This might sound a bit weird, but I must admit that I find Bond Street tube station rather amazing. Not that I’m turning into a public transport nerd or anything, but I find the fact that Londoners can now switch between the Jubilee and Elizabeth Lines so easily pretty incredible. As a feat of engineering, it’s pretty phenomenal when you think about it: Bond Street is quite an old, well used station, but they have managed to link it into a brand new underground line so seamlessly that it feels like it was originally designed that way. The amount of planning and work that must have taken blows my mind: how did they manage to do so much digging without disrupting what was already there?

Mind you, that also brings to mind a much more important point: a hell of a lot of effort and money is spent on London’s infrastructure, but I fear that that makes the chasm between the capital and the rest of the country even wider. Two years ago London got a brand spanking new tube line costing billions, making getting around the city easier than ever before, while it seems that the rest of the country is being left to crumble. As a project, Crossrail as a whole is mind blowing; yet the Northerner in me still remembers the crumbling little towns served by slow, inaccessible busses I grew up in. (Do busses outside of London even have automatic wheelchair ramps yet?) As I roll through stations like Bond Street, so sleek, well designed and reeking of London’s affluence, I can’t help also feeling a deepening sense of unfairness.