How to walk underground from Liverpool Street to Farringdon | Hacker News Reader

How to walk underground from Liverpool Street to Farringdon

diamondgeezer.blogspot.com

98 pointsrevorad79 comments

When I lived in Montreal, I used to love the "Underground City" in winter (and in the height of summer). Basically the entire downtown area is connected by tunnels. I used to have a colleague who lived in an apartment building connected to it. He would often show up at work in short sleeves and no coat because he could walk the couple of miles from his building to work completely underground.

What's interesting about London is how little of this it has compared to other cities. There are a few relatively short walkable tube links, but most of London is very definitely above ground.

London doesn't have Montreal's fierce winters - occasionally it snows, but mostly it just rains a lot - but even so. The tube is treated exclusively as a serious and frivolity-free travel system.

The idea that it could be more than that, with underground malls and food courts that would appeal to tourists and regulars, seems somehow unthinkable.

The subway tunnel from London Bridge national rail station to the Underground has some of this, but I agree that it's astonishingly rare. Very few stations even have so much as a toilet, let alone a cafe or shops.

Personally I'm a very big fan of TfL's approach on this - the minimalism of the network is really quite nice.

Actually, there is a _ton_ of London that is underground, it just happens to not be for pedestrians or the general public. You should take a look at some of the planning and tight clearances that are required for things like adding additional cooling/ventilation to the existing tube network. When they were adding a new exit to Victoria as a part of the changes to the station I remember reading about trying to navigate the digging of multi-meter diameter holes with clearances to other underground structures or voids that were 10cm or less.

That sounds awful (and unnecessary) to me. When I’m using the tube it’s because I want to get somewhere. Shoppers getting in the way would just be frustrating. It makes perfect sense in Montreal but eating/shopping underground just sounds miserable when our weather rarely goes below 0. Also a poor use of expensive space when, as I said, eating and shopping above ground is always comfortable.

It isn't that surprising. The original tube lines were built just below the surface and they had to go down the middle of the road partly because it was easier and partly to try and avoid damage to old buildings (and demolition although this did happen in places).

When you look at how densely populated London is along with many deep basements, you don't have a lot of options for having these underground malls.

Does it rain in London that much, vs other global cities... Or is it just a myth from old smoggy and rainy movies...? https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/rain-much-london-...

I’ve heard you can do this quite well in Chicago and Minneapolis (the latter via skywalks[0])

Probably because of the brutal cold you have around the Great Lakes.

[0]: https://minneapolis-2021.s3.amazonaws.com/images/hotels-minn...

The author lost me when they took a train from Moorgate to Barbican. Clearly doesn’t count as walking underground!

Since it's a train in which you can walk from the last to the first carriage, he counted it as walking by walking the train while the train was going between Moorgate and Barbican. I guess technically it is walking and being underground.

I can walk from Paddington to Canary Wharf underground if I’m allowed to pace up and down the train.

I could walk from London to New York if the stewards weren't so touchy during take offs and landing.

You could still do it if you define walking as “moving your feet constantly”, who cares about word definitions anymore.

Apparently that’s ok, but using a lift is resorting to mechanical means. Riiiight.

watch me drive over the atlantic ocean while doing donuts on this ship...

It was a fun read for someone who used to live in London.

> It's taken 20 minutes to get here via seven escalators, two staircases, one ambulatory train ride and one lift. You may quibble that the train ride was a cheat and that a couple of bits weren't technically below ground, but you can't argue with the extraordinariness of such a long artificial subterranean connection.

Walking along the train from Moorgate to Barbican while you "ride" it seems a little like cheating, but if the trip time is short enough you could be perambulating the whole time - so fulfills the spirit of the quest.

Finding that elevator/lift at Barbican looks challenging. But at least you didn't have to ignore a "Beware of the Leopard" sign.

> seems a little like cheating,

Yeah, IMO more like actually cheating. Otherwise any other two stations could be connected with you just walking really slowly.

I can walk Heathrow to Clapham Common - entirely underground (except the parts where the underground is actually above ground)

Then when you got there you could ask the man on the Clapham Omnibus to decide whether this counted as cheating or not. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus

Accommodating the cheat, the journey could have been more elaborate: enter at Monument, walk underground to Bank, short hop on central line to Liverpool Street, then the rest of the journey.

Because the Elizabeth line trains are so long this trick would allow very long "underground walkways". I walked the entire length of the train yesterday in about the time it took me to get from Liverpool Street to Whitechapel. I'm not sure I'd argue they're now connected by foot underground!

Parts of that section are open to the sky, too, so not really under the ground.

Since everyone is posting their favorite underground pedestrian walkways, I’ll share the ones from Sapporo which blew my mind:

https://www.sapporo.travel/en/spot/facility/sapporo_undergro...

When I visited Hakata, there were many of these places underground too. The lack of light made it feel like it would be annoying if you worked there but the lack of noise and traffic made it a nice way of walking across the centre of Fukuoka.

I spent a day in Sapporo once and was initially confused at where all the people were. Streets were almost devoid of life. Then I found out about these underground tunnels and it clicked, that’s where everyone was, walking underground.

The Montreal underground city connects (in its main section) a total of 7 metro stations via closed (mostly underground) passages. Wikipedia claims “32km” of interconnected tunnels. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal

Paris has "grand correspondences" which means the lines link on the map, but in reality are a long way apart. There are many travelators (think flat escalator), and even had a "high speed" one, which was fun, but I think now ordinary speed, injuries maybe.

In Japan there are snow avoidance passages with shops in Sapporo and it seems an ever expanding underground links for the stations near to Tokyo station. Longest at the moment seems exit C2b of Otemachi station to the very South exit of Higashi Ginza station, 35 minutes, 2.7km.

High speed moving walkways are usually prone to falling, but also are usually bespoke machines with all the maintenance nightmare that entails. It‘s hard to upkeep lots of normal escalators let alone a specialized one.

Travellators are surely fairly standard - most major airports have dozens. And the Paris metro has enough that I imagine they would reuse one or a handful of common designs across their network.

Normal travelators are very standard. They‘re very slow, though, operating at ~2 km/h

What the grandparent is talking about was a high speed travelator that accelerates people to 9km/h to provide shorter journey times. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3001182.stm

Toronto airport also has (or at least had, it's about 5 years since I was last there) travelators which start slower to allow you to get on/off and then accelerate in the middle (they work by the individual segments getting "longer" and "shorter"). Not sure how fast they go but it definitely feels quite a bit faster than normal ones.

Yes, and they're infamous for breaking all the time.

Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel predicted banks of travelators running in parallel, where the one at the edge would go at a walking place and each successive one would go faster so you could travel many miles at 30mph or more.

>Paris has "grand correspondences" which means the lines link on the map, but in reality are a long way apart

So they're not marked with a different color or something? It just looks like two dots are equally distant, but one set is farther apart than the other?

Also is there a french word for "grand correspondences"?

I have an interest in urban planning, but I don't speak anything other than English fluently but I'm getting good at reading small bits of text like news articles or signs and translating what I won't know with software, but it's a slow and laborious process -- sorry for the barrage of questions :-)

It seems that a possible French term is "grandes correspondances", but "grandes" means "big" or "great" and some uses of this term seem to refer to important connections or major locations for connections, as opposed to physically distant ones. (Like if we referred to "the biggest tourist destinations", a common interpretation could be the ones that receive the most tourists, rather than the destinations that are themselves largest or most populous.)

"Correspondances" are what could be called "connections", "(inter)changes", or "transfers" in English (either locations for, acts of, or opportunities for switching from one transportation service to another). The word is also used for situations like air travel connections, not just subway connections.

I only speak a little French and mainly formed these conclusions from some brief web searching just now. :-)

This Tweet refers to "la plus grande correspondance souterraine possible sans prendre un seul train" (the largest [i.e., longest] possible underground connection without catching a single train). So, it can clearly refer to a physically "large" distance to travel for a connection.

https://twitter.com/ElyssFr/status/1031511189325373440

> "grandes" means "big" or "great" and some uses of this term seem to refer to important connections or major locations

Another use you will see on railway signage is "grandes lignes", which are the long-distance express services.

Ithink the term 'grand correspondence' is perhaps less clear than saying an underground map is usually topological not geometric.

If you look for 'geometric map tube' (or similar) you can see how the actual positions of the London stations differ from their positions on the standard (topological) map.

There is another version of the standard tube map where the connections between stations are labelled with the walking distance between them.

> … near to Tokyo station. Longest at the moment … 2.7km.

I walked that route once, about twenty-five years ago. We had had an unusually heavy snow for Tokyo and I needed some exercise, so I took the subway to Otemachi and walked underground to Higashi Ginza and back.

The areas around Shinjuku and Osaka stations also offer vast, mazelike underground pedestrian networks. I used to pride myself on knowing the entire Shinjuku system, but it has expanded since and now I might get lost.

After many trips to Osaka, I feel I know all the nooks and crannies of the network there, but it has probably expanded in the past couple of years, too.

The underground transfer from Yamanote to Keio Line in Tokyo Station (how you get to Disneyland/Chiba/Makuhari Messe) is so long that it's actually faster to go to the next Yamanote station, go outside, and walk back to it.

Working as a law clerk in downtown Chicago in the '90s, these underground walkways made it a lot easier to safely traverse the paths between the various courthouses. https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/cdot/pedestri...

Toronto has publicly usable underground tunnels that span multiple city blocks as well.

They're very functional as welll, have you been to Canada in winter? Lotta precipitation.

(I took a short walk through because in summer they also had AC)

PATH is huge, with over 30 km of tunnels and more than 50 buildings

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(Toronto)

About a decade ago I tried to make a map of PATH by gathering floor plans from each of the buildings and stitching them together. I couldn’t get floor plans for every building and eventually it fell by the wayside, but it was a fun project.

I wonder if anyone else has done it since. As far as I could tell, there was no “official” map in much detail beyond an outline of the connected buildings’ footprints.

Where do you gather the floor plans for each building? I've had similar ambitions but didn't know where to start

I'd guess that a lot of buildings have publicly accessible floor plans either for directing customers (in the case of shopping malls) or firefighters.

I used to love walking in the concourse beneath center city Philly, but it is now a campground of sorts, and pretty unsafe.

The Philly concourse is huge. I couldn't believe my eyes when I encountered the Broad St. part--it appeared to go on forever.

Mornington Crescent!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)

Thanks for posting this, it was interesting although I agree that including a trans-train ambulation was cheeky. The author's subsequent post strikes me as extremely valuable given the advent of 205 metre long trains...

https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2022/05/where-to-sit-on-c...

Somewhat related: there used to be a bar on the platform of Sloane Square tube station: https://www.mylondon.news/news/nostalgia/london-underground-... now closed, unfortunately!

Awesome. In Hong Kong I've found I can walk from Sheung Wan to at least Admiralty via a series of malls and elevated, covered walkways. Looking forward to finding more routes.

The Moorgate - Liverpool Street link is actually potentially useful for me, as i live on a line which runs into Moorgate and occasionally travel to the frontiers of civilisation from Liverpool Street, so now i can change trains without having to catch the tube or leave and re-enter the stations. Although whether the deep route is actually any quicker than the route through the streets is yet to be determined.

OP mentions in the article that the surface route was 3 minutes slower but maybe he was walking slower!

> This passageway has become a point of conflict since Tuesday as the one-way system at the top of the Central line escalators has not been adjusted to take account of passengers surging up from Down Below

This has been such a pain this week! They really need to figure out the crown control in the Liverpool Street tube concourse, it's never been good and now they've just rammed another route through the middle.

If I "walk along the train while riding it", as the author suggests, I can get from any station to any other station. Taking the tube from Moorgate to Barbican is not the same thing as walking underground, so this article is somewhat misleading.

As someone working in the Financial District in Manhattan, I think it's cool that I can get from Brookfield Place in Battery Park City over to pretty close to the heart of old FiDi, at the southernmost Fulton St exit.

I like that page!

Reminds of the old Internet :-)

I find the underground escalators interesting, not only for their length but for the horizontal part on the top and bottom, which seems as if it'll make it easier to get on and off while carrying baggage.

Isn't that the usual design? If you type "escalator" into Google Image search, all of them seem to have that horizontal portion.

There are so many British colloquialisms in here I had a hard time following—and my wife is from England.

Enjoyed it anyhow, and I probably am not the target reader so it likely doesn’t matter.

Riding a train is not reaching by walk. You insensitive liar!

As someone used to the Boston MA system, I'm impressed by the cleanliness and lack of homeless people and graffiti.

It only opened a couple of days ago, so there's that, but I think you can expect it to remain in similar condition, notwithstanding wear-and tear for some considerable time. Graffiti is rare on the London underground, and is generally removed quickly.

I believe London also has a significantly lower number of homeless people, although comparable statistics are hard to find.

There are homeless in London of course, but access to the underground is reasonably tightly controlled with barriers and the staff will very quickly deal with anyone that hasn't paid a fare or is trying to deface the environment

And here I was thinking London homelessness was pretty catastrophic as it was…

You ever been in Courthouse Station? It looks beautiful compared to the rest of the system.

That said, I dont think of the T as particular grungy with graffiti its mostly just poorly maintained.

This is "Crossrail", aka the Elizabeth Line, the Tube's major new extension that opened this week (after years of delays.) So it hasn't had much chance to get dirty yet.

Beggars and homeless people are common in London, but less common on the Tube since you can't get very far inside most stations without a ticket.

Something wrong with the photos in this article. No armed guards? No graffiti on the walls? No trash on the floors?

The smell of urine must be overwhelming.

No actually the majority of London inner city underground once you are inside the barriers is remarkably clean.

Considering that this section of the London Underground opened to the public just three days ago, it would be quite the feat for it to be already covered in filth.

Cameras every where and to be fair cleaners do an awesome job for trains

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