Blue Is The Warmest Colour

 

Regular readers (hello you!) will know one thing about me: I'm a miserable sod.  I don't like anything.  I cast a jaded cynical eye over every town, street and human being I encounter on my travels.  This is, I presume, why you read it; you don't come here for jolly happy times, you come here for low-key bitchiness.

I've got some bad news for you.  The third day of my Stockholm trip was devoted to visiting the stations on the Blue Line, and every single one is an absolute delight.  Every station is architecturally stunning, awe-inspiring, beautiful.  Every one made my heart sing.  So the blog posts that cover the Blue Line... well, they're mainly going to be nice.  Sorry about that.

These are the escalators from the platform to the ticket hall at Hjulsta, a small suburban station on the edge of the city, and they are more beautiful that 80% of the railway stations in the United Kingdom.

Hjulsta was a district built under the Swedish Million Programme of 1965-75.  With a Socialist government in power, they undertook a pledge to build 100,000 new homes every year for ten years.  Vällingby was taken as the ideal model, and soon they were constructing new apartment blocks and houses all over the country, but especially in Stockholm.

However, while Vällingby had been conceived and constructed with care and commitment to Garden City principles, the new estates were put together with less attention to detail.  Homes were identical, produced using kits, and thrown up with an emphasis on speed rather than quality.  Concrete was used throughout and, to help with construction, the building sites were stripped of all vegetation.  It meant that when people moved into their new homes, they had new modern, spacious interiors, but the common areas were cold and unflinching.

Sixty years on, of course, the planting is established, the trees are in full bloom, and grass and flowers are everywhere.  In the Sixties and Seventies, though, it felt bare.  It lead to feelings of isolation and abandonment.  In addition, the demographics of Sweden changed; the baby boom ended, and a housing crisis became a housing surplus.  Suddenly there were blocks of half-empty apartments, leading to crime and neglect; the better off residents moved away from the estates and poorer people - often immigrants and refugees - moved in, further underlining the feeling that these districts were "other", apart from the city.

I'd swung away from the central path through Hjulsta because - alright, I'll admit it; because there were some young men idly kicking a football.  They were remarkably rowdy for that time of the morning and I didn't fancy passing them and possibly being dragged into whatever soccer-related madness they were currently undergoing.  I ducked down a side road, discovered it was a dead end, went back round a different way, and ended up on the perimeter road round the estate where there was no footpath because humans were meant to stick to the walkways.

Fortunately, I found a footbridge that took me up and over the road and back into the residential district, giving me a good view of the parkland and allotments laid out for the locals.  I passed an oval football pitch - or possibly an oval pitch for something that isn't football - and disappeared into a diagonal path between small homes.  A man was sat on his front step, smoking a cigarette, while a dog walker passed me in the opposite direction, no doubt heading for the park.  It was a neat little neighbourhood, the kind of strip where you can imagine they had summer barbecues together and sat out on warm evenings chatting with beers.  A community.  The kind of place I, an antisocial bastard, would absolutely dread and try to hide from.  I'd be the one house that didn't put up Christmas decorations or answer the door on Hallowe'en and the children would rightly shout abuse when I slid out my front door to buy my groceries.

Another footbridge carried me over the main road.  Below me I could see a young man with a tote bag and a backpack, stranded in the gulley of the lowered highway, dodging concrete to try and reach the pedestrian areas.  He must've taken a turn like mine, and I wondered if the football boys scared him too.  

I descended down to the Tenstaplan, where a kiosk was selling magazines and coffee and a railway worker in high viz sauntered over to his waiting colleague in a van.  

Helga Henschen themed The Art at Tensta around concepts of solidarity and brotherhood, particularly towards immigrants.  I'm writing this as far right lunatics recover from a busy Saturday of looting, fighting and burning down libraries across the UK, apparently as a "protest".  Judging from the footage, they're mainly protesting against concepts of sobriety, sanity and waistlines under 40 inches.  All countries need immigrants to help them survive (have you taken a look at the birth rate in the developed world lately?) and wandering around screaming at people with a different coloured face simply because you happened to be born in a British postcode won't stop that need.  On top of which, immigrants make a country so much more interesting, so much more varied and different.

I will admit I'd been surprised by how multicultural Stockholm was.  You have this image of Sweden as a nation of Aryan ideals, nothing but blonde-haired, blue-eyed Vikings wandering around being effortlessly glamorous and attractive.  And while that's true, there were also huge quantities of black and brown faces too, throughout the city.  You don't know what a place will be like until you're there.

Messages of solidarity line the track, while the central crossover chamber is decorated like a prehistoric cave, with drawings on the walls: a reminder that we all started out the same way, crawling out of the dirt to become humans.

It's also worth noting that the central cave contains tiny ceramic birds and this boggle-eyed walrus, both of which are adorable.

I walked down one platform and back up, snapping away, smiling.  I really cannot understate how great these stations were, and I was literally only two in.  But wait: it was only going to get better!

That was what I saw when I stepped off the train at Rinkeby.  Take it in.  Hot orange walls like a volcanic fissure.  Cool black floor tiles.  Light bouncing off every surface.

The head artist, Nisse Zetterberg, took inspiration from the many Viking artifacts found during the tunnelling of the Blue Line.  The area around Rinkeby, in particular, is known for its runestones.  As part of this, Zetterberg asked another artist, Sven Sahlberg, to design the hanging sculpture in the central cavern.

How can you not look at that and feel better about the world?

Rinkeby opened in 1975 but none of the station feels small or dated.  It's been built to last, with platforms and circulation spaces for plenty of passengers.  It felt alive and thrilling and as I'm writing this, I want to go back.

On the other hand, then you step out of the Tunnelbana and into the real world.

Rinkeby was, I'm afraid, the first and only time I felt anxious about my surroundings in Stockholm.  Admittedly, this was partly my fault.  I went the wrong way out of the station, which sent me round the back of the shopping precinct.  I found walking through a car park, past a community centre where a gentleman who may have been on uncontrolled substances muttered to himself, and then onto an ugly road lined with small, basic stores.  Passers-by were confused by my presence, looking, as I did, like an absolute tourist in my white shorts and garish shirt and oversized backpack.  I only needed a baseball cap on my head to look the full dumb-ass foreigner.

In this case, my instincts weren't completely off.  Rinkeby is one of the city's utsatt område - exposed, or vulnerable, districts.  Crime, unemployment and drug use is higher in these areas, and they're marked down by the emergency services as risky to enter.  There are high levels of immigrants and low levels of economic prosperity.  Life, in short, is bad for the people here.  

I edged round the hefty grey bulk of the area's new police station, built to triple the force's presence in the area.  It was a police station that struggled to be built - construction companies didn't want to venture into the district, over fears of theft and intimidation.  I thought it was a prison at first, with its high walls covered in bulletproof steel, but it was only when I got round to the front and saw the car park and the entrance that I realised it was a little more domestic.  It still didn't exactly scream open policing, however, acting as a threatening bulwark.

I headed south, to the Rinkebyplan, where new apartment blocks had been constructed in an effort to raise living standards.  A primary school was surrounded by a metal wall, but holes had been cut into it and filled with plexiglass so that you could see the kids playing inside and it looked a little less like the exercise yard at Pentonville.  One child waved at me as I walked by, and obviously I waved back, because I'm not a monster.  At the end, a new road bridge had been constructed to take traffic over the motorway to the new developments at Stora Ursvik being built on the other side, but it hadn't yet been connected.  I wondered idly if it ever would, or if Rinkeby would be denied a connection with the new residents; isolated once more.

That same building work threw up a major hazard for me.  I needed to get to Rissne station, which was at a diagonal from Rinkeby, the other side of a major road interchange.  On top of that, the new apartment blocks I could see in the distance needed their own junction, and this was being carved into the embankments around the highway.  In short, I was going to have to take a diversion.

It was ok at first.  A brand new pedestrian bridge with long sweeping ramps to allow cycle access had been constructed over the 279 road.  Across the way, however, it deposited you on scrubland.  Paths had been laid to take you to civilisation, but they were badly laid and signposted.  I veered off to one side, hopeful that I could maybe trudge down an embankment and get a short-cut across the highway, but there were fences blocking all possible routes.

Still, at least there was a finger sign pointing to Rissne Tunnelbana station, eh?  It was, unfortunately, a liar, but I didn't know that at the time.  I continued down the path, past a woman crouched next to the flat tyre on her bicycle.  I wondered if I should offer to assist in some way, but decided not to, for the following reasons:

• the language barrier
• I know nothing about bikes and haven't fixed a puncture since around 1988
• the metrics of a large man approaching a tiny lady in a vulnerable position in an isolated spot
• she'd earlier burned past me on the footbridge in a way that was very unfriendly so there's karma for you
• she was on her phone anyway calling for help or at the very least bitching to a friend
• I am at heart an awful awful person.

Stora Ursvik had around 1700 residents in 2012; by 2027 there are plans for 15,000.  New apartments were laid out on wide boulevards (these were definitely boulevards) with resident parking and lamp posts offering style over function.  I once again wondered if they'd ever connect with Rinkeby across the motorway.  They had the Tunnelbana station, of course, so the new residents would want to have access to that, but would they want traffic to be two way, for the people of that area to seep into theirs, infecting them with their crime and general poverty?

I was still on a diversion.  Now I had to get across another highway, descending into bushes marked out with neon orange signposts until I could get to a temporary pelican crossing.  It took me over the main road and into more bushes, overshadowed by Urskvik's high-tech recycling plant.

I crossed the car park of Willy's, a chain of low cost food stores.  I feel the urge to share with you that the branch at Rissne was their first move into a large, big box format, a format referred to as "Super-Willys".  Look, I'm just reporting the facts here.  It brought me out at the back of the Tunnelbana's Rissne depot.

I was starting to get a little bitter about all the diversions.  If I'd been in a car, I'd have got from one station to the next in five minutes; out of a car, it was all round the houses for half an hour.  Yes, I know I could've gone back into the station and got the next train to Rissne and that would've been sorted, but you're kind of missing the point of the blog, aren't you?  Back roads and building sites aren't exactly picturesque, either.

Finally I reached Rissne Central, behind a gang of excitable teens headed for the Tunnelbana and, no doubt, scads of mischief in the city centre.  

I passed through the ticket gates, ready for whatever the Blue Line was going to throw at me next.

The answer was: history.  While Rinkeby had gone the symbolic route to reflect the ancient land around it, Rissne went literal.  Madeline Dranger and Rolf H Reimers covered the tunnel walls with text detailing the entire path of human civilisation from the construction of the pyramids to the present day.

Each bit of text is colour coded - blue for science, yellow for religion, green for politics, red for social development and purple for culture - and if you wanted you could track the development of mankind while you waited for your train.

In the middle of the platform, at year zero, there's a star.

They've even provided handy maps on the opposite wall so you can see, for example, the extent of the Mesopotamian or Roman empires.

If this was my local station, and I had a spare afternoon, I'd come down here to read.  You could bring a little folding chair, position yourself on the platform, and submerge yourself in the platform walls.  It'd be ace.

As the train pulled out of Rissne, a woman at the end of the carriage stood up with a pile of papers torn from a notebook in her hand.  She walked along the train and silently laid a page on empty seats as she passed.  I was standing up, as I was only going one stop, but I could see one of the pieces, and I took a picture so I could run it through Google Translate.  It listed her name, that she was a mother of two, and that she was unemployed and looking for work.  Her phone number was at the bottom.  My heart quietly broke as she reached the end of the carriage, then turned around and walked back, collecting the pages again from indifferent passengers.  I presumed she'd do this over and over, on every leg of the journey, for the rest of the day.  Even as I write this, I can feel the gut-wrenching sadness.  Some people are living lives that we can barely comprehend.

Most of the stations on the Tunnelbana are double ended, allowing for entrances in different districts.  Where this happens they're built with two separate platform spaces with a connecting passageway inbetween.  When there's only one exit, however, you get what they call a trumpet station, where an island platform sits between the tracks and you can see the whole station in one go.  Rissne is a trumpet station, and so is Duvbo.

The Art at Duvbo was again referencing the past, but a more prehistoric one, with Gösta Sillén going for a feel of a grotto.  He created fake dinosaur fossils and embedded them into the roof and walls of the station, giving it a Jurassic Park vibe, only without the random slaughter.

There's escalators to take you out of the station, but I decided to use the lift, because it intrigued me.  Instead of building a passage way and sticking a direct elevator in it, most of the Blue Line stations stuck an inclined lift alongside the escalators - a sort of indoor funicular.  That's so much more exciting than a regular lift, isn't it?  Almost like a fairground ride.  I had to have a go, and, courtesy of my patented Shaky-Cam (Now with bad lighting!), you can too.

Literally a thrill a second there.

Duvbo could've done with a second entrance, actually, what with its ticket hall not actually being in the district it's named after.  That's a small, historic urban village of exclusive villas but, it turns out, it was built on unstable soft ground, and so they couldn't construct the shafts needed to get passengers to and from the surface.  Instead, the ticket hall emerges in Central Sundbyberg.

It was still only half nine and Sundbyberg absolutely refused to wake up.  I was starting to admire the Swedish refusal to open before ten am.  Think how much better everyone in the retail trade must feel with an extra hour or two in bed.  It did mean that an area that should've been a central business district felt about as exciting as a January Sunday in Mold but at least I wasn't buffeted around by commuters.

The roads sloped downwards, until they settled in a valley with, to my surprise, a railway line running right through it.  This was the Mälarbanan, one of the busiest commuter routes into Stockholm, and one of the reasons Sundbyberg had grown up here in the first place.  

It was a little disconcerting, having a major transport arterial slicing through your town centre, and the local authorities agreed.  They formulated a plan for a new centre for Sundyberg, achieved by putting the railway in a tunnel (and doubling it from two to four tracks).  This would free up the land over the top for new offices and apartments, remove a barrier to movement, and enable a brand new underground interchange station.

Sadly, the project's currently on hold.  Work was meant to start in 2023, but that's been delayed until 2028 at the earliest "while permits are obtained", and by permits, I presume they mean "a lot of cash".  It's a shame because while the electrified railway gives the area a gritty, turn of the century industrial realness - and is no doubt a real boon for lazy trainspotters who want to sit in a cafe and watch the engines go by - it'd be a lot better in a tunnel so that people on the surface could actually live.

The entrance to transport interchange is via a subway, with a sign up top showing the next arrivals on both the Tunnelbana and the local railway lines.  But hang on: what's the name on that sign?  Sundbyberg?

I think you'll find, SL, that's only the name of the overground station; the underground station is Sundbybergs Centrum.  They correct it at the subway entrance to the station proper but still: sloppy.

Absolutely nobody else on planet Earth cares about this.

Sundbyberg Centrum's artwork is based around a half-dozen large pieces of statuary, each one different to the other.  It means that it was the first Blue Line station I was a little disappointed by.  I'd become used to there being an overarching theme, but the idea here seemed to be "ooh, art."

It wasn't bad, of course.  It was delightful.  It just didn't feel like a single experience.

You knew I'd get miserable in the end.