London Underground Fancy Dress Party

Many people have held private fancy dress parties where you have to come dressed as a Tube station. That doesn't mean you cover yourself in crisp packets, graffiti, advertising posters and have a pigeon under your arm. You dress up as something that sounds like London Underground station name. However, I've just learnt of a public Tube fancy dress party on the 31st January.


It's organised by Bringstuff who say "We want you to come dressed as a visual interpretation of a Tube station - a blacksmith with a large hammer for Hammersmith, a manchester clown for Piccadilly Circus or James Bond for Bond Street etc"


"You get the idea, so be as creative as you can, with one exception. NO ANGEL COSTUMES - Angel Islington is off limits as it would be rubbish if everyone turned up in the same costume. "

Full details are on their website & entry's free before 10pm. If you're looking for ideas for Tube Fancy Dress party costumes, there's lots in the comments of the aforementioned post, or you might want to suggest some of your own.

I might be tempted to go along covered in mouldy ham representing a station I change at a lot on the District Line. Although that's a tad unsociable, so I'd probably dig out an old duffle coat, grab a small suitcase & a jar of marmalade and learn Peruvian for the evening.

Energy Saving Subway Station

Following on from yesterday's post on the London Underground's green products, I came across an interesting story on Current about an energy saving subway station in Tokyo.


Tadao Ando, the designer of Shibuya Station, told Wallpaper magazine "It's composed of a central void contained inside an egg-shaped shell and aims to reduce the station's dependency on air conditioning equipments by letting the outside air blow into the underground space, creating a natural ventilation system that is energy saving."

As the London Underground has very little dependency on air conditioning equipment (mainly because it currently doesn't have any - apart from comedic giant fans), I doubt whether we'll be seeing this in London any time soon.

Ando made some interesting points about orientation in the subway & how spatial improvements could help this:

"The existing underground stations in Tokyo are generally very confusing, generating a sense of disorientation, making it very difficult to find your way and getting around. This is due to the fact that it is very difficult to recognize your own position in relation to the street level's world and in addition to the constant shift of direction you are forced to make in the labyrinthine underground world. In order to help people's orientation in this underground world, giving them a sense of spatial perception and improving the functionality of the station, I created a 15 metre central void from concourse level B2 to the platform level B5, and wrapped it all up within a symbolic egg-shaped shell."


The station design looks amazing although not sure what the mirrored parts would do to my sense of spatial perception. Environmental blog Planet Green n Pink said "The idea behind the design was to keep a continuous flow of energy moving smoothly. That translates to a positive experience for the traveler and very good Feng Shui."

Good Feng Shui & a positive energy experience on your commute, please can have some Japanese design on London's Tube stations.

Eco friendly Tube products

Looks like the London Underground are doing their bit to help people get a little greener with some new products launched for their shop. Mags put me on to these Envelope Angels after seeing them as a Secret Santa gift in I like.


"They're labels you stick over the address on a used envelope to make it shiny enough to use again. They come in two models, original angelic and London Underground issue (above). They're really nicely designed - the box acts as a dispenser which you can refill, and Blue Marmalade, the people who make them are so nice they'll even recycle the plastic stickerbacks for you."

The Tube one is illustrated with a stretch of the Northern line leading to Angel station, and carries the slogan: 'Another journey for every envelope'. Hopefully it's a better journey than an average one on the Misery Line! They're only £5.86 for a pack which contains 100 "To: Labels" and 100 "From: labels". The company's tip is to include a label pair within each envelope you send and pass on the idea to those you mail.

Blue Marmalade also make some very cool looking pendant lampshades. They're made from single sheet of recyclable material and when they light up reveal the Tube map illuminated in their folds.


The lamps which are £24.27 come in Classic styles (for high ceilinged rooms) & Intimo (for more intimate settings!). They can be used with energy saver bulbs and bulbs up to 100W.

Apparently the fold-out design means there's not much waste during production and the material is also recyclable. Based in Edinburgh, Blue Marmalade aim to be as green as possible, and say that harmful chemicals and manufacturing processes are removed from their designs.

Trent Jennings from the company said: "The Underground map represents British graphic design at its best; it has strong functionality but also great visual impact." I think it's a great idea for a lamp and I'm sure it will be gracing my lounge very soon.

Future of Blogging on Working Lunch

Later on today I'll be live on BBC2's Working Lunch talking about the future of blogging. Not sure if I can trust the BBC's laptop to do live blogging this time, but it's nice of them to ask me on again. Thanks to everyone on Twitter yesterday who responded to my plea to borrow a crystal ball & give me their thoughts on the future of blogging.


You might have heard about the death of blogging or probably more accurately the rise of microblogging (like Twitter, videoblogs & Facebook status updating), but I think it's just mainly a case of blogging growing up and becoming mainstream. Like Johnny Rotten advertising butter, blogging's become less "subversive" or "rock n roll" and more mainstream. With the millions of people who blog now, that's bound to include people (and businesses) who blog for difference reasons and financial gain is bound to be one of them.

Ultimately that's going to get lots of early adopters or people who started blogging five or six years ago (like myself) muttering into their keyboards, saying "Ah blogging's not what it used to be" or "Blogging's rubbish these days, with companies and brands getting on board". But for me it's doesn't have to be a case of doom & gloom.

True there are now millions of blogs but readership of blogs isn't falling. What will probably happen is that numbers of blogs will continue to rise, but the lifecycle of those blogs will be much shorter.


In the past to make a blog "work" (whatever that means) all you had to do was have one. But now with millions of blogs competing for attention it takes time, effort, engagement with the people who read it & evidence of some passion & interest in what you're doing. Otherwise, you'll get bored, your readers will certainly get bored, people will stop reading & linking to your blog and you might wonder why you do it. That can be said for anyone who blogs - small businesses, brands, personal blogs, celebrities or journalists.

Some blogs are influential and can touch a nerve (when I started blogging in early 2003 I never expected TfL, Tube Lines, London Transport Museum & some of the London press would pay so much attention to this blog). Some bloggers can certainly give mainstream journalists a run for their money. If blogs are written well and have interesting content, they can help companies build a good relationship with their customers, but none of this happens overnight or in isolation from other online communication.

Kevin Marks a software engineer at Google, used to work for Technorati (the major index for blogs) & wrote a post about the whole "death of blogging" debate which summed up what I'd been thinking for quite some time. "Blogging's not dead, it's becoming like air". He said: "the old blogging crew are still around, they're just blogging less than those paid to do so a dozen times a day. Not because they are less interested or engaged, but because there are now many new ways to do what we used blogs for back then."

That's my thoughts for this morning, and they could well change by the time I get to the BBC! I'll update this post later with a link to the programme. I'll be joined by Robert McIntosh who'll be talking about how Twitter has helped his business. He kindly hosted a Twitter Wine Tasting at his house last year, where tasted wine & discussed it (in 140 characters or less!) with other Twitterers in the US. Again something I certainly never expected to be doing when I started blogging!

UPDATE - Ended up talking more about Twitter - like the introduction by Declan Curry. "Apparently blogging is dead, all the clever clogs are now Twittering!" Declan's an active Twitterer, so I'm spose he would say that ;-)

It was interesting that at the end Simon Calver, Chief Exec from Lovefilm, who was also on the show, agreed with my point about companies needing to blog & use online communities to monitor what customers think about their services.

If you're in the UK you can see our appearance on BBC iPlayer.

Baby girl born in Tube Station

You may have seen the news over the weekend that a baby girl was born at Kingsbury London Underground station in December, making her only the 2nd recorded Tube birth in 84 years.

Dawn out of EastEnders waters break on the Tube

Transport for London said that there had only been one other birth recorded on the London Underground. The first baby was born at Elephant and Castle station in South London in 1924. An urban myth at the time had her named as Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor (her initials spell TUBE), but she was called Marie Cordery (or possibly Mary Ashfield Eleanor Hammond, after Lord Ashfield who was Chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board at the time).

On the 19th December 2008, Julia Kowalska's waters broke on the Jubilee line and she got off the train at Kingsbury station but went into labour on the platform.

A TfL spokesman said: "At 9pm the station supervisor received a message from the control room that a woman on a northbound Jubilee line train was complaining of stomach pains. A few minutes later the station supervisor went to the platform and found the pregnant woman having contractions and called an ambulance.

"The woman, accompanied by her sister, was wrapped in a foil blanket to keep warm and taken to the supervisor's office, where the ambulance crew delivered a healthy baby."

However, Jerry Springer says that he was born at East Finchley Tube station during an air raid in 1944. He's pretty famous, so how come he's not known as the second baby to be born at a Tube station? Or do people giving birth when the stations were used as air raid shelters not count?

It's unlikely that we'll find out much more about baby Kowalska as some reports have her mother down as homeless, whereas others say her mother lived with her sister. I was hoping she might have Kingsbury or Jubilee as a middle name.


It is amazing that more children aren't born on the Tube. I see some very heavily pregnant women travelling on the London Underground, and with all of the movement & overcrowding you'd think that would bring on more contractions.

EastEnder's character Dawn (in the first picture) had her waters break on the District Line, & she was stuck in a tunnel. I thought that would be the first fictional Tube birth. But they rushed her to hospital in the end.

So it seems unlikely that you'll have to use any midwifery skills on the Tube, as Tube births are apparently few and far between.