Worst reveal since Nina West and her many barber smocks, am I right?
I headed down to the ticket office via the "Whispering Reeds" of Henjasaj N Koda's artwork, meant to evoke the gentle rustle of summer foliage. Unfortunately I was so distracted by having a breeze on my lower arms all of a sudden I completely forgot about the huge slab of rock down there, the true centre of The Art at the station, and so you'll have to endure a picture of it taken belatedly through the ticket gates.
Incidentally - and I'm sure the answer is probably "money" - why don't ticket gates in the UK have gates that extend above the machinery, therefore stopping you from jumping them? It seems like the simplest way to immediately cut down fare evasion. I could probably leap a Tube gate, given a run up and a healthy wind behind me, but you'd need to pole vault these. The ticket gates are, of course, extremely modern and efficient. They accept contactless and app codes; you only need to validate on the way in, as they'll let you straight out on the assumption you've paid; they were all in working order. The Tunnelbana was, at times, like experiencing an alternate world where public transport was worth using.
The Tranebergssund separated Alvik from Kungsholmen and the administrative centre of Stockholm, but it felt like the city was seeping into the suburbs. Building work was throwing up tall towers all around me and the station viaduct was overlooked from above, rather than being the high point as elsewhere that day. Alvik station itself is a hub, allowing you to change from the metro to the Nockebybanan and Tvärbanan tram routes. Outside, the shops were commuter aimed, including a Caffe Nero - which surprised me, a little slice of England in Sweden, like when you see a WH Smith at an airport and are quietly embarrassed that shopping there will give foreigners the impression that a bag of Skittles is thirty eight pounds throught the UK. There was also a branch of - sigh - Bastard Burgers. Hipster food places with wilfully aggressive names are my pet noir. It's not funny and it's not clever. It's a teenage boy's idea of what's rebellious and dangerous - ooh, my shop's got a swear in its name, I'm so hard - and I hope it goes into administration and is replaced by a thousand Max Burgers. You'll be unsurprised to learn that Bastard Burgers specialises in piles of grease and cheese that the middle classes are allowed to eat because they're very expensive but society would throw up its hands in shock if a working class person had one because they'll only eat a million and get obese and be a drain on the state. A McDonald's Big Mac is trash, but it's honest trash.
I was a little anxious about getting across the Tranebergssund. There was a bridge, of course, but on Google Maps it was marked in the yellow of a major highway. I'd zoomed in on Streetview and seen cyclists, so I knew there was a side path, but the question was, were pedestrians allowed on it? I'd already doubled back on myself that day so I didn't fancy doing it again. I pressed on, hoping that I'd at least be able to get across before some irate person on a Raleigh kicked me in the kidneys for being on their path.
I was walking on a third arch, added in 2002 to alleviate pressure on the other two and allow rebuilding works to take place. The third bridge was actually made out of steel, with a concrete cladding to make it look like the other two arches.
Cyclists whizzed by me, mostly respectful, but occasionally asking an existential question: what is a bike? Because once you add an electric engine, and a helmet, it's rapidly approaching a motorcycle. Especially if it's driven with reckless abandon by a delivery driver determined to drop off a rapidly cooling Bastard Burger at the desk of a depressed intern whose only joy that day will be a tepid Crooklyn (120 grams of Swedish beef with béarnaise dressing, bacon, onion ring, cheese, lettuce, tomato and yellow onion). At that point, I think maybe they need to leave the side of the bridge built for people using their legs to get about and instead head over to the bit with the internal combustion engines.
Where I'm going with this tangent is there was an e-scooter abandoned on the Tranesbergbron. It wasn't quite in the middle, but it was sufficiently far from an exit to raise the question of what happened to the rider. Dark ideas swelled around my head. This was Sweden, after all, a nation famously given to suicide, and the scooter parked next to a particularly high drop had overtones of a final journey. Which would be a little undignified, if you ask me, tootling up on a rented e-scooter, but people not in the right frame of mind do strange things. I decided, to try and keep things light, that it had actually been abandoned by a Stockholm scally, who'd tried to ride it out of the city centre and over to the suburbs but had hit a geofence. Whoever it was, a commendation for parking it neatly at the side of the path and not blocking the way.
It's called Resande med djur (Traveller with Animal) and is by Carina Wallert. The woman is inspired by portraits of Virginia Woolf, apparently, and I'm not sure if Virginia would be thrilled to hear that. However, Carina was deliberately going for an abstract person, because she'd spotted that people are far happier to see an animal on the metro than a human being. This is absolutely true, and I'm personally in favour of a new railway by-law that requires all dogs on trains to be taken up and down the aisle so all the other passengers can stroke them and tell them what a good boy they are.
Carina's case is slightly undermined by the fact that the Traveller's Animal is a cheetah, for some reason. I'd be less in favour of wild cats being allowed to wander the public transport network. Perhaps things are different in Sweden, and sharing a compartment with a puma is absolutely everyday.
I'm going to take a deep breath before I move onto the next station, Thorildsplan. The Art so far has been inspirational, complex, sometimes befuddling. It's provoked. It's challenged. At Thorildsplan, however, The Art goes straight for the cold cynical heart of every Gen Xer and squeezes it until it bursts.
It's 8-bit art.
Artist Lars Arrhenius claims that observing the traffic swirling around the station reminded him of a video game, and that's how he ended up with this design. This is, I believe, nonsense. Lars was born in 1966 and is therefore exactly the right age to get all misty eyed for the Nintendo Entertainment System. He might pretend there's something deep behind it but basically, he really likes Mario.
Clinker tiles have been used as pixels to form patterns that resemble, but (please note, Nintendo lawyers) are not actually, images from Super Mario Bros. Mushrooms. Pipes. Clouds.
There's no real reason for it. Until 2008, the ramps were covered in inspirational quotes from the philosopher Thomas Thorild, who the station is named after, but a constant battle against vandalism made SL look for a sturdier alternative. The result was very similar to but not actually the Mushroom Kingdom (once again, pay attention Nintendo lawyers).
If you were born between 1965 and 1980, though, it's incredible. I wandered up and down the ramp, taking picture after picture, and I'm sure I'm not the only forty-something who's done the same thing. It brought back memories of long evenings in my brother's room - he had an NES, while I'd stuck with my trusty Spectrum +2A - playing Mario endlessly. Sat on his bed, in the dark because the sun had come down and we'd not moved to put the light on, taking turns and sitting there watching while the other played. Single player games were a spectator sport in the Eighties and Nineties. It was perfectly common to go round to a friend's house to watch him play a computer game and never get a go yourself.
If you know anything about the history of gaming in the UK, you'll know the name Matthew Smith. He was the creator of the legendary Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, two Spectrum games that redefined what the humble Speccy was capable of and which captured kids across Britain. He was born in Penge, but grew up in Wallasey, and was part of a vibrant Liverpool computing scene in the 1980s. Seeing Thorildsplan's 8-bit art, I wished we could do something similar to honour him at a Merseyrail station. You could put clinker tiles covered with Miner Willy all over New Brighton ticket hall. It'd be a tribute to a lost genius - Matthew burned himself out and vanished from sight, only occasionally resurfacing in the decades since - it'd celebrate a Merseyside success, it'd look great, and it'd make a lot of middle aged men very happy.
Imagine him six foot high all over the walls. You'd love to see it.
It was the city, and yet, not the city; the back streets where people lived, where visitors wouldn't tend to go. It was a midweek afternoon and yet the roads were silent. I was constantly surprised by how little traffic there seemed to be away from the main arteries in Stockholm. You could almost walk in the highway, as though it were early in the morning.
Friedhelmsplan is the spot where the Green and Blue lines cross over. One day, perhaps, it'll also serve as the terminus of a Yellow Line south to Älvsjö; construction hasn't yet started on that, and in the world of transport construction, you don't believe that a line will actually happen until there are spades in the ground (and sometimes not even then, eh HS2?).
I was, of course, here to use the Green Line to get to my next station, S:t Eriksplan. However, I had to see the Blue Line first. The Blue Line is the Tunnelbana's crowning achievement, opened in the 1970s and the kind of station architecture that takes your breath away. The Blue Line is where they fully embraced the cave aesthetic for the station design, and it's frankly mind-blowing.
The walls were left rough, though covered with shot concrete to protect them, and that would be enough to be honest.
What takes the stations on the Blue Line to the next level is their decoration. At Fridhelmsplan, Ingegerd Möller and Torsten Renqvist took inspiration from the sea, and the platforms are decorated with navigation aids.
After that, the Green Line platforms couldn't help but look second best. They date from the 1950s, and this stretch of the Tunnelbana is nicknamed the "bathroom" section because of the prevalence of square tiles. It didn't help that the station was undergoing some maintenance, leaving big empty panels where advertisements should've filled the tunnel walls.
S:t Eriksplan was even more bathroom-y, but somehow it made it work. Perhaps it helped that it didn't have a cavernous Blue Line platform to show it up. Or perhaps it was because it seemed to embrace being a 1950s throwback, rather than shamefacedly trying to conceal it.
Now I was properly in the city centre. Kungsholmen was left behind and I was in a bustling, thrusting, modern European capital. It was still recognisably Stockholm, with its coloured buildings and architectural flourishes, but the pace was quicker, the people more urgent, the world denser and harder. I was no longer the fastest walker on the pavement as I was overtaken by people with Places To Go.
The shops at the bottom of the blocks were inserted seamlessly, all of them with those subtle European signs that mean you're not really sure what they do. In the UK, we allow shops to slap a corporate logo and a massive wodge of branding over the doorway so that every street ends up looking the same. It's only when you look above that you realise, ah yes, KFC used to be a Baptist church, or Primark still has the architectural flourishes from its previous life as an Army & Navy store. After dark it's a long parade of glowing light that make the High Street interchangeable.
Here, the cityscape was in charge. The apartments were the important ones - the shop at the bottom merely helped pay the rent, and it was subservient to the needs of the residents. Nobody on the first floor was going to be kept awake all night by the blue glow of a Halifax X. The exception to this, appropriately, was a British-style "Pub Stringfellows" on a corner, which had covered the bottom of the building with its branding and looked about as classy as you'd expect an establishment called "Pub Stringfellows" to look.
The staircase, meanwhile, used to lead down to the Stockholm Transport Museum until the late eighties. The museum has since been relocated to much better premises out on the edge of the city. I wonder what it's like...?
Two more stations to go then you won't have to read this interminable nonsense any longer. What can I say about Rådmansgatan? Not much at platform level to be honest; it's fully bathroom station.
A blocked off part of the roadway carried a sign from SL. I whipped out Google Translate and discovered that this was works for an escape route from the new branch of the Green Line to Arenastaden. This veers off from the existing Green Line at Odenplan and goes to the national stadium near Solna, with two interim stations at Södra Hagalund and Hagastaden. The opening date is projected for 2028 which does, of course, mean that there will no longer be a neat 100 stations in Stockholm. Damn you progress, for destroying a wonderful round number!
The gigantic Baroque heap that is the Gustaf Vasa kyrke loomed up ahead of me, a pile of fussiness that climaxed in a dome with a tower with a crown on top. Signs outside advertised that its café was open, which felt demeaning, like it was trying to attract tourists via the easiest possible route. At its feet was the Odenplan, a stretch of wide open paving surrounded by bus stops and shops.
Odenplan station got a major upgrade in the mid-2010s when a new tunnel was built underneath Stockholm for commuter trains - a sort of Swedish Crossrail. Prior to this, commuter services had terminated at a backroad station called Karlberg; the new underground line gave it a direct interchange with Tunnelbana services in the middle of a major district.
At one end of the building an air duct for the subway station has been transformed into a "multifunctional artwork" by Leif Bolter. The fact that I've used inverted commas to describe it should clue you in I'm not a fan.
To me, it looks like the clocks that used to adorn all provincial indoor shopping centres in the Seventies and Eighties. Every one of them had a central square where a clock face would be surrounded by a Rube Goldberg machine of bouncing balls, water buckets, and metallic fins, usually accompanied by some sort of elaborate chime on the hour. Most of the shopping centres ripped these out in the early Nineties when they realised that reminding people in a windowless enclosed space what the time was might make them leave to catch a bus. They were replaced with coffee stands, usually, if it was a classy mall; if it was a bit downmarket it got a couple of benches and some fake grass with a slide on it "for the kids". The Art at Odenplan was a silver tube with an LED clock on it and no amount of gussying it up could impress me.
On the platform, there's a small pavilion which is used for temporary art pieces; when I arrived they were still setting it up.
The Art celebrates the life and work of August Strindberg, who lived round the corner. His home has been turned into a museum. Strindberg was perhaps Sweden's finest purveyor of extremely depressing literature which, when you think about the competition, is quite the achievement.
I'm afraid I've not read any Strindberg, nor seen any of his plays, so I'm not best placed to give any sort of critical commentary here. I will say that every time I see the title Miss Julie I think of Shakin' Stevens' song Oh Julie so perhaps I'm not ready for a new career as a theatre critic.
I had one more touristy spot to do before my final station, though this one was a bit macabre. On the 28th February 1986, the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was walking back to the Tunnelbana after a night at the cinema with his wife. This being Sweden, a mature, polite democracy, he had no security with him. Not far from the station, a man approached the couple from behind, shot the Prime Minister dead, wounded his wife, then ran off down a side street.
Sweden was of course horrified by the assassination. A man was subsequently arrested and convicted, based on an identification by Mrs Palme, but at appeal he was acquitted due to a lack of evidence. A second theory about the murderer, involving a man who was interviewed as a witness at the time but who died in 2000, has since taken hold as the most likely explanation; he was a gun collector who disliked the Prime Minister's policies and worked in an office building at the site. It's all circumstantial, and there are a dozen other theories, involving, variously, foreign states, anarchists, and a far-right activist who was found naked and shot in North Carolina eight years later. I've not seen any mention of the Rothschilds anywhere but they usually get dragged into this sort of thing. It is unfortunately a high-profile case that will likely never been solved, as everyone involved is either dead or, in the case of foreign powers like the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, the countries involved have pretty much vanished.
The spot where Palme was shot is marked with a simple plaque; the street leading to the crossroads has been renamed Olof Palme Gata. It's a reminder that even the most civilised, well-to-do nations have a dark underbelly, and we all need to be vigilant to make sure it's not victorious.
Damp but smiling, I reached the last station of the day, Hötorget. I negotiated a crowd of tourists about to embark on a walking tour, pulling on ponchos and raising umbrellas, and descended to the platform below.
Hötorget's been deliberately preserved in its 1950s state, with the pale blue tiles and orange litter bins, to give you an idea of what it was like when it first opened. Apart from the neon, of course. That was added in the 1990s, with the roof being specially lowered to allow the wiring to be inserted.
You know how I said The Art on the Tunnelbana was a wonderful thing, and should be encouraged? I take that back. At Hötorget it was a distraction. This could've been a delightful throwback, an experience, and instead you've got a roof looking like a Vegas jukebox. Fortunately they've left the signage intact, so if you look away from the streaks of pastel you can pretend it's the 1950s and Khrushchev could bomb you at any moment.
That was another section of the Tunnelbana completed, another branch to cross off the list. Two days in and it was shrinking all the time. It'd soon be over, unfortunately.
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