Layers

 

I began to ponder the difficult question at Islandstorget. 

Could I take my coat off?

The rain seemed to have eased up and it was warm again.  I was feeling the heat as I walked.  I could shove it in my bag.  And yet... I didn't want to have to get it out the bag again if the rain returned.  I would have to debate it in my head.  Endlessly.

I left the station, passed through its bus exchange, and walked past a building which I believed at the time was a bail hostel, or perhaps a young offenders rehabilitation centre.  It had that general vibe.  It was only as I sat down to write this that I had a look and learned it was a hotel.  So if you're heading to Sweden and want to stay somewhere that looks like a criminal institution, their website is here.  

I plunged into a quiet neat suburb of large white houses.  There was a smell of freshly cut grass in the air, and as I turned a corner, I encountered a group of gardeners dealing with the verges and the trees.  I wondered if they'd been at it all morning, including in the rain, or if they were allowed to hide in the van until it stopped.  They paused, politely, as I passed, so that I didn't get mown grass thrown up at me.  I'd actually encounter two more teams of gardeners as I walked through Islandstorget, so either I'd happened to be here on their day on the schedule to get tidied up, or this is an area that takes its grass verge maintenance very seriously indeed.

Long curved avenues climbed a gentle hill, reminding my legs that they were a little bit tired by now.  The houses were stoutly middle-class, all detached, all hidden by trees and shrubbery but close enough to allow me to see the little personalisations - the barbecues, the swing sets, the ornaments on the window sills.  Electric chargers were mounted to the walls by the car ports.  

I turned left at the tennis club - told you it was middle-class - and approached Ängbyplan station.  The Art at the station is unique, and I think I should probably put in some kind of warning here, because the patterns may cause dizziness and/or some kind of seizure.

Wow.

I will say, I do like it.  I'd rather there was a riot of black and red tilework that was at least trying to do something to provoke than a plain pastel blandness that doesn't want to offend anyone.  Åsa Lindström took black and white photos, twisted and manipulated them, then turned them into the tiles here.

I repeat: wow.

This is, however, where I have to make a complaint.  Ängbyplan station might have delightful tilework, but it doesn't have a sign.  There wasn't a name over the entrance or on the brickwork.  The viaduct didn't have a name on it.  There wasn't even a Tunnelbana T totem.  If you didn't know this was a metro station already, you wouldn't have necessarily known to go in.  As such, for one time only, a station on the Stockholm Metro is represented here with a platform sign.

I'm as angry as you are.

I actually missed The Art at Åkeshov, because it's placed against a wall behind you when you come down the stairs from the platform; it's blatantly obvious when you come in, but I only saw it once I'd passed through the ticket barriers.  However, it's another copy of Carl Fredrik Reuterswäld's Non-Violence - the gun with a knot in the barrel - so if you're really that bothered about seeing it, go back to my post about Fittja, look at that picture, and imagine it's in a ticket hall instead of on a platform.

Åkeshov's station was in an underpass, which is why the sign selfie is even more badly composed than usual, but at least it's GOT a sign, eh, Ängyplan?  If I went left in the subway, I'd end up in the Norra Ängby district, a development of detached homes.  Wikipedia informs me that our own late Queen visited one of the houses here when she was on a state visit to Sweden in 1956; apparently she wanted to see how Swedish people lived, so she turned up with the King for a look round.  I bet the hoover got a hammering that day.  There's a great picture of her leaving with King Gustaf VI Adolf, walking along the deck outside and doing that little wave she was paid a huge amount of money to practice, and you can just about see the woman who lives there in the doorway.  I may be projecting, but I'm pretty sure she's thinking "thank Christ that's over."

I turned right, though, because I'd seen a fair few Swedish houses already that day, and if nobody was going to invite me in for fika and awkward conversation what was the point?  Besides, to the south was the Judarskogens nature reserve, so my walk was accompanied by trees and greenery.  It also gifted me a moment of low human interest, as a woman who'd been on the same train as me walked up to a man waiting outside the park gates and said hello awkwardly; I'm not sure what number date they were on, but it was certainly single figures.

Some houses soon turned up anyway, a new-build strip between the park and the railway.  A young, impossibly beautiful couple were sat on the terrace of one of them, him with a book on his lap, her smoking a cigarette, both looking cooler than I have ever done or ever will.  The road arced round, but I saw a small side path and, as is my habit, went down that instead, because I will never pass up an opportunity to explore.  It took me directly to Brommaplan's shopping centre.

Brommaplan had a McDonald's, which might not seem odd, but I'd not really seen many of the clown's burger spots in Stockholm.  In the city centre, yes, round the station to catch the tourists, but out on the streets, not so many.  McDonald's was beaten to the burger market in Sweden by Max Hamburgers, a homegrown company, and still struggled to impose its bolshie American self on the Swedish people.  This raised an interesting alternate universe where McDonald's had similarly struggled in the UK, and we were all happily going to a Wimpy Drive Thru for a Bender In A Bun to go.  (I had a Max burger, by the way, because there was a branch right opposite my hotel and I was curious; I can report it tasted like a hamburger.  Jay Rayner, I am not).

There's a jet engine hanging from the ceiling at the station, which you can see just to the side of my fat head in the picture above.  This is a reference to nearby Bromma Airport, Stockholm's first international airport until it was supplanted by the much larger Arlanda in the 1960s.  It continued for domestic and private flights for several decades, but during Covid it closed entirely and nobody really missed it.  Its position, fairly close to the city with good transport links, means it's now worth far more as a site for a property development.  Services are being transferred to Arlanda with a provisional closing date of 2027.  This is all to distract you from the fact that I was absolutely sure I'd taken a picture of that jet engine but apparently I didn't.  Michael Portillo would never be that sloppy.

If you're keeping count, Brommaplan was my tenth station of the day, which meant another 10% of the Stockholm Tunnelbana was now completed.  It's interesting how I can power through the stations when I'm in Sweden, but it's taken me five years to get anywhere near finishing the West Midlands Railway map.  I really need to crack on and finish that, although then that raises the question, what will I do with myself once it's done?

Abrahamsberg was in a small precinct, with some nice shops and a bus turning circle.  There was an ICA over the road, which, I have to report, is not as good as the Coop; I tried a couple of them and they were distinctly lower grade.  There was also a shop called Abrahamsberg Video which, for one delightful moment, I thought was a working rental shop.  Sadly, it seems the name is a historical relic, and it's long diversified into being a general convenience store.  I'll have to wait another day to find somewhere I can rent a copy of Two Moon Junction.

Apartment blocks turned to small houses, and then I was by the Bromma gymnasium.  On the street outside was a discarded ribbon.  I imagined a furious thirteen year old gymnast, left with a bronze, hurling her trophy to the floor and storming off; someone then came along and nicked the medal but left the ribbon behind.  

More cigarette butts, by the way; the Swedes don't seem to have embraced vaping, and thank goodness for that.  As the great sage Katya Zamolodchikova once said, "Smoking is embarrassing.  Vaping is humiliating."  If you're going to fill your lungs with a cancerous substance, have to guts to make it a ciggie.  Dousing it in pineapple and peach flavours is infantile and it smells worse than good old tobacco.  Also, nobody ever looked cool with a vape in their mouth, whereas everyone with a fag dangling from their lips is already more stylish than people without.  (This paragraph is brought to you by Philip Morris).  

This district felt cosy and homey.  It didn't have the cold moneyed veneer of Islandtorget but instead felt more handmade.  One house had decorated the space under the stairs with a summer-themed display - picnic items, a tiny deckchair, a small pot of flowers.  It looked like, and probably was, a project for some pre-teens, but I imagined it shifting from season to season, like the toppers you get on post boxes.  It opened right out onto the street too, and the lack of vandalism spoke very well to the area.

I could tell I was approaching the Tunnelbana station because suddenly there were cars parked at the kerb, parked for the day while their owners worked in town.  It curled down the hill and I saw the platforms across the way.  

Now I've been very kind about The Art on the metro.  I've been considerate and taken it in with an open mind.  At Stora Mossen, however, I find myself biting my tongue. This is the piece, by Marianna Zaborska:

It's that orange square in amongst the blue tiles.  This is, apparently "a symbol of human orientation", and is inspired by a quotation: "The circle with the square is heaven and earth; integration, the conjunction, they presuppose each other as time and space".  (This information is taken, as is most of the info about The Art, from Marie Andersson's excellent book A Guide To The Art In The Stockholm Metro).  I will repeat: it's an orange square in amongst the blue tiles.  Well done to Marianna for getting some cash from SL to pay for it.

It was time.  As we pulled into Alvik station, I made the decision.  The coat was coming off.  I bundled it into my backpack on the platform but, in perhaps the lowest-stakes cliffhanger in the history of Western civilisation, I'm not going to do the reveal until the next blog post.  Bet you can't wait.