I recently spent the night above a Tube sta­tion in North Lon­don. A friend of mine has moved into the sta­tion house there which is lit­er­ally built around the ticket office. You wouldn’t really notice it as a dwell­ing unless you knew, you’d just assume it was offices or some­thing. Any­way, the line is over­ground here, and when we’re sit­ting in the lounge, it’s not more than 10 feet away. From the bed­room win­dows, there’s a view of the plat­form oppos­ite and at a stretch you can even see the tracks. It’s not everyone’s ‘ideal home’ but there’s some­thing quirky and amus­ing to hear from home the announce­ments repeat­ing loc­a­tion and des­tin­a­tion through­out the day: ‘This train is going to…’ and the ubi­quit­ous, ‘Mind the gap’.

It was at night though that I was most struck by where I was. The mur­mur of chat, the sounds of tea-making, the dis­tant pres­ence of a radio – some­thing was going on in the ticket office below the bed­room! It’s the kind of thing I knew went on, I sup­pose, but had never fully real­ised before. The rhythms of the Tube at night are easy to for­get when the trains are in their sid­ings, the bar­ri­ers are closed and there’s no reason to be there any­way. And what I could hear wasn’t any­thing out of the ordin­ary, it was just part of the routines of main­tain­ing sta­tion life.

My night close to the rails brought to mind Rogan Macdonald’s pho­to­graphs of ‘London’s fourth emer­gency ser­vice’ which show what most of us don’t get to see of the Tube — the hid­den work that keeps it going. His photo-story, Emer­gency Response — at: http://www.roganmacdonald.co.uk/site/pop_small.html - is based on just a few images that nev­er­the­less con­vey a sense of work as being com­plex and puzz­ling and dif­fi­cult and excit­ing. The impres­sion of it as a col­lect­ive activ­ity is really power­ful across the pho­to­graphs too. It’s the single image of the locked entrance at Arch­way and a man with a job to do strid­ing towards the gates as if he could walk right through them that reminds me that the end of my day is the start of his.