits in with the rest of the building.

Apparently it all symbolises family and so on, the openness of an appeal, the welcoming hand of assistance, etc etc.  I think it's neat, that's all (insert Marge Simpson gif here).

This is not Marge Simpson.

The station turfed me out into a shopping centre and then, from there, into a pedestrian path between blocks of apartments.  This was turning out to be the Stockholm style for its suburbs.  A public transport hub at the centre, with metro and bus services alongside one another.  A traffic-free shopping plaza, sometimes open air around a square, sometimes inside to shield you from the Swedish winter.  Then footpaths taking you between blocks of apartments, three or four storeys high, the traffic off to the side somewhere.

It all seemed so... logical.  It seemed like a great way to live.  It was the fifteen minute city, except built in the Sixties and Seventies.  The flats weren't overwhelmingly huge and impersonal, and each nested into a neighbourhood with a garden or a playground in the centre.  Every flat had a balcony or a terrace for some outside space.  Trees and plants were everywhere.  You had density, justifying that expensive underground railway, but not to the extent that it became anonymous.

I wondered why we'd never tried anything like this in the UK, and then I realised, we did.  We built lots of council estates like this and then deprivation, neglect and drugs turned them into no-go areas.  I thought of Marsh Farm, a neighbouring estate in my home town of Luton, where dinky paths curved around houses and flats, and thought of my mum referring to it as "mugger's paradise".  That had a specially built shopping centre, the Purley, with a library and a market on a Thursday and flats above; you reached it via underpasses from the surrounding housing blocks.  

The Purley's been demolished now.  So have a lot of the flats across Britain, replaced with endless cul-de-sacs and semis.  There's a housing crisis and yet we never seem to want to build above two floors, unless it's luxury apartments in which case, the higher the better.  Have we all been scarred by the Seventies and Eighties, by Ronan Point, by Quarry Hill, by Park Hill?  I'm sure Sweden must've also suffered with unemployment and drug abuse in that period, but instead of wiping the homes away, they've kept them, refurbished them.  

Of course, you can't underestimate the value good public transport makes.  Marsh Farm was linked to the town by buses, not a fast electric railway.  Stations create a place and a focal point.  They create wealth and allow residents to access more.  A metro is more than a collection of stops, and that's one of the reasons I love them.

Skårholmen's pedestrianised heart was exactly what you'd want from a local centre.  Good shops, a market, trees, even a fountain.  It was still not much beyond 9 am, so the stalls were setting up and the stores remained closed, but people were already milling about, drinking coffees, enjoying the sun.  

The station sign could do with a bit of TLC, mind.

The Art at Skärholmen is a series of paintings of New Mexico by Ulf Wahlberg (no, I don't know if he's related to Donnie from New Kids or Marky Mark).  The idea is that this is the same scene painted in the different lights over 23 hours, with each painting representing the next hour.

They're not the originals, by the way.  Those were vandalised over the course of their installation, and these are photographs of the originals that have been specially treated to be resistant to abuse.  Stockholm's Tunnelbana suffers just as any other metro system does.

I'll be honest: I found the brown tile work on the platform walls far more interesting.  Perhaps it was the colour.  It was so 1967, the year the station opened, so trying to be modern and different.  I love the refurbished Merseyrail stations but part of me still secretly misses the dark brown plastic seating and rubber floors.

Back above ground for Sätra, and another set of art added long after completion by Pälvi Ernkvist.  Here it was a series of mosaic tiles in blue with red stripes dividing the panels, placed in small and large patches around the platforms.

Look, I'm going to be frank here: mosaics are a very "shrug" choice to me.  Don't get me wrong; in the UK, I'd be all over this as a stunning piece of contemporary art.  If Bebington suddenly decorated its underpass in a blue mosaic with red tiles, I'd be straight down there with my camera, praising it to the rafters.  Such is the benefit of low expectations.  On the Tunnelbana, though, it came off as a bit "meh". I'd been going only a couple of hours and I'd already seen baby hands, giant aluminium spirals and that gun off the United Nations.  You need to up your game, to be frank.

Incidentally, the station sign says Sätra centrum, but the map and the Wikipedia page call it Sätra.  Perhaps I need to deploy an Oprah "so what is the truth?" gif here.  I read this week that young people find gifs embarrassing, causing a load of people to immediately stop using them, to which I say: stuff that.  I find gifs hilarious, and when used correctly, they're a superb punchline.  Young people find everything old people do embarrassing.  Newsflash: they don't like your music or your taste in clothes either.  Do what makes you happy, and if that involves a gif of Bianca del Rio captioned Judging you, then that's fine.  Also, gif is pronounced with a hard G, and anyone who says otherwise is a loser.

I walked away from Sätra Centrum shopping centre and towards the main road, past a dad feeding his two young kids ice creams.  It was getting surprisingly warm.  You hear Sweden and think snow and ice and parkas, and yet I returned from Stockholm with a suntan.  It had better weather than the UK that week.  Admittedly a low bar.

There's an industrial area near the station and a wide boulevard has been built to take the trucks and tankers there without problem.  I was on a parallel side road, quieter and greener, but still a road where for some reason a biker decided to ride on the pavement.  This was especially annoying because Stockholm's bikers were, in my experience, extremely respectful of pedestrians, stopping for them at traffic lights and sticking to the roads.  It helped that the city has a marvellous network of bike paths, again making me wonder why we can't manage anything similar in the UK.  Anyway, this old lady decided to cycle on the path towards me, making me step to one side, and I will curse her name until the end of time.

I turned left at a running field-slash-sports complex which, I was surprised to see, was being used for sport.  My understanding of sports pitches, based on watching the Netflix drama Young Royals, is that sports pitches in Sweden are exclusively used by young homosexuals to bond with potential boyfriends.  I didn't realise people used them for anything else.  If you haven't seen Young Royals, it's another one of those dramas in which two nice young men fall in love and hold hands and occasionally kiss.  It's a gay drama that is made for teenage girls who are grappling with their sexual beings; who've hit puberty, and have desires, but aren't quite ready for dealing with the idea of actually having sex, so they want to watch some pretty boys kissing without ever involving female sexuality because that would be triggering.  You can tell these are made for heterosexual girls because they have teenage boys doing everything except having sex with one another, which is absolute nonsense; Wilhelm and Simon have had carnal relations once a series and they should be thankful for that.  I would like to make it clear I don't actually want to watch teenage boys rutting, I just want there to be a modicum of realism, that's all.

Bredäng has a satisfying twang to its name, a kind of boing!  At least it does in English.  I was quickly learning that Swedish pronunciation is radically different to what I expected.  One of the more life changing parts of the trip was discovering that Björn Borg's surname, in Sweden, is pronounced Bor-ie.  I felt embarrassed for the entire English speaking world and felt sorry for him having to put up with that his whole life.

There's a jigsaw motif in The Art at Bredäng, with Lena Kriström collaborating with local students to create her pieces.

It's a step up from its British cousin, where Amy, aged six, is allowed to plaster a platform with CaREful of fird rail and a picture of a stick figure being electrocuted, but I still resent it.  You're the artist, you got paid for it, create something.  Don't drag a load of teenagers into it.

Something wonderful happened at Mälarhöjden station.  I was the only person to get off the train.

Metro stations are about hustle and speed and traffic flow.  They're about sending people off where they want to be as quickly as possible.

It means that when you get one to yourself it feels special.  This has happened to me in London before, and it's never lost its appeal.  You're a lone figure on an underground platform.  You are the only human below ground.  It's thrilling.  Just try not to think of An American Werewolf In London.  

The Art at Mälarhöjden is by Margareta Carlstedt, and looks like a very nice vase your nan used to have on the sideboard.  She was one of the earliest artists to get a commission for the Tunnelbana and it shows; the style is very 1961, when it was commissioned, very Katie Boyle-era Eurovision, and has a slight whiff of playing it safe.

I cut across the back of a Coop (Swedish Co-ops will rapidly become my favourite shops as the trip went on) and disappeared into a small quiet suburb.  This was my first experience of a housing estate, in the sense of family homes rather than apartments.

It was hard not to shake the feeling that I was in some kind of Scandinavian theme park.  The streets were lined with wooden houses with porches and attic windows and landscaped gardens.  Pretty Wendy houses decorated to match their larger siblings sat on manicured lawns.  Ornate post boxes waited at the kerb for parcels and letters.  Flower boxes were spilling over on windowsills.

The colours surprised me.  There were different shades from house to house, each one individual, each one unique.  It's a lot easier to paint your house when it isn't brick, of course, but I also suspect this is a marker when it snows.  During the months of the year when it's starkly white everywhere you'd welcome a splash of red or lime or blue.  

There were a few joggers and dog walkers and then I reached a terrace of homes that were rather newer than the ones I'd left behind.  Again, I was left feeling frustrated about the state of housebuilding in Britain.  Here was a row of good, solid houses with balconies and gardens and driveways.  They looked like something you'd build in Milton Keynes, except Milton Keynes of forty years ago, before Barratt Homes took over and decided everything should be a three bed detached called The Windsor.  These looked like fun places to live even though they'd patently been squeezed into a patch of land over the railway.  I bet the people who live here are the coolest people in the suburbs.

The T of the Tunnelbana called me to a small side path, where Axelsberg station (I presume it's pronounced Axelsber-ie) was tucked away.  I was walking behind two young girls, enthusiastically planning their day out together, and I overtook them because they were having such good fun they were positively dawdling and I can't stand that.

At Axelsberg, artists Gösta Wessel, Leif Bolter, Inga Moden and Veine Johansson created a series of sculptures spelling out the station's name.

I mean, well done and everything, but that does feel a bit "we tried coming up with ideas and this is the only one that stuck".  Perhaps having four people work on one project isn't such a good idea.  Also, I looked for the S, and it's plain ugly.

You'll be delighted to hear that even though that's the end of this post, there are still loads more to be written, and I'm still on DAY ONE.  Truly, you don't know what's hit you.

"insert eyeroll gif here"