EotL00: Prelude

[David Scott]

We had agreed we were going to go to Cockfosters. Maybe it was the beer talking, I don’t know. Biggs and I were standing on the edge of a tube platform in South Kensington and a brand new decade that didn’t even have a name yet. It seemed to us that the time was right. Not that night true but soon, very soon...

Biggs had lived on the Piccadilly line for the best part of a decade and I’d been getting on at the Arsenal for even longer than that. Neither of us however had ever been to the comically named north-eastern terminus of that line. Worse, a short conversation revealed that we knew virtually nothing about the place.

You might be in the same situation. If so here are some things you should know about Cockfosters:

• John Betjeman once taught in a school near there.

• Cameron McVey who produced Massive Attack’s magnificent Blue Lines album grew up there, although he might have been born somewhere else.

• Cockfosterians don’t take much advantage of the significant comic potential of their home town’s name. The restaurant “Hunters of Cockfosters” and the fact that Screwfix have a major centre there are all I can find.

• Cockfosters is the last and most easterly stop on the Piccadilly line; at the opposite end to Heathrow; a ying to Heathrow’s yang; if Heathrow is the entrance to the world’s greatest city then Cockfosters is its exit. Viewed in this way hundreds of thousands of people should pass through Cockfosters each day, but they don’t.

This last fact was the only one we were aware of when at the tail end of 2009 we agreed that the next time we had a beer together it would be in Cockfosters. It wasn’t that we wanted to have a “Fosters in Cockfosters”, although I understand some people think this is a clever idea. No. What appealed to us was that Cockfosters was on the edge. On the edge in the same way that the Scottish island of St Kilda is on the edge. People lived there for over two millennia eating birds and climbing the UK’s highest cliffs to catch them; a community of less than 200 people almost completely isolated from the rest of the world... St Kilda that is, not Cockfosters.

As the train trundled in to South Kensington to take us home that night a look came over Biggs’ face. He was pointing at a map on the wall. “There are others of course...”

I instantly understood his meaning. For every line on the London underground there are two end points. Some of these  are shared with other lines so that although a particular line finishes the journey can still be continued. Such stations are at the end of a particular line but they are not at the End of The Line; they are not On the Edge. There are 20ish stations however that can be said to be properly on the edge... and Cockfosters is just one of them.

As the tube doors slid closed Biggs shouted “What if we had beer in all of them. What if we went to all of them next year?”

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