London Underground labyrinths

November 6, 2013

London Underground labyrinths

Filed under: London — duncan @ 8:53 am
Tags: art on the underground, labyrinth, labyrinths, london, london underground, mark wallinger, tfl, transport for london, underground

As part of their Art On The Underground project, Transport For London commissioned Mark Wallinger to create a labyrinth for every one of the 270 London Underground stations, to commemorate 150 years of the Underground.

Interesting fact: these are labyrinths, not mazes, the difference being a labyrinth only has a single path you can take through it apparently.

I’m not sure if they’re going to be a permanent fixture, but I suspect they’ll remove them all at the end of 2013. Which would be a shame, especially given it’s already November and not every station seems to have a labyrinth at this point. So they might install the last ones in the last two months of the year, then swiftly remove them again, thus reducing any opportunity to see them all.

~~I don’t expect I’ll manage to do that anyway…~~ I was only photographing them if I happened to notice them on my day-to-day travels, and I don’t use the Underground that frequently. Then I started taking it a bit more seriously quite recently, and notched up several more.

Update: TFL didn’t manage to install them all in 2013, however they’ve confirmed these are going to be permanent fixtures to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the underground. They completed installing them all in June 2014.

The numbering system represents the order the stations were visited as part of what was the record-breaking Underground Challenge (visiting all the stations in one day) in 2009 (I think); it’s since been done quicker than that. The Labyrinth website lists all the stations.

The links in the list below are to photos I’ve taken.

Here’s the number of labyrinths per zone:

Zone 1	64
Zone 2	68
Zone 3	44
Zone 4	44
Zone 5	23
Zone 6	20
Zone 7	4
Zone 8	1
Zone 9	2

And just for the sake of it, the number on each line:

Bakerloo	25
Central	49
Circle	36
District	60
Hammersmith & City	29
Jubilee	27
Metropolitan	34
Northern	50
Piccadilly	53
Victoria	16
Waterloo & City	2

Some more links:

In search of Mark Wallinger’s Labyrinth
Geofftech (listing all the locations of the labyrinths, by the current record holder for getting round them all fastest)
Creative Review
It’s Nice That

Comments (1)

1 Comment »

Brilliant, i saw one yesterday at Parsons Green, i took a picture of it as i didn’t know what it was. I shall be looking out for them in the future 🙂

Comment by Steven Vacher — October 13, 2015 @ 9:54 am | Reply

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November 6, 2013