The Long Haul

Cast your mind back, back, back to when this entire interminable journey round the Stockholm Tunnelbana began.  In my very first blog post about the journey, when I was voyaging down the bottom of the Red Line, I encountered engineering works that meant I had to transfer to the Green Line to go south from T-Centralen.  I wrote:

If you're sitting there thinking, "having only a single tunnel connection between the two halves of the network seems like it's putting all the eggs in one basket" then stay tuned, because they do have a solution for it.

Foreshadowing!

The fact is they have a very good solution to the problem, and that solution is extending the Blue Line south from its current stubby ending at Kungsträdgården.  It's never good to end a metro line in a city centre - the end point is where you have to reverse the train, which takes time and takes it out of service.  You want to do that in the quiet suburbs where there are fewer passengers who don't mind a bit of a wait.  The works are currently underway, and come 2030 there will be a second route south under the water to the island of Södermalm and beyond.  

There will be six brand new stations with the majority of them on an all-new alignment to Nacka.  One of them, Hammarby kanal, will actually be under a canal, with an exit on either bank, which I find tremendously exciting.  I'm almost certainly going to revisit Stockholm in the 2030s, put it that way.

You might be wondering why I'm banging on about extensions to the Blue Line now, when I did the Blue Line ages ago.  The reason is that other branch on the map above, from Sofia.  At present the Green Line has three southern termini - Hagsätra (the 19 service), Farsta Strand (18) and Skaprnäck (17).  The Blue Line will take over the Hagsätra branch, which will mean all three lines will have two branches at either end, which is pleasing.  (The Green Line is due to get another northern branch, to Arenastaden, in 2027).  This'll mean more trains, because the bottleneck between Gullmarsplan and T-Centralen will have been relieved, a simpler service pattern, and a second way to reach the city centre by train should anything happen to the current Red/Green connection.  (Something which, incidentally, I wish Merseytravel would look into, as right now there's a single train tunnel under the Mersey and if it goes down the Wirral is basically cut off.  I know, I know, pipe dreams).

At present, Gullmarsplan station is in the open air, as the trains cross the water from Södermalm on a bridge.  The Blue Line, however, is almost all tunnel, so new platforms are being excavated beneath the existing station, allowing for a smooth interchange for anyone from Bandhagen who wants to get to Gamla Stan but has lost their direct trains.  

I hope the new Gullmarsplan platforms are as impressive as their siblings on the Blue Line, because right now, The Art is a bit disappointing.  You see that spiky thing on the post there?  That's The Art.  Yes, you might have to squint.

Actually I'm being mean, because there are also these lights mounted to the underside of the concourse above the platforms.  I expect it all looks very impressive at nighttime, but on a blindingly bright July day, it was lost.

I'm afraid I got a little disoriented in the station itself.  It didn't help that it was currently undergoing those rather extensive and complex rebuilding works.  However, the main fault lay with me.  I knew I had to go south from the station, but the main exit was to the north.  Behind the station, though, is a bus exchange, and I thought I might be able to go up there and find a way out from there.

No such luck.  Not only did I find myself in a bit of the bus exchange with no exits, it was also a bit of the bus exchange that didn't even seem to get any buses.  There wasn't any way out except back the way I came.

On the plus side, it allowed me to take a sign picture without anyone around to point and laugh.

Having located the correct exit, I made my way across Gullmarsplan itself, a square surrounded by bars and cafes.  People were sat on outdoor tables enjoying their lunch, though it should be said the clientele was less "sophisticated Europeans enjoying some delightful national delicacy with a glass of wine" and more "local drunks starting their day with a couple of litres of cheap beer".  If they'd have been in Liverpool city centre they'd have almost certainly been hammering the karaoke by now.

I walked under the railway and up some steps to the podium that forms Stockholm's entertainment centre.  Wedged on a triangle between the trains and the motorway, Globen City is your one stop shop for sports and leisure.  On a weekday afternoon, it wasn't exactly throbbing, but I imagine on a weekend it's an absolute nightmare.

The first venue I encountered was Hovet, Sweden's largest ice hockey stadium and often used by the national team.  It's the oldest of the arenas, completed in the 1950s and roofed over a few years later, and is due to be knocked down and replaced with a new ground next year.  I should say that I've tried to restrict the references to ABBA throughout these Stockholm blogs, for much the same reason I haven't really talked about Volvos or IKEA; I don't want any Swedish people who stumble across this to think I viewed everything through a hurdy-gurdy lens.  I must, however, make a note that ABBA's final arena performance on Swedish soil was at Hovet on October 20, 1979.  Thank You For The Music, etc etc.

Next up was the Avicii Arena, better known to us of a Eurovision bent as the Globen Arena, the host venue of the 2000 and 2016 song contests.  This meant I was very close indeed to a stage graced by both Petra Mede and Måns Zelmerlöw, which was of course thrilling.

Neither of those Eurovisions are ones for the ages, even if Måns ripping his shirt off and thrusting his hips is burned in the memories of viewers across the continent.  2000 was won by Fly On The Wings Of Love, which is dreadful, and 2016 by 1944, which I've always found really boring.  Mind you, the UK entries those years were Nicki French and a pair of twinks so it's not like we were robbed or anything.

It's an interesting building, of course; as Las Vegas has recently discovered, if you build an arena that's shaped like a testicle it tends to attract attention.  I'd spotted it from places all over the city and every time it drew the eye.  It's now circled by a pair of capsules that climb up and over the dome, one of those experiences created so that the district isn't a complete desert between performances, but not something I think I'd pay to experience.  The Arena's currently closed for refurbishment, and will reopen next year.

The final venue on the plaza is the Tele2 Arena, the home stadium for both Hammarby IF and Djurgårdens IF football teams.  I'm fascinated by European cities that manage to share stadia without civil war breaking out; if you suggested Liverpool and Everton should have one arena between them there'd be riots.  It's fine as far as stadiums go.  The problem with more or less any stadium built in the last decade or so is it's pretty much always a big metal and glass mesh bowl; that shot up there could be the home ground for any large European team.

I went down the steps to the road at the base of the arena.  My brain subconsciously noticed a siren in amongst the sounds of the city, but didn't really pay attention to it.  It woke up fully when the siren was stopped by an explosion.

The platforms under Gullmansplan aren't the only tunnels to be built in this area.  The new Blue Line will take a more direct route to Sockenplan, cutting out the bend via Globen and Enskede gård and enabling a new station, Slakthusområdet to be built.  As I've mentioned previously, Stockholm is built on some extremely hard rock, and as a consequence, rather than using boring machines to make the tunnels, they blow it up.  The sound I'd just heard was a detonation.  It was slightly disconcerting, knowing there was a load of TNT beneath my feet, but also a little bit exciting.  You don't spend decades watching James Bond films if you don't like a good explosion; in my head the ground beneath me looked like the chamber full of dynamite in the Main Strike Mine in A View To A Kill.  Sadly without Grace Jones.

These two men stopped to watch a crane deliver its load, commenting to one another throughout.  I love them.

Slakthusområdet means, literally, the slaughterhouse area, as this was originally where Stockholm butchered its livestock and sold on its meat.  An industrial area devoted to food processing grew up around the abattoirs, meaning there were dairies and bakeries alongside meat production facilities.  In his video covering the extension, filmed a few years ago, Stockholmshjärta mentions that the whole area smells of sausages and smoked meats.  Sadly that's no longer the case.  The food businesses all moved out to Farsta, well away from the city centre, meaning Slakthusområdet could become an entirely new residential district.

The new station will have ticket halls at either end, meaning one part will be handy for the Avicii, and the other will be good for the Tele2, plus they'll stick in a load of new shops and offices and restaurants.  I've not seen anything about them changing the name, either, which is brilliant.  Who wouldn't want to live in the Slaughterhouse Area?  I hope they name all the streets and buildings appropriately.  "Yeah, I live in the Slaughterhouse Area.  Flat 15, Giblet House.  Across the way from Meathook Plaza and Agonising Heffer Scream Avenue."

 

Since it's going to be demolished in a few years, Globen station's been mildly neglected by SL.  It's a bit scruffy, not helped by playing host to thousands of people on a weekly basis.  There were a couple of security guards on patrol by the entrance (Hammarby were playing that evening) and the banister on the staircase was covered with stickers.  This is one of the most annoying features of modern football fandom: the stickers.  All the obsessive followers wander round the away town slapping stickers with their name on across road signs and public amenities and it's disgusting.  Grow up.

I quite liked The Art at Globen, some shards of green coloured glass by the tracks, but that may be because they reminded me of that crystal Superman uses to create the Fortress of Solitude in the first film.  I have a limited field of references.

Enskede gård on the other hand, gave me a Marvel superhero, in the form of Spider-Man here dangling from the ceiling.  I'm being facetious, obviously.  The figure was created by Maria Meisenberger, and is apparently based on the form of one of her relatives; I'm trying to imagine my Aunt Rosina, say, popping round and asking me to crouch in a leotard for a few hours so she could stick me on the roof of a metro station.  It's not necessarily a no.

There's another one over the exit stairs, where the walls have been decorated with images based on Maria's corneal nerves.  Is she ok, do we think?  The one crouching over the stairs is slightly sinister, looking as if he/she is about to pounce on you as you pass below.  There's no word on what's going to happen to the statues when Enskede gård is closed in 2030; personally I think they should be moved all over the T-bana, getting suspended from the ceilings of stations randomly, just to frighten people. 

I passed through the old-fashioned ticket gate - again, no point in upgrading it, it's all getting knocked down soon anyway - and into the streets beyond.  Enskede gård is the quietest of all the Tunnelbana stations, which is why it's not getting a replacement on the Blue Line extension.  The neighbouring stops can handle the load.  I walked past some apartment blocks with a small Italian restaurant built into the base; a family was sat on the terrace, eating pizza.  This was another element of Stockholm life I'd taken to.  Having these groups of high occupancy buildings close together meant that there was enough traffic to support small restaurants and bars - one or two amongst the blocks - and creating real neighbourhood hubs.  The density isn't there in the UK's suburbs for them to be successful but every little district I'd wandered through over the week seemed to have one.

I crossed back over the tracks by the quite magnificently named Betty Pettersson's Gymnasium, a high school named after the first Swedish woman to graduate from a university, and into a small street dotted with dinky houses.  

That translates to Valuable cats with no traffic sense live here.  I'm not sure if it's an official Swedish Department of Transport sign, but I sincerely hope it is.

The road was so quiet I wandered down the middle of it, nodding a hello to a passer by, an astonishingly good looking man.  It's not just a cliche; the Swedes really are a very good looking race.  Every other woman I passed looked like she could stroll into a beauty contest and win, no problem.  It's no mystery why Miss World judges and James Bond producers favour them. The men weren't as hot, in general, but every fourth or fifth one looked like a long lost Skarsgård boy - admittedly not one of the really famous ones that made it to Hollywood; more like one who had his own tv show in Denmark.  It's a lot of tall, well-built men who live healthy outdoor lives and have Viking blood coursing through their veins.

I passed on buying a home-made jam from Astrid's Garden Pantry (a small wooden display box on the side of a house, with an honesty box underneath) and headed into the tiny precinct outside Sockenplan station.  There was a paint shop that seemed to specialise in the Swedish version of Farrow and Ball, and when I crushed something underfoot, I realised it was a discarded macaron; this area clearly had a few bob.

Sockenplan begins a run of three stations that begin with the letter S, which is something my pattern-finding brain finds very exciting; even better, Slakthusområdet will push that run to four.  I may not be a very interesting person.

The Art on the platform is based around the Ship of Fools, and reminds me of when they'd go behind the scenes of Spitting Image and the puppet heads would be lined up on shelves.  Grotesque faces staring blankly out at you, alive and yet not.

At Svedmyra, they drew inspiration from the greenery surrounding the station.  There are the large images of leaves by the tracks:

But the highlight is the mosaic tiles on the lift housing, scales that glisten green and blue.  They could be a fish, or a feather, or a leaf, and they change in the light.

Close up, you just want to touch them and run your hand over them.  They reminded me of when you find a piece of flint, how it's jagged and sharp and rocky until you turn it over, and then you find a smooth shiny surface you slide your finger down.

I finally managed to drag myself away from the platform and out the door.

The station felt anomalous, weird, without a parade of shops and a bus stop outside.  Instead of high apartments I could just about see the red roofs of houses through the trees.  I took a side path, and wandered underneath cool evergreens.  It didn't feel like summer here.

Eventually I was turned out onto some backstreets, little residential roads that curved between houses.  A couple of rows of shops with flats above; a cafe with two ladies sat outside on plastic chairs, smoking.  The twin viaduct of the T-bana crossed the road ahead of me.

Beneath the railway, between the tracks, there was the by now familiar sign for a skyddsrum - a bomb shelter.  Sweden has enough shelters to provide accommodation for seven million people (current population: ten million, don't worry about it) and has recently announced it'll be funding their refurbishment and expansion.  Having Russia across the Baltic Sea has understandably made them nervous as a nation, and the invasion of Ukraine hasn't done much to make them feel better about it.  

It did make me wonder what I was meant to do in the event of a nuclear holocaust.  I'm not advocating a resurrection of Protect and Survive, the single most terrifying series of public information films ever made, but the Government could at least let me know where my nearest bunker is in case there's a holocaust.  I'm kidding, of course.  I know there aren't any bunkers for us plebs, only for the important folks, and they stopped maintaining them about eight minutes after the Berlin Wall fell.  Also I wouldn't want to survive in a post-nuclear hellhole.  If the bombs come, I'm taking my folding chair and sitting outside and waiting for that sweet fireball to sweep me away.

I saw The Art at Stureby before I saw anything else on the station; it's this three armed organic lamppost, like HR Geiger's nightlight, perched on the far end of the platform.  The road shadowed the tracks and took me to the entrance.

One thing I've not mentioned in all of this tedious nonsense is the trains.  I mean, yes, the C20s are clean and efficient and fast, but they also all had names.  The names were suggested by the public, and here is a brief listing of some I noticed:

• Gunnar
• Stig Helmer
• Vilma
• Emil
• Daniel

The trains were introduced from 1997 onwards, as you'll understand when I tell you that I saw a train called Anakin.  If they start naming the new ones they're introducing, the C30s, I'm guessing there'll be a Taylor Swift and a brat.

Bandhagen broke my chain of S-stations but to make up for it, it had one of the more fun pieces of art.  Freddy Fraek (superb name) crafted a giant folding ruler that rises up and over the platform, sometimes disappearing into it, sometimes accompanied by rocks.

It's big and impressive but also intriguing.  I bet kids love it.  It's like a giant climbing frame, and in fact had to be reinforced with copper after its original plywood proved too fragile.

Even better, the ruler carries on below the viaduct, suddenly bursting out of the wall of the station and into the precinct.

A couple of swift turns and then I was walking in parkland again.  It was filled with families and children, people with dogs.  Ice creams dripped onto the pavement.  I passed a petting zoo, and wondered who was louder, the animals or the kids.  There was a food stand, named in English as Up Your Potato And Buns.  I couldn't decide if this was a mistranslation, or an attempt at a Bastard Burger-style hipster name.  It sounds vaguely rude but also not; it's an innuendo that doesn't really make sense, like when youngsters decide that a word is actually a swear and go all giggly because you said "hoover".

I was approaching my last few stations and feeling a little emotionally drained.  This was July 5th 2024, the day after the General Election at home; I'd woken at 6am to the delightful news that both Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss had lost their seats.  I was feeling a sort of unburdening, the sloughing off of Tory nonsense and general evilness, a feeling that possibly things could get better now.  Walking through a sunshiney park in a liberal European democracy gave me hope of what Britain could be if we tried, and now the Tories were gone, maybe it will happen.  It probably won't, but give me a little moment of hope.

Högdalen station was reached through a pedestrian precinct that seemed very familiar.  If you'd replaced the ICA with a Heron Foods and stuck a couple of charity shops in there it could've been Birkenhead.  That may not be a good thing.

A quick train ride, and I was at Rågsved, the penultimate station on the branch.

I followed some teenage boys down the steps outside the station to the road.  In England they would've been called scallies; I'm not sure what the Swedish equivalent is, but I'm sure they've got a term.  They were headed for the shopping centre, a spiral-shaped building dating from the sixties, but I went to the main road instead, skirting the edge of the district.

Like a lot of the districts I'd visited at the edges of the T-bana lines, Rågsved became notorious for its deprivation and drug use in the seventies and eighties.  (The BF, incidentally, was horrified when I told him about some of the less salubrious parts of Stockholm I'd visited, and furious I hadn't mentioned it before I went).  It had received a lot of government money to be refurbished but I still got the prickle of anxiety as I walked around, the sense that I should keep my guard about me.

Rågsved shifted into Hagsätra but it was a paper transition, a matter of postcodes rather than an actual social shift.  It was the same blocks of flats and grassy paths, the same long meandering roads, then another precinct with a supermarket and a pantbank - a pawn shop.  This was where the 19 ended, the final station on the branch.

That was my 24th station of the day, and my last one in the southern suburbs.  I only had two more stops on the Green Line and then it was complete.  For them, I'd have to head back into the city centre.  At least I'd get a nice sit down en route.

You can just about see it at the end of the platform on the right, but there's a poster there that has the words BARN CANCER printed on it in big letters.  Those posters were all over the network and they startled me every time.  It translates as CHILD CANCER, and it's presumably raising money for research, but there was something about the blue background and the big bold letters that seemed like it was advertising it - like, child cancer - now available in a store near you!

I was underground again, my happy place, and the ride to the surface past the tiled walls gave me a lift.  I was getting tired and I wanted to have a nice sit down and a rest somewhere.  Somewhere not station related.

The contrast with the trees and suburbia I'd left behind in Hagsätra was stark.  It was busy and noisy.  Wide avenues sliced between offices and shops.  Cyclists burned by in dedicated lanes.  There was the honk of impatient delivery drivers and loud conversations from passers by.

Götgaten slices through Södermalm, a long straight road passing from one side of the island to the other, and it felt very much like a through route.  It wasn't a place to loiter and parade; it was a hectic crossing.  Side roads hinted at a quieter life - small squares, the occasional batch of trees, routes without cars - but here it was relentless, moving, driving.

Of course after banging on about how busy and overwhelming it was I discovered the only photos I had of the street made it look like a traffic-free idyll.

I passed the opportunity to buy some freeze dried candy (widest assortment in Scandnavia (sic)) and descended into Medborgarplatsen.  It's another of the Bathroom Stations, but they've gussied it up with some coloured columns.

Medborgarplatsen is one of the oldest stops on the entire network, originally opening as a tram stop in 1933 before being converted to metro use in the fifties.  Those brackets over the tracks?  They're originally to hang the electric wires for the trams from.

That was it.  End of the line.  All of the Green was finished with.  It's a lovely feeling, crossing that final station off, but it's always tinged with sadness.  Finishing means an end, and sometimes you don't want things to be that final.

And this is all that's left.  Stick with me, I promise we can get through this together.