round the rails we go

Giallo

2026-10-13T14:25:11.216+01:00

The approaches to Centrale stretch back for block after block, so much so they've had to carve a tunnel underneath them so one side of the city centre isn't cut off from the other. I left the station through one of its side exits, past the armoured vehicle with its idling soldiers that was intended to reassure us, and past the extremely tightly packed trousers of a couple of members of the Polizia. I'm not sure why the Italian defence forces feel the need to wear pants that are clearly a size too small so that their buttocks are prominently displayed, but I thank them for it.

Back here, behind the stations, there were masses of hotels of all classes, and the streets were filled with wheely trolleys and befuddled looking tourists. I'd been in Milan long enough now and pounded enough of its streets to feel almost native, and I whizzed around them with barely concealed contempt. Outside Sondrio station a gaggle of them had assembled and were arguing furiously in, I think, German, stabbing at their phones as they tried to demonstrate they knew the right way and that was it.

Sondrio suffers from its proximity to Centrale - it's close enough to walk to - and so I descended into a slightly silent underground space, one that allowed me to take some absolutely wonderful shots of the M3 architecture without any pesky commuters getting in the way.

I suspect that I'm the only person who likes these stations, and that's fair. We all like different things. You're wrong, of course, but that's fair. Perhaps it was simply that after days of standard, off the shelf subway design I was thrilled to encounter a bit of style. It's also another reason why it's taking me so damn long to write it all up. Admittedly, a massive project at home has interfered with it, giving me very little time to sit down and type for a few hours, but still, it's hard to say anything about these stations other than "good" or "bad".

The area around Zara station was dirtier, rougher, than the streets I'd experienced so far. This was a Milan that was working hard and not prone to be interrupted by foreign tourists.

A newsstand for Corriere Della Serra was closed and shuttered; it was hard to tell if this was simply the time of day or if it was a permanent closure. I went into a grimy Carrefour to top up my liquids, hopping over an unfriendly ramp to the underground car park, and re-emerging just as a homeless woman began an argument with a driver who'd been less than deferential to pedestrians as he'd swung in.

Throughout these Milan posts I've tried to convey exactly how hot it was in the city. It was absolutely disgustingly hot. It was like being stuck in an air fryer. Finally, however, I have a way to physically show you how warm it actually was, via the medium of candles on the street outside a restaurant:

They were melting halfway down, purely through the ambient temperature; at the top they'd not even been lit. It was hot.

Maciachini station was on the ring road, a series of crossings to a piazza where the entrance was slotted into the corner. Faded Covid-era signs marked it as exit only, and I had a flashback to all of that, all of the one-way systems and two metre gaps and facemasks, and it was somehow yesterday and a very long time ago all at once.

Maciachini opened in 2003, though you wouldn't know it; the house style for the M3 is maintained throughout, no matter when the station was built, so it still looks delightfully dated. It looks, in fact, like it should feature in a Giallo movie, and when I got down to the platform and saw an attractive blonde in a red dress on the other side, the film started writing itself.

Giallo movies - which means, appropriately, yellow, a reference to the cheap paperbacks that served as inspiration - are thrillers made in Italy in the sixties and seventies, lurid slashers where beautiful women are stalked and murdered by serial killers. There's usually a great deal of blood and nudity and long chases through dark city streets. The M3 was crying out to be featured in one - all those wide open spaces for a former Bond Girl to run through, terrified, before being throttled by black-gloved hands as a train screams past - but sadly there are very few Giallo movies set in Milan.

I did watch one which is actually from the 80s, Sotto il Vestito Niente, or Nothing Underneath. It's set in the world of Milan fashion, with models being stabbed and murdered, often with their breasts out for no real reason; Donald Pleasance is the detective, and there's a moment when he eats spaghetti in a Wendy's, bizarrely. There's also a chase through Milano Centrale, and a Moschino fashion show on the plaza outside - a plaza which is actually a building site because, yes, they were in the middle of building the M3 at the time. You can watch it on YouTube if you want, though it's not the finest example of the genre. and some of the acting is terrible. It's grimy and exploitative and very lower rack of your local video shop - not a fancy Blockbuster, the one on the parade that had an entire shelf for Shannon Tweed movies.

I resisted the urge to commit a bloody stabbing and instead got a train to Dergano. The M3's a straight line here, punching its way out to the city limits, and it was starting to feel more parochial now. Garages appeared, industrial units, petrol stations, the lower ranked parts of a metropolitan ecosystem.

Let's all meet up in Snack Bar 2000, won't it be strange when we're all fully grown?

Flags on the lampposts commemorated Enzo Caparra, a lad who had died when the scooter he was riding on collided with a car. He was only 20 years old. It was a far classier memorial than the bunches of greying flowers and soft toys you'd get on a British road.

Affori Centro served a large supermarket and a few shops. Around me were apartment blocks behind walls and trees. There was, at least, something of a street presence for the station: a yellow arched entrance that looked like a cover for supermarket trolleys but actually contained the down escalator.

Two more stations on the line to go.

I got confused as I tried to exit Affori FN. It interacts with the mainline station above, which I didn't need to go to, so I followed what I thought was an exit to the street. I ended up in a small back entrance, tucked behind the station in a dark plaza.

I took the sign picture, then walked out on what turned out to be definitely not the pedestrian route. I was on a curved road that rose up to the main street beside a large building site. Taxis swung wildly past me as I tried pressing myself against the concrete wall.

At least when I got to the street it was a cool, dark park, extremely welcome now the afternoon had hit. A pair of grandparents pushed a tiny child in a pushchair, while I could hear the laughter of schoolkids somewhere close by.

Now I was back on the main road again, passing the headquarters of the Polizia. I considered wandering in, reporting some emergency or other, so that I could be interviewed by a large Italian man bursting out of every part of his uniform. Unfortunately I'd not had a single crime-related problem the entire time I was in Milan. Perhaps I should've throttled that girl in the metro station after all. Or perhaps I could imply I had some contraband hidden about my person and would require a strip search.

My mind wandering to places that definitely weren't wholesome, I traversed a huge roundabout that joined with a motorway exit. Once again I dashed across a space definitely not built for pedestrians, though this time it was my fault for not crossing the road to where there were actual pavements.

The final station on the line was, like so many other Milan Metro termini, a park and ride. A multistorey car park crouched over the top of Comasina station while bus and tram stops were located outside. A McDonalds provided all your nutrition needs. I took my last sign selfie of the day.

That was the end of the M3, my fourth Milan Metro line completed. The only one I had to finish now was the newest one, the M4. Deep breath, folks. We can get through this together.

Castello

2026-10-02T18:52:54.834+01:00

It should be noted, for the record, that Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time. He did implement a series of programmes that saw some of the trains - principally the ones foreign journalists and tourists might use - run on a far more efficient basis, but in the main, Italian Railways were chaotic before fascism and remained chaotic throughout.

Similarly, though Mussolini liked to claim the credit for Milano Centrale, it was actually a building that had been planned for a couple of decades. Milan's old main railway station was where Repubblica is now, but as is often the case with European termini, what was adequate in the mid-19th century quickly became outdated and useless. A new station was planned, with a design approved in 1912, but then something called the Great War came along and held everything up. Rebuilding resumed in the mid-twenties, to more or less the same scheme, so while it opened in 1931 under Mussolini's rule, it didn't have that much to do with him.

What's undeniable is that Milano Centrale has the oversized grandeur that screams fascist architecture. It feels like it's the product of a giant ego. This is the Carriage Hall, what in the UK would be a simple porte-cochère, but here it's massive. Taxis and buses used to pass through here but a redesign in the 2000s pushed them into the adjoining squares either side of the station. Now it's a large entry space, filled with kiosks for mobile phone companies and home to the rental car agencies, and still incredible to wander around.

This is, I'll remind you again, the place where you were meant to get dropped off. We're not even in the station yet.

The next circulating space is the Atrium. This is where the station splits. Head straight ahead and you're in a modern undercroft where the ticket facilities are. So many ticket facilities.

This is the area that was most changed and upgraded twenty years ago and it really looks it. Suddenly it's all glass and bright LED lighting. It's nice, yes, and there are also some fast food facilities and little station amenities, but this isn't what we came here for.

What we want is to get to the main hall, so it's back to the atrium where staircases and escalators wait for you.

The lines are elevated as they come into the station so it's necessary to get you up to their level for boarding.

The main hall though... if you don't say "wow" when you walk into it, you may be dead inside. It's impossible to say or think anything else. You step into a magnificent lofty space - a church to worship the railways.

Marble reaches upward (though it's concrete made to look like marble at the top; they weren't that mad with the budget) to the high vaulted ceiling with its roof lights. Like any Catholic church it's richly decorated with artwork and statues proclaiming the glory of God - or rather, in this case, the glory of the train.

During my stay at the hotel across the square I'd often walk over in the early evening, just to poke around. To look at all the different sizes and sights. To take it all in.

The station's most famous mural is on the train hall side, one that depicts Mussolini himself - or it would, if the face wasn't completely obscured. The story is that a wayward bullet during the war hit it and then they patched it with concrete. Sadly, it's accessible only to ticket holders through new automatic gates watched over by stern guards; they were earning their money turning away American tourists who repeatedly seemed to want to wander through without a pass. I went up into the Pret a Manger, where a glass balcony lets you see the trainshed for free. There are twenty-four platforms hosting trains to destinations across the continent.

There are, perhaps, too many commercial interventions at the station. Either end of the main hall has been enclosed for a glass bubble of a restaurant, but they're not high-end - there's a Wagamama and a Five Guys. That's very much the vibe with the eateries and shops though at least the McDonalds is squirreled away where you can't see it, and there is an attempt at a food market in one of the side wings. They've sort of misunderstood how a food market should work - you have to order and collect your food first, then find a table, rather than letting you order when you're seated. It makes it all the more chaotic, though they had some delicious-looking offerings.

The one store I did have a good look round was the bookshop, which had a huge English language section, as well as a massive selection of Italian books with slightly disappointing covers. For such an imaginative, artistic nation, Italy doesn't seem to want to put it on their paperbacks; the designs are frequently simple, a single picture and the title and that's it.

Stazione Centrale also has hidden depths of darkness. Jews were taken from here to Auschwitz during the period German occupied Northern Italy, and a memorial wasn't placed here until 2013. There's also a special waiting room Mussolini built specifically to receive Hitler when he visited; the floor is inlaid with swastikas. Funnily enough that isn't often open to the public.

The station works, it just does. It's epic and awe-inspiring but at the same time, simple to negotiate - you come in here, you see the platforms there, you know where to go.

The only slight disappointment is the metro station. There's some great M3 styling under there, but the interface between the underground and the overground is clumsy. The circulation areas are under the Piazza Duca d'Aosta outside, but they're dark and small and distant; they were built when the Carriage Hall was still in use and so they have that roadway to cross. Two travelators try to cut the journey but during the week I was there one of them was invariably broken.

It's a small gripe however. If anything, it makes the main station look even greater. You come out of this low-ceilinged warren into the vastness of Centrale above.

Milan is rightfully proud of its terminus, and it's an instantly recognisable part of the city, which is probably why there doesn't seem to be a sign telling you what it is. It doesn't need one. Which is inconvenient if you're a blogger who takes a lot of sign pictures. You'll have to settle for this one instead.

I came. I saw. I swooned.

Detour

2026-09-30T22:17:26.660+01:00

I've been doing this blog for nearly two decades now and yet I can still remember places and experiences from it with real clarity years later. I had one of those experiences today. The BF and I were out for a drive in the wilds of Cheshire and we spotted a sign for the "Lewis Carroll Centre". This is a small, lottery-funded addition to the back of All Saints' Church in Daresbury to celebrate their local hero. The father of Lewis Carroll - real name Charles Dodgson - was the pastor here and it's where he was born.

When I moved from the little exhibition space - more of a church hall with information boards on the wall - I went into the church proper and remembered being here before. Back in 2010, in fact, when I collected Runcorn East station and then came out here because I'm a big fan of the Alice books. There's a stained glass window devoted to Carroll but I didn't get a picture of it because the church demanded two whole pounds for the privilege and I am very, very, cheap.

They don't charge that two pound any more so, sixteen years later, I am able to bring you a picture of the Alice window.

Very much worth the wait, I'm sure you'll agree.

I will finish the Milan trip soon. Life has got in the way.

Yellow Fever

2026-09-25T12:12:32.220+01:00

Told you the seats would be worth the wait. STOOLS! Mushroom-y stools! And they're red, to make them stand out. Admittedly the passenger ghosts on the wall are disappointing but still, how great are they? All of the M3 stations have them and they're ace.

When you step out of Porto Romana station it becomes obvious why this one got to keep the name and the mainline one had to change. This is what you see straight away.

The gate dates from 1596 and was one of the entry points through the city walls. Sadly it's on a traffic island now, so I entered the historic centre of Milan via a series of pedestrian crossings instead, ending up on the Corso di Porto Romana.

The tarmac became cobbles, inlaid with tram tracks, narrower than the avenues I'd been used to. Men on a cherry picker repainted the side of one of the buildings a bright canary yellow. Gaps between the buildings were adorned with LED screens beaming out ads. It was Wimbledon, and so Ralph Lauren posters were everywhere, replacing the football ones that dominated in the countries that actually qualified for the World Cup.

Crocetta station is on a small triangle of land where two larger streets become one. It's the closest station to Sforza-Policlinico, on the M4, and at one point there was planned to be an underground interchange. Instead, the next station Missori was chosen as the crossover point, though the actual interchange was cancelled, and you have to pass through the ticket barriers and walk through the streets to make the change.

I used my visit to Crocetta to coo over the light fittings.

Look how pretty they are in the ceiling! And that ceiling itself; so interesting and practical!

Being extremely positive is tiring, guys. I much prefer being a cynical bastard.

By now I was on the central section of the M3, where the tunnels are laid above one another to minimise the interference with the historic fabric of the city. You got a clue about why that was important at Missori station.

Do you think Italians hate building stuff? Does it constantly wind them up that they can't so much as dig over their garden without discovering another priceless archaeological horde? "All I wanted to do was plant some petunias and I inadvertently unearthed a long-lost Roman amphitheatre." I wonder how many times they've started the foundations for a building, found a perfectly preserved forum, then quietly covered it back up again so they could get on with construction.

At Missori it's the base of a house and some ancient sewer systems, dug up when the metro came through and preserved behind glass in the link tunnels. I, being an ignorant tourist, was the only one actually pausing to look at them.

I climbed the steps to emerge in the Piazza Giuseppe Missori, now properly in the centre of Milan again. I'd already skirted the area doing the M1, but that had been in the evening; I was here in the day, looking at the most famous sights of the city.

As I walked north, I realised why Milan hadn't really stolen my heart like Amsterdam, Stockholm and Helsinki had before them. Milan, I realised, was Manchester. It was a very good Manchester, it was actually a better version of Manchester, but it was still Manchester. A big industrial city that prioritised commerce over everything else.

Manchester is a nice enough place to live and work but you wouldn't really want to go on holiday there, would you? Milan is the same. Though it's got centuries of history behind it, there's a certain amount of grim faced capitalism running through its heart. When it built, it built for superlatives; the biggest, the tallest, the widest, not the most beautiful.

It was telling that the guidebooks I looked at before I came here were almost all "Milan... and also the Italian Lakes". There was a clear hint that the most interesting places to visit might actually be outside of the city.

I should emphasise that I did enjoy my time in Milan, and it's absolutely worth visiting, and it's a Manchester only in the loosest sense. Compare and contrast its cathedral with Manchester's and you realise they're not in the same league. There's a reason why Milan had recently successfully hosted an Olympic Games and Manchester has failed to get close not once, but twice. And this is Milan's version of the Arndale:

The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is the most famous shopping street in the city. The foundation stone was laid in 1865, though it wasn't completed for another thirteen years, and it swiftly became a centrepiece for Milanese society: a place to perambulate and be seen. It was one of the earliest shopping malls and it's striking how much it established the style - the tall shops, the marble arcades, the glass roof with the dome. This is what the Trafford Centre wishes it could be.

It was bombed during the war, and had to be extensively rebuilt; it was restored again ahead of Expo 2015. One mosaic has to be regularly restored; the arms of Turin on the floor include a bull, and there's a tradition that spinning your heel on its testicles will give you good luck. This means there's a drill effect on the tiles and they keep having to be relaid. The most recent restoration caused controversy because the bull's testicles weren't as prominent as they used to be, and there had to be redo to make sure the bullock's bollocks were as magnificent as they were intended to be.

The shops lean heavily towards the elite, with some of them being recognised as historic in themselves. There isn't a Greggs, let's put it that way.

Look closely at the very pinnacle of the central dome and you can see that some local scrotes have decided to decorate it with black spray paint. I know we're meant to be very considerate to these inner city youths, reach out to them and teach them, give them diversions to stop them from committing crimes, but I think when they're out vandalising internationally renowned historic landmarks, a good hard tasering to the crotch may be called for. There's no excuse for it at all. If they'd slipped and slid all the way down that dome to the ground I would produce, at most, a shrug.

The Galleria links the Piazza del Duomo with the Piazza della Scala, connecting Milan's two most iconic structures with one of its own. The Palazzo Marino, the city hall, is at one end, and they still had the Olympic rings mounted outside. On the other side is the Teatro alla Scala, the opera house, and one of the most important cultural institutions in Europe.

La Scala hosted the premieres of the likes of Otello and Madama Butterfly and we have now exhausted all my knowledge of the artform of opera. It's one of those things I think I should perhaps look into, get myself a nice recording of something not very complex and sit down with the lyrics and try and appreciate it, but who has the time? Especially now Strictly's back. I know from Pretty Woman that you're not truly classy until you go to the opera for the first time and are so moved to shed a single, cinematic tear to symbolise your transition from hooker to debutante. If any Richard Geres are out there and willing to take me I'm up for it.

I was now in the Fashion District, the heart of Italian elegance, the core of extremely highly priced elegant clothing shops. Once again, like Julia Roberts, I was distinctly out of place among these temples of style, though sadly I will never get to strut into Valentino for my "Big mistake. Huge." moment. I am physically incapable of paying that sort of money for clothes. If I won the EuroMillions and was in Milan with £100 million in my pocket I still couldn't bring myself to fork out, say, £695 for a black t-shirt with silver tape embroidered on it. That is simply ludicrous. You could get a decent minibreak for that money. It's obscene.

I'm clearly in the minority about this, because the whole area was awash with people carrying extremely expensive carrier bags, but on the plus side when the revolution comes I'll be with the proletariat helping to put them up against the walls to be shot.

Montenapoleone station is on a small square between the Grand Hotel et Milan and the Hotel Armani. The former was where artists and composers traditionally stayed before performing at La Scala. Verdi had a suite here, still in use today, and it was where he suffered the stroke that would kill him in 1901. The Hotel Armani is much newer, unsurprisingly. As I passed the restaurant two obvious models came walking out. I'd never been that close to a model before and they are truly not of this earth; taller than me, barely in three dimensions, their faces so carefully crafted you could've immediately turned them into statues. They held the tiniest handbags and carried with them a clear disdain for the rest of humanity and honestly, fair. If I looked that flawless and I had to spend my days around the toad people who form the rest of my species I'd get a bit annoyed.

Look at the state of that. Gross.

Have I talked about the station toilets yet? I should talk about the toilets. They're housed in an alcove behind these amazing red glass doors. I didn't actually go in them, because a public toilet in an underground station is rarely a place one wants to visit, but look at those lovely doors.

And look at these wonderful circular voids in the checkerboard walls. They could've put in a boring old opening to let light and air through but instead they put in portholes.

Magnificent.

One train ride later and I was at Turati, heading outside under another of those bright yellow ceilings that will never get old to me.

I paused to take my usual photo with the sign on the steps, but as I lined up the camera, I became aware that there was a slight tension in the air around me. There was a bit of a crowd up ahead, and I could see policemen.

The building right next to the metro stop is the American consulate, and a series of hefty security structures have been put in place to keep it safe. Part of the pavement has been reconfigured with covered walkways and a small glass porch houses the first wave of checks before you're permitted inside. I hustled past quickly before they noticed my camera and assumed I was some sort of terrorist, ending up on the Piazzi Stati Uniti d'America, named as a tribute after 9/11. (Amusingly, Via Della Moscova runs right through it).

The Via Filipo Turati takes you north, and then the road suddenly opens out into the massive Piazza della Republica.

This isn't a square, in the traditional sense, but is instead more of a massive open air meeting spot. Wide avenues cross over one another, separated by acres of grass and trees. Trams come and go to interchange and terminate. Pedestrians scurry over the various crossings, moving from one island to the next, held up again and again while another stream of traffic pours by. It's an epic piece of urban design.

I dodged and crossed and finally ended up by an entrance to the metro, handily located by a tram stop for effortless transfers.

All that space up top meant that Repubblica station could be even more open and gorgeous than its siblings on the M3.

Incredible. I could live here. Not the city, I mean specifically inside this metro station.

My next station, finally, was Centrale. I'd skipped it when I did the M2 because that was already an overwhelming length of line to cover. Now I could give it the attention it deserved.

We're gonna need a bigger blog.

Yellow Pearl

2026-09-15T21:53:00.315+01:00

The heat finally broke overnight. A cataclysmic storm hit Milan, lightning flashing behind the slab of the Pirelli Tower, my hotel room shaking with the thunder. It battered the city, drove rain into every crevice, drowned it.

And yet, by next morning, there was no sign of it. The streets were dry and the sky was blue again. The only indicator that something had changed was the slight wisp of wind that cut across open areas and the heat being that little bit less intense. It was as though it had been tamed.

I was only just outside Milan proper, in the adjoining municipality of San Donato, where a bus station had been slotted in above the metro and alongside the motorways. It was shabbier than most, its cafes fronted with plastic chairs, a loose market selling cheap clothes at one end. I passed through the local platforms, then out past a newer building for long-distance services. There were already queues of people waiting there with suitcases. I went out, over the bus access ramps and the motorway junctions, and past the M3's depot.

It was an unfriendly place for pedestrians. Footpaths weaved between thick bunches of yellow grass. I passed under road signs and kicked litter out of the way. A cluster of pigeons fed frenziedly on a patch in the grass - I didn't look too closely, hoping it was discarded fast food and not the corpse of something. Or someone.

Beyond the viaducts and bridges I got the sign for the Milan clean-air zone and I was back in the city itself. Thin homes stretched along the roadside, parked cars wedged against the kerb. There was a bit of culture being inserted into this space, a new campus for the Milan Conservatory, with a building site promising elaborate architectural shenanigans that were yet to appear above ground.

Around Rogoredo station a series of glass blocks appeared, the campus for Sky Italia. I'm not sure if Sky is the channel responsible for that terrible stereotype about Italian telly, that it's nothing but housewives taking their clothes off, but since it was Rupert Murdoch adjacent I'm choosing to believe it is. (It's now owned by Comcast, who own Universal, and NBC, and who are probably also appalling for many other, different reasons). I didn't actually watch any Italian TV while I was there - I had my laptop to keep me amused - and so I can't tell you if their telly is now extremely classy and expensive and full of costume dramas and nature documentaries but given the way the rest of the media landscape has changed, I very much doubt it.

Rogoredo's another mainline station with the metro underneath. It was getting on for nine am, so there weren't too many commuters rushing for the train, but I still negotiated around the suits to get my shot at the entrance.

I went down the steps into the wonderful world of the M3.

The M1 and the M2 were perfunctory, with some dated charm but not much to really distinguish it. The M5 was clean and new but also a tiny bit dull.

The M3, however, is one hundred percent fantastic. Approved in the late 70s and constructed throughout the 80s, it's both of its time and modern, unique and fascinating. The city took a look at what had worked and what hadn't on its original pair of metro lines and created a new pattern for stations. They're still uniform along the line, with the same colour palette and design, but it's so much more exciting and vibrant.

Look at the walls, for example. Other stations have bare, smooth walls, or fibreglass panels. Stations on the M3 have wonderful textured concrete, divided into squares, both practical (try graffiti-ing that!) and attractive.

And those ceilings! Yellow grids with bold, bright light bulbs. More lighting around the edges to guide you. The colour telling you exactly where you are and where you're going. I love it.

There's the space you'd expect from the Milan Metro - room to move and circulate - but it feels so much more open and friendly. There aren't the dark black corners that plagued the M1 and M2. Those dull blue walls on the Gessate extension are far behind us.

Out again at the next station, Porto di Mare, a nautical-sounding name considering we were closer to the Alps than the sea. It's a hangover from an early 20th century scheme to build a harbour and ship canal that would reach the river Po via Cremona. That would enable vessels to travel from the Adriatic directly to Milan. Work started in 1917, then over the course of the following century it stopped and restarted every twenty years or so. It's still, officially, somewhere on the books, but unsurprisingly building a massive canal isn't top of anyone's infrastructure wants in an era of trucks and aeroplanes.

It was another down-at-heel neighbourhood, dominated by a fast autostrada that shadowed the main road. Tags covered the bare walls and tiny minimarts that stocked everything and nothing sat at the base of the apartment blocks. Even so, there were still people sat out on chairs on the narrow strip of tarmac, drinking coffees and smoking. We try to adopt the pavement cafe culture in the UK, but restrict it to safe pedestrian areas and squares; British people wouldn't dream of having their breakfast in such an unfriendly location, which is why we will never truly be European.

The motorway had swept up onto stilts so that it could cross the Piazzale Luigi Emanuele Corvetti without being interfered with, leaving the passenger space underneath in darkness. It was occupied by parking for scooters - how official this was I couldn't say - and spraypainted artworks on the concrete struts.

After my experience with Sidney Poitier and the CIA I'm slightly afraid that Steve McQueen and aliens is another conspiracy rabbit hole.

The lift shaft for the station at (Just One) Corvetto is more great 80s design. I always loved a payphone with a curved outer edge; the most exciting ones were the ones with that perspex bubble like something out of Space: 1999. The architects must've thought they were so forward thinking and modern, combining public transport with public communication. Now it's a remnant of a lost world, like a horse trough on a village green or a post box for Air Mail. I imagine there are teenagers - maybe actual adults - who have no idea what that curved shelter was for.

The station carried a relic below. The Metro's stations are unstaffed, with passes dispensed from machines; even their time is up, because all the ticket gates have tap in and out pads and in my casual observation this was easily the most common way people paid. (The exception was at Centrale, where there was always a queue of tourists for the machines; a member of staff telling them not to bother would pay for itself).

The Biglietti counter is still in place at Corvetto but is no longer in use, which is a shame, because once again look at that gorgeous design. No amount of stroppy passengers could distract me from the joy of working behind a circular window.

On to Brenta, and let's take a closer look at those handrails shall we?

Wonderful. I'm sorry, so much of the M3 is going to be me cooing over yellow and red bits of street furniture. It'll be even more boring than usual.

I don't know why Brenta's text is in black and the others in white. That's annoying. There you go, an actual negative.

Brenta is only a couple of blocks down from Corvetto but it felt like a shift change now that the motorway had peeled off. The streets were busier, packed even, and trees shaded me as I walked. It was undeniably a much nicer place to be.

Scalo Romana mainline station was upgraded ahead of the Winter Olympics and, in the process, got a name change. For the first hundred years of its life, it was Porto Romana, named after the city gate of the same name that's about a kilometre down the road. When the metro line was built however, there was a station literally underneath the gate, so that naturally got called Porto Romana as well. Milan now had two stations of the same name that weren't in any way convenient for one another and so last year they finally changed it.

There is a metro station right across the road from the mainline one, of course, but that's not called Porto Romano. It's not called Scalo Romano either. It's called Lodi TIBB.

TIBB stood for Tecnomasio Italiano-Brown Boveri, the name of a train manufacturing company who had a vast railway yard here. Merger after merger throughout the later half of the twentieth century left it a part of Alstom, I think? To be honest the trail seems to ebb and flow, and as with so much to do with traction engines, I found it incredibly dull.

What's much more interesting is that the closure of the railworks has left a massive stretch of unused industrial land which is being reclaimed as the new district of Scalo Romana. The Olympic Village was built here, and has recently been converted to student accommodation, while a new skyscraper (the Torre A2A) will house new headquarters for a big utility company. There will also be parkland, apartments, and new roads to reconnect what was once a huge scar.

The Lodi part of Lodi TIBB, by the way, is the name of the square it's under, Piazzale Lodi.

We'll leave it there for a while I think. I don't want to overwhelm you with my gushing. Do check back for a future blog post where I wax about the seating on the platforms. No, I promise you: they're great!

Green Spots

2026-09-09T21:26:17.062+01:00

With most of the M2 out of the way, all I had to do was finish the Gessate branch. There was a bit of a problem though. This branch was originally a long-distance tram service, running into Milan for much of the 20th century, until the decision was made to incorporate it into the newly built metro in the seventies.

It means that this branch is unlike any of the parts of the Milan Metro. Instead of passing through close knit urban communities, it links small towns and villages on the edge of the metropolis. The distance between stations can be measured in miles instead of metres. It passes through farmland and back roads.

I decided I'd do this branch a little differently, for various reasons. Firstly, I was exhausted. I'd done three days of intense speedy walking in a strange city and I didn't fancy more long walks. A lazy day of travelling would let me recover. Especially since the weather warnings were continuing, with the excess heat now getting the added threat of thunderstorms and lightning. Secondly, the routes between the stations weren't exactly exciting, long straight roads and the odd canal. And third, I wasn't in the mood.

So this blog post will be more of a list than a single narrative. I went to the stations, one after the other, passed through the ticket gates, took a sign picture and went back to get the next train. This isn't really a journey, more of a series of observations. Normal service will resume with the M3.

GESSATE

It was the end of the line and it really felt like the end of the line. By the time I reached Gessate it seemed like I'd left Milan far behind and travelled into the backwaters of the Italian countryside.

Gessate opened after the rest of the Green Line, in 1985; the old tramway used to extend as far as Vaprio d'Adda but there's never been any suggestion that the M2 should go that far, with buses being provided instead. I'd be a bit narked if I was in Vaprio, looking at that lovely fast metro line that used to come to town and now goes nowhere near.

There's a bus exchange outside, but the rest of the village is hidden away behind trees. It's like the end of the world. On a late night, after the last train, it must feel desolate.

I went outside and took the sign picture then returned to the platform. One down.

CASCINA ANTIONETTA

For many years this was the quietest station on the entire network, surrounded by fields and constructed mainly to break up the distance from Gessate to Gorgonzola. Cascina means "Farmhouse" and that seems to be the only thing it was built to serve. Imagine being the farmer, seeing a huge metro station appear on your land for the use of you and your wife and maybe a cow.

Because it is a weirdly massive building. ATM would've been forgiven for sticking a couple of platforms here and nothing more but they treated it the same as any other metro station. This paid off in the long term, as, in the last twenty years, a new neighbourhood has been constructed next door to take advantage of those links into the city.

It's still distinctly battered and tired. The whole branch is getting refurbished, not before time, and it really needs it. Paint is peeling and some parts of the stations look unsafe.

The huge ticket hall is a pleasing element though. It's a shame that it's so empty.

GORGONZOLA

The first actual town, and the first place that seemed like it needed a metro connection rather than a quiet branch line. You step out of the station and are presented with a fine avenue into the centre. For the first time I was tempted to go for a wander around, but the heart of Gorgonzola was still a fair old walk away.

Instead I went to the Coop. There was one next to the station and I wanted a drink. I also wanted to see if I could find the town's most famous export.

That is some actual Gorgonzola cheese from actual Gorgonzola on sale in actual Gorgonzola. I was very tempted to buy it, because I was born without a sweet tooth, and a big hunk of smelly cheese is like a packet of wine gums for me. I didn't though, because I had a hot afternoon ahead of me, and having a lump of cheese sweating in my shoulder bag would do neither of us any favours. Instead I bought a bottle of Coke Zero, and the checkout girl and I had a confusing conversation where she pointed out the cold ones in the fridge to her side, and I was too embarrassed to get one so I said I was fine with it being warm, and then we both looked befuddled that I was speaking English, and basically it was awful.

As befits a town of its status, Gorgonzola has a decent station, in far better nick than its neighbours and gleaming with a civic pride they lacked.

It is, however, missing the overarching roof they had, with two side platforms and an expanse of open sky in between. I began to feel the heat.

I killed time staring at the network map. The M4 was still marked as under construction, months after its opening, which didn't help with the general air that this branch was ignored and unloved.

VILLA POMPEA

This was, quite easily, the worst station on the entire Milan metro for me. Apologies if it's your local stop - as though any Italians could put up with this nonsense - but it was a mess. It was rusted and dirty, lonely, grim.

The footbridge was split in two, a public route on the outside, a railway route on the inner one, but the public route seemed to be abandoned. Either that or ATM refused to deal with the part that wasn't behind the ticket line and the council couldn't be bothered.

In the ticket hall, there was a map of the local area that seemed to date from the 1980s - probably the last time it was cleaned.

I walked out into a bare car park. Orange netting marked a building site, but there weren't any builders to be seen, nor any sign of what they were doing there.

Then it was back inside, almost tripping over a tiny step at the entrance to the ticket hall that was at just the right height to be annoying, up and over the crumbling stairs to the platform for my train out of there.

BUSSERO

Ok, I'll say what we're all thinking: Bussero sounds like something a certain kind of gay would call his arse on the apps. There, I've acknowledged it, we can all move on.

I got some distinctly peculiar looks from an elderly couple heading into the station as I loitered outside to take my sign picture. What's the matter, I thought; have you never seen a middle aged loser record his visit to a backwater metro stop before?

I got a moment of nostalgia when I saw the ticket machine outside the station. It reminded me of the ones that used to dispense my One Day Travelcard when I headed into London as a teenager. This blog is now getting sentimental over ticket machines, a new low.

It's hard not to like a station where the glass walls are covered with bird silhouettes. I'm sure this is to stop the local wildlife braining itself accidentally but it was still pleasing to see.

CASCINA DE' PECCHI

As I'd worked my way down the line, I'd become aware of a class division between the stations, one that I'm going to call Marble vs Non-Marble. It became clear how well kept and maintained a station was based on whether the platform steps were concrete or fancy marble. When I got off the train at Cassina de' Pecchi and saw that its platform was block paved I immediately recognised it would be a Marble station.

And so it was.

Casssina de' Pecchi was far more of a central hub. It felt like a station that was important to its town, with a busy, well used bar at its centre. Elderly men sat on tables outside drinking coffee and shouting across to one another - why they couldn't all sit at the same table is a mystery.

The city was creeping in on us. It was wrapping itself around the line, pulling it closer.

VILLA FIORITA

You might think that in a country known for having extremely hot temperatures that there would be some kind of provision to cool the platforms. You'd be right. Many of the stations featured large air conditioning units, ready to blast cold air out onto the grateful passengers below.

None of them apparently worked, but it was a nice idea anyway.

Can you tell that it's hard to think up something to say about some of these stations?

CERNUSCO SUL NAVIGLO

For reasons best known to themselves, ATM chose to paint the concrete on this branch of the M2 a pale blue colour. It's not a nice blue and it hasn't aged well at all. Worse, it's flaking off everywhere you look.

The good news is that Cernusco sul Naviglio they were repainting it. Part of the platform was marked off while two men slapped some white emulsion all over it. A massive improvement in anyone's book.

Cernusco S.N. was very much a Marble station. I went to the ticket hall and found people passing around, meeting friends, finishing work, going out for the night.

The street outside was busy and attractive. This is what I want to see when I step out of a railway station. Life. A city, a town, a village that's working and thriving.

CASCINA BURRONA

The Merseytart Rules are simple and have been consistent over the nearly twenty years of this blog. Use a train to either arrive at or depart a station, pass through the ticket barriers, take a picture of your massive head in front of the station sign. Unchanging and ironclad.

It brings me no pleasure to tell you that the rules were broken at Cascina Burrona, for the very simple reason that I couldn't get off the station. The ticket machines were on the platform and none of them liked my iPhone, meaning I couldn't swipe to exit, meaning I couldn't leave. There was no way around them and no way to call for help. I'd been using the same payment method all day - and would use it successfully at stations for the rest of the week - so this was very much a station specific problem.

It meant I was trapped on the platform. I was the only person to get off the train so I don't know how much of a "me" problem this was and, as I say, there was no way to call for help. As it was all I could do was take a platform sign selfie as proof of attendance and silently curse ATM. It was lucky I wasn't walking between stations, because otherwise that would've been really, really annoying.

VIMODRONE

The final station on the line before it merged with the Cologno branch at Cascina Gobba and the only one to sound like a film where James Woods puts his hand into his own stomach, Vimodrone was definitely a Marble station, as you can probably tell from that posh platform.

I went up the steps to the ticket hall, which sits above the railway lines. Excitable teenagers were gathered outside, ready for a trip into the city. Tall apartment blocks towered over the access staircases. This was Milan now.

Vimodrone had already been refurbed, and while the white paint was an improvement on the nasty blue, it still wasn't great. The best way for concrete to look is like concrete and they'd created a rod for their back by covering it up.

I took my sign picture and smiled to myself. Another line gone. The whole network was nearly finished.

Bet you can't wait, can you?

I'll Gather Lilacs

2026-09-04T12:04:40.709+01:00

Well this is different, I thought as I got off the train. Full, extensive, platform decoration!

Unfortunately when I got closer I saw that it was a big old advert. Don't you hate it when that happens? "Oooh, what an interesting piece of art!" you think, then you squint a bit and realise it's a plug for a chicken shop. Allianz are the world's largest insurers and their Italian branch was based in the development above my head so they'd bought up the entire length of platform one to promote how brilliant they were at making money. They even had a section devoted to all the buildings around the world with Allianz in their name.

I was surprised to spot a London location on there. Allianz Park?

This was, it transpired, the home of Saracens rugby union team. The sponsorship ended in 2020 after a financial scandal at the club meant that Allianz no longer wanted to be associated with their dodgy dealings. This is a company where the first paragraph of their Wikipedia page says "Allianz was a major supporter of the Nazi movement and was an insurer of the Auschwitz concentration camp" so you can understand why they might avoid negative PR at all costs.

I poked my head round to platform 2 and discovered it was red. I initially thought this was a rare example of a company being willing to mix up its corporate look to be interesting, but actually, it was because this platform was sponsored by Generali, the largest insurance company in Italy. Basically what we had here was old fashioned corporate rivalry.

Generali had gone for look at our long proud history in Italy, unlike those Germans on the northbound side as their theme, with old posters exhibiting their centuries operating in the country. There was also some corporate guff about their manifesto for the future - printed in both Italian and English to try and capture as many readers as possible - but I'd already turned away in boredom at that point.

The escalators were blue, by the way, which says to me Allianz paid that little bit more and therefore won the battle for Tre Torre's soul.

You don't have to be a fluent Italian speaker to work out that Tre Torri translates as "three towers". When the Fiera Milano complex moved out to Rho it left behind acres of prime real estate in the centre of Milan, which has now been developed into a complex of offices, shops and homes. The centrepiece are the Tre Torri, three huge skyscrapers that rival the complex at Porto Nuova for the future capital of Milan's corporate world.

The Allianz tower is nicknamed the straight one and, as previously noted, is the tallest building in Italy if you don't count the spire on top of the UniCredit Tower, which this blog absolutely does not.

The Generali tower is nicknamed the twisted one and is currently without a corporate logo on the top because in June last year the whole sign fell off. Fortunately it was caught by the rigging at the top of the building and didn't plummet to the plaza below; it was, however, extremely embarrassing for everyone involved. An application recently went in for a new sign, which presumably will be held up with more than chewing gum and crossed fingers.

The third tower is nicknamed the curved one, because it bends forward towards the centre of the group. You can't really see it from below, though; it looks like any old skyscraper from here. This one is occupied by Oscar accountants PriceWaterhouseCooper, who were nowhere to be seen in the Tre Torri underground station. Perhaps they should've sponsored the escalators.

At the base of the three towers is a wide circular plaza, and I absolutely could not tell you anything interesting about it. In fact, a couple of days after visiting, I struggled to remember if it was here or at Porto Nuevo where I ate a little pot of fresh fruit. The fruit was far more interesting and memorable for me than the architecture.

The development isn't actually called Tre Torri, by the way; it's called CityLife. Again, you may have noticed that CityLife isn't actually Italian, and is, in fact, corporate bollocks. It's incredible to me that Milan allowed a massive flagship project to be given an English name, but then I guess it's easier to sell that to foreign investors than the Italian version, which Google Translate tells me would be Vita Cittadina. That sounds extremely glamorous to me, but finance bros don't want glamour, they want the minimum complication possible so they can concentrate on doing all those Hard Sums that actually the computers do for them. Also, don't get me started on the capital L in CityLife, which is right up there with MediaCity in Manchester for sheer nonsense. There has only been one good use of a sudden capital letter halfway through a word, and that is in GoldenEye, where it is transcendent. Everywhere else it's bollocks.

I left CityLife through a series of blank plazas filled with luxury brands nobody was actually shopping in. There was a Dyson store, and a DJI store, and a Nespresso shop, and the Carrefour had its entrance carefully hidden below the main stretch so that you wouldn't accidentally see someone poor leaving with a carrier bag full of loo rolls and Domestos. I couldn't imagine anyone waking up of a Saturday morning and saying "shall we nip to CityLife for a look round?" the way we used to go to the Arndale in Luton, but I guess that's not the target market; the target market is people with too much money trying to find some way to spend it during their lunch hour.

You can see the arch of the curved one there. It actually reminds me of this bloke I met on New Year's Eve in 1996 where his [the rest of this story has been excised in case my mum reads this].

Domodossola is another crossover point between the metro and the suburban lines, though it's a far less important connection than one on the S-bahn tunnel, carrying a couple of smaller routes. The arrival of the M5 has meant an upswing in users though and Trenord are currently in the middle of upgrading it.

Look at the state of me. Dripping with sweat and clutching a bottle of water like it's my newborn child.

Domodossola doesn't have a wealth of corporate sponsorship at platform level. It doesn't have any interesting alcove tiling either.

Perhaps Gerusalemme will be better?

Did you ever have that thing as a kid where you picked one birthday present to open first, and it unluckily turned out to be the best one, so all the ones after it were a bit disappointing?

The neighbourhood I walked out into was delightful. The metro station had been covered with a tree-lined piazza where children played on swings and slides. People wandered past with dogs and bags of essentials. I vanished into the streets behind and found a school, where the pavements had been permanently inlaid with hopscotch and shapes for the kids to play on.

As well as the odd bit of trigonometry to stop them having too much fun.

I was walking along the Via Monviso, a street that had all the hallmarks of being a quiet city backwater, apart from the cars that drove down it. The traffic was relentless, even though it was barely a single carriageway, and none of the drivers seemed to be especially keen on obeying the speed limit. I'd not encountered many of the notoriously reckless Italian drivers during my time in Milan - mostly the cars had been something that happened off to the side of me while I wandered around looking at balconies - but here it was a potent reminder that you can build a comprehensive public transport network and walkable streets and cars will still turn up and annoy you.

I hadn't realised it when I took this route to my next station, but I was actually about to pass a bit of Milan's transport history. The Messina depot is the home to about 150 of the city's trams, a network which ranges from modern articulated models to single carriage streetcars.

As I approached one of those streetcars accompanied me on the road, moving at a speed which definitely implied it was the end of the driver's shift, and turned into the entrance of the tram depot.

I followed it past the opening to the building and took a hasty snap inside. There was a man stationed in the entrance, presumably as security, and I didn't want to be accosted as some kind of insurgent. I am quite aware that transport spotting is a very British hobby - I often think of those poor aviation fans who were arrested as spies in Greece even though they were actually only massive nerds excited to see an aeroplane - and explaining to an irate man in a second language that no, I don't want to blow up Milan's transport network, I just want a picture of your depot roof, is not something I fancied doing.

Although now that I look at the picture I think he may have been asleep.

I crossed the Via Cenisio to find the imaginatively titled Cenisio station.

You might have noticed, from the previous photos, that the stations on the M5 were smaller than their M1 and M2 equivalents. The platforms are actually half as long, with trains to match. This saved a lot of money when it came to building the new lines and helped push them across the line for funding. The loss of capacity on the line is made up for by the automation; driverless trains can be run at incredibly high frequencies, with a potential gap of ninety seconds between them. In reality, it's more like three or four minutes, because the need isn't there yet.

It made me wonder why we didn't adopt a similar method to build new metros in the UK. Somewhere like Leeds or Manchester could get an underground for a lower set up cost. Then I remembered: it's because us Brits can't have any nice things.

Tile colour at Cenisio: light grey.

Tile colour at Monumentale: a slightly lighter grey. Hey, maybe the greys will subtly change the further I get along the line, until they're white at the terminus?

Monumentale is named for the huge cemetery next door, and the station turned me out into a plaza dotted with flower salesmen. A pair of young children played with the water fountain there, running across and getting their hands wet, then fleeing with a scream of joy. I interrupted their game to refill my bottle then left them to it.

I walked to the busy road bridge that spans the tracks behind Garibaldi station. That should've been my next stop on the lilac line, but of course I collected it as part of the green line. The Via Carlo Farini crossed the railway, a busy wide road with strips of pedestrian walkway at the side, unfriendly and to be hastily passed over.

The landmark here is the Torre Arcobaleno, a concrete water tower for the station that received a makeover for the 1990 World Cup. It was rebuilt and covered in 10,000 coloured ceramic tiles to create a huge piece of art. The tower was restored again in 2015 when the Expo came to Milan, and a couple of years ago they added LED lighting ahead of the Winter Olympics; basically it gets a revamp every time a large international event is held in the city. I don't know what they'll do for the Euros in 2032 - build it a massive hat?

Negotiating the circus at the end of the bridge was complex. Four roads crossed there, plus a tram line, while the pavement dipped below the surface of the tarmac. I crossed with a man who looked like he had no idea where he was going - by the time he reached the Holiday Inn on one corner he stopped and scratched his head like Stan Laurel. I crossed again, into an office development that had been built alongside the railway lines.

The halo effect of Porto Nuova outside Garibaldi station means that what was once a run down district is now a desirable business address and a series of glass boxes had been squeezed into a triangle of land. There was a back exit for the station here, too, to enable a quick commute, while the walls had been covered with lively street art. It still didn't feel entirely kosher, however; the new office buildings couldn't quite shake the shabby air of railway lands.

More traditional Milanese buildings in brown and orange were overshadowed by a reappearance of my friend, Bosco Verticale.

I was taken with it all over again, the shape, the trees, the sheer humanity of it. A skyscraper that felt completely natural. The Tre Torri had been big and bold but I bet they haven't been taken to the hearts of the people of Milan the same way Bosco Verticale has.

There was a street market in the road leading to Isola station. It looked like a slightly tacky one, the same way markets are all over the world, flouting copyright laws with cheap imports. Having the towers of Porto Nuova behind me and the stalls in front of me was an interesting contrast.

Above me two men were dangling on ropes from the roof of a building. They were painters, adding another layer of white to a villa, and they'd apparently decided to eschew scaffolding in favour of abseiling. I couldn't decide if this was clever or stupid. Yes, it saves you money, but if you drop your brush you're having to bounce all the way down to the street and up again. Also, you're not exactly protecting pedestrians underneath from rogue drips. I decided to be cautious and crossed the road, heading past the market and up to the station.

There was some graffiti on the building here: Boys don't cry - they OD and Huggs [sic] are free. I will be honest, when I've been at my worst mental health wise, hugs have been a bit annoying, but you can't deny that it's a nice message to spread. Putting it in English rather than Italian does feel a bit like they're scolding Brits in particular.

They're taking the piss now.

My train was also indulging in a little light sponsorship from a plant-based food brand. You can also see one of the delights of the metro - well, it delighted me; when there are notices about the services, ATM prints them on a piece of laminated card and hangs them from the grab rails so you can read it while you commute. In this case it was telling people attending concerts at the Ippodromo not to use Ippodromo station, but to go to San Siro, where there was better crowd management.

I skipped Zara - saving that for the M3 - and got off at Marche instead. The last six stations are in a line, following the course of a single road (called the Viale Zara at this point, and then the Viale Fulvio Testi after the Piazzale Istria. I suspected that the architecture for these last few stations would be even more standardised than on the rest of the line, so you can imagine my disappointment when I saw a distinct lack of tiling in the seating alcove. That's the end of that dream.

The road was wide here - a boulevard - with a tram line running down the centre. I got out of the station with an incredibly noisy family - mum, three kids, none of whom seemed to know the meaning of "indoor voices" - but fortunately they were headed south while I walked north, clinging to the dark shadows for a little relief from the sun.

I passed a library, where the three flagpoles were occupied by the Italian flag, the flag of Milan, and the blue EU flag. Someone had dangled a Progress Pride flag out of the window alongside to make it a row of four, and I gave a little salute to whichever LGBTQIA+ individual was inside. The library system is absolutely rife with homosexuals, for the very good reason that it's a quiet job that's inside and gives you access to enormous quantities of books. I don't know where they're all going now councils are closing them left right and centre.

Further up the road a poster had been stuck on a traffic light control box. It was captioned CIA OF SIDNEY POITIER above a headshot of the venerable Oscar winner. Perhaps it was a reference to his work in underrated Nineties thriller Sneakers? A bit of internet searching and I discovered this blog of the same name which if I'm honest hasn't cleared anything up at all. A page on Blogger that makes no sense whatsoever and seems to have been composed by a lunatic? Hey, that's my gig!

Down the steps at Istria station to the platform. I'm not even going to post a picture of the seat alcove because it's so upsetting. Instead I will post a picture of my advertising nemesis during my trip to Milan: Sofia Vergara.

Pretty much every station I went to had this poster for Skechers where Sofia looks like she's about to French kiss a trainer. I'm not sure what particular foot fetishist spearheaded this campaign but in future please keep your deviances to yourself and stop forcing much-loved comedy actresses to participate in them.

You know that bit in Father Ted (written by Arthur Mathews and nobody else) where Dougal sees a big button that says "do not press" and it's all he can think about?

Please let me pull the forbidden lever. Please. Just once.

Ca'Granda: more of the same. I should, by the way, mention how much space there is in the lilac stations. When you go from the platforms to the mezzanines there's acres of bare open floor that seems to serve no purpose at all. It's a huge circulation space for a small station with no interchanges.

It was clean and tidy though, as were all of the stations on the M5. The pale walls weren't anything special - they reminded me of offices blocks in the late 90s, where PoMo was fading away, leaving behind the basics but without any of the indulgences that made it interesting - but they were undeniably brighter than the black of the older stations I'd been to.

Each of the stations here was less than a kilometre from the next; it's the kind of public transport service that you dream about. Dense walkable neighbourhoods filled with trees and businesses and plenty of options for travel that aren't cars. We should be copying this example across the planet.

This is a memorial to the resistance fighter Baccalini Guglielmo who was shot and killed by Germans on this spot. It was quite touching to see that there's still a wreath hung here, even if it does look like it's on its way out. I was always slightly wary looking up the names of people commemorated on the side of buildings. Italy has a, let's say, complex relationship to its history in the 1930s and 40s, and sometimes you discover that the person being lauded is a man who probably should've been up before a tribunal. Fortunately, in this case, Baccalini was very much anti-Nazis, so hurrah for him.

I passed a small shop offering photocopies and printing from USBs and marvelled that it was still going in this day and age. Then I remembered that Millennials and Gen Z don't own printers any more - it is apparently a sure sign that a person is an oldie if they have an Epson on their desk. This may be because young people are in tiny flats where they don't have the space for an inkjet, but still, it shows how technologies can seem obsolete and then make a sudden reappearance. The children yearn for a Prontaprint.

A small retail park gave me the opportunity to get a Coke from a Carrefour. Also in the park was a Boots, which surprised me; I had no idea they were so international. There was something very odd about being in a sweltering hot Italian sun and seeing that familiar blue and white signage. Outside was a vending machine which might as well have been termed the Real Emergency Services. Inside was everything you could possibly need from a pharmacy after dark. Condoms, nappies, stuff to both stop and induce bowel movements, face masks, pregnancy tests. I imagined a queue of embarrassed looking individuals late at night all pretending not to notice that the person in front had a bottle of Durex lube clattering into the bottom of the machine.

The station at Biocca - which sounds like one of those gastric solutions - was squeezed into a triangle of tram lines.

Here's an interesting little architectural feature. The balustrades on the stairs in the stations incorporate this funky M5 logo, which makes it look extremely glamorous and 1980s. If you put this on the cover of an Italodisco LP it wouldn't look out of place at all.

Ponale also had a rarity; an in-station cafe. These were all over the M1 and M2 but ATM few of the stops on the new Metro line had them. It didn't seem exactly welcoming - I'm not sure it was even open - but that's not the point.

I trudged up the steps to the street, my legs weary by now, my knees protesting. The heat struck you as soon as you stepped into the sun. It was burning.

On the plus side, there was only one more station to go. For now, anyway. The M5 is going to be extended all the way to the adjoining city of Monza, interchanging with mainlines and the M1. It'll more or less double the length of the lilac line and will put the home of Italian Formula 1 on the metro map.

I dragged my weary carcass the last few hundred yards to Bignami station. Two men smoking outside an office block gave me a peculiar look as I passed, no doubt wondering how a recently exhumed corpse could look so bad. Then, there it was: the final metro stop on the M5, the end of another line.

Would the end of the line be commemorated with a final tilework to capture and entrance me? A last gasp of art to celebrate this major achievement in public works?

Bloody sod you then.

Lilac Time

2026-08-28T13:19:17.658+01:00

If you cast your mind back to when this interminable voyage round Milan began, I decided to do the five lines in numerical order, because I'm boring and a bit predictable. With the M1 and the M2 largely done, my spreadsheet was clear for day three: complete the Gessate branch, then move on to complete the M3 from start to finish. A long day, to be sure, but worth it.

The first two days were making me rethink my approach. I really hadn't taken into account how hot it would be. The whole of Europe was sweltering under nightmarish, sweltering conditions, and as a fat middle aged man who walks very quickly, I was finding myself both exhausted and sweaty. My clothes from the first day on the network were still damp two days later, hung in my air conditioned hotel room; meanwhile I'd got used to my pee being thick treacle from the dehydration.

Waking up to a severe weather alert, with predicted temperatures reaching the high thirties, filled me with terror. I really didn't want to flake out in the middle of the street (I once fainted in the heat at school and it's given me a lifetime stress about it happening again). A hospital visit would be terrible, not least because I only had a week in Milan and all those stations still to collect.

I changed my plans. Instead of the M2 and M3, which would take me out all day, I'd do the M5: a much smaller line which, with any luck, I could polish off before the afternoon heat really took hold.

The other advantage of going to the M5 early was its radically different architecture. The line opened in 2015 (before the M4, oddly), and twenty-odd years after the M3. It means it benefits from many of the subsequent advances in metro technology: driverless trains, platform-edge doors, integrated disabled access.

I got off the train at San Siro Stadio and immediately grinned. One of my main complaints about the Milan Metro is every station is more or less the same; you can only tell where you are by reading the name on the signboards. It's economy of scale when it comes to the design and building process, yes, but I felt it was also a missed opportunity for small points of differentiation. It doesn't have to be elaborate architectural variations, it could be something simple and small.

Something like, for example, unique tiled artwork at each station. This is what the Tube did with the Victoria Line in the Sixties, and seeing a tiled design at San Siro Stadio delighted me. It seemed the M5 had a similar idea. I looked forward to cataloguing them.

I went up to the surface. There are two exits to the station. One is open for regular, day to day transportation. It's a sub-surface ticket hall, escalators, and exits to the street.

The other entrance is, basically, a massive funnel, ready for match days at the stadium that gives it its name. Automatic turnstiles here hold back the crowds until the platforms are cleared, regulating the passenger numbers and stopping overcrowding.

The San Siro is, of course, one of the most famous football stadiums in the world, the home of both AC and Inter Milan, in another of those perfectly reasonable groundshares that are common in Europe but would result in some kind of interurban warfare in the UK. There was a brief period where it was suggested Liverpool and Everton should share a brand new stadium and I genuinely think both teams would've rather shared with Manchester United than one another.

The stadium has existed on this site since the 1930s, gaining new tiers and extensions as the decades went on, with its newest most famous ring coming in time for Italia '90. That was the one that gave it the distinctive spiral entrances, plus the gridded roof struts above.

It's also, weirdly, my fourth Olympic stadium on a foreign metro trip in a row, though only on a technicality; the opening ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics was held here, but no actual events, what with it being a football stadium and all.

The San Siro's days are numbered now. Inter and AC bought it off the city last year with plans to build an entirely new stadium next door. There used to be a velodrome and indoor arena there, built in 1976, but during heavy snowfall in 1985 the roof collapsed. It was subsequently demolished and has left a nice open area which means the two football teams can construct a replacement without interfering with matches at the existing ground.

They've been rather quiet on what their actual plans for the site are; earlier this year some old ticket offices were knocked down, causing the city to query if they were starting work before they'd got permission. Approval for the new stadium isn't planned until next year, but they'll have to get a move on to put it together, as Italy will be hosting the Euros in 2032 and need it ready for then. (Italy are co-hosting it with... Türkiye. How is it that as we're trying to discourage unnecessary air travel sporting events are being hosted across multiple countries that aren't even neighbours? Good luck following your team from Turin to İzmir and back again).

Incidentally, I sent the BF a picture of the San Siro, thinking that, as a football fan, he might appreciate it. He replied with the following message:

Sporting types: they're basically children.

The various concrete barriers around the San Siro had been graffitied by the various "Ultras" and were decorated with messages in Italian that I'm sure weren't at all flattering. This one I could understand, though because I'm a Massive Gay, my immediate thought was of iconic Italian movie star Claudia Cardinale, and not, as it turns out, the American chair of the private equity firm that owns AC Milan.

There's another potential building site further along the Via dei Rospigliosi. This was the site for Milan's trotting racecourse (better known as harness racing in the UK). That moved to a newer site at La Maura, leaving a large expanse ripe for exploitation.

Unfortunately for the developers, the land has come with all sorts of conditions; the stable blocks, for example, are listed and have to be preserved, while the city has insisted on half the space being used for greenery and public areas. As a result the area is only now getting underway as a future site for apartments and shops - helped, no doubt, by the metro on its doorstep.

The next station was San Siro Ippodromo, which doesn't sound like real Italian. It sounds like something Captain Bertorelli from 'Allo 'Allo would say. "I took-a these beyoootiful laydies to-a the Ippodromo! What a mistake-a to make-a!" Obviously I know we took the word "hippodrome" from them, and that here it's referring to the racetrack, but it still sounds a little bit too comic.

That definitely says San Siro Ippodromo, by the way. The designers went arty for some of the entrances to the M5, with these steel awnings with the name laser cut into it. I'm sure it looks fantastic at night, lit from behind, but on a bright morning you have to squint to see it.

Ippodromo's tiled alcove? This fetching shade of green that absolutely clashes with the lilac of the line colour. Segesta, meanwhile, is grey.

Neither has what experts would call a "design feature" like San Siro Stadio though. And that was only some writing. Perhaps my excitement was premature.

You'll also notice I managed to come out without my stupid little hat as well. Another reason why I needed to get back before the heat started burning the top of my head.

The M5 intersects with the M1 at Lotto, which you might remember I got a couple of days before, and so I skipped that one and walked across town. I passed the Popeye's which had annoyed me back then, this time crossing instead of walking alongside, and got annoyed by it again. Still, it could be worse: Liverpool is soon to get a branch of notoriously homophobic fried food merchant Chick-Fil-A. Do better, Liverpool.

This part of the city was experiencing a rapid and radical upswing in fortunes. For many years it was home to the main exhibition centre, until most of it moved out to the end of the M1. There are still a couple of halls left here but the majority of the site has been given over to regeneration.

The end of the old exhibition centre has been enlivened by the addition of The Comet, a mass of LED-lit metal that writhes its way over the otherwise boring boxes. It's also home to the Allianz MiCo, a convention centre.

I threaded my way through the many lanes of traffic and across to Portello station, hidden beneath the high walls.

Down at the platform, I stopped to take in the next piece of alcove tiling. Perhaps it could fill me with hope that there was a whole world of art ahead of me?

Oh.

The Green Mile

2026-08-19T12:27:22.745+01:00

Before I headed out to Milan, I looked around for books on the network. Sadly, there didn't seem to be any, or at least none in English, and I didn't have time for a crash course in Italian. I finally found Italian Ways: On and Off The Rails From Milan to Palermo, by Tim Parks, but I didn't enjoy it. Parks is a resident of Northern Italy and the book catalogues a series of rail journeys he'd taken over the years, but it came off as somewhat patronising to me. What he enjoyed, on his trips around the nation, was when the service was chaotic, when the trains were a mess or broke down, when the staff were rude. When high-speed services with new electric trains are introduced, he grumbles about their efficiency and their seat reservations; when Milano Centrale is rebuilt and modernised, he complains that it has lost all the charm it had when he got his bag stolen and you'd be accosted by random panhandlers.

It's a very middle class English attitude, that the Continent should be a bit ramshackle because it's so much more authentic, and that Italians are completely wrong to want trains that are reliable and clean and decent. I imagine that when he comes back to London and a suburban service is cancelled he's furious and hisses "typical British Rail" but because it comes with an Italian accent it's somehow delightful.

The reason I bring this up is because my next station was Lambrate, and Parks specifically mentions it in his book. I quote:

"This is the station where the Gypsies gather, on the southbound platform on the metro, the Green Line. They take over the stone bench opposite the last carriage when it arrives. There are three or four swarthy men, unwashed and unshaven, half a dozen women, one or two with babies in their arms, and a few adolescents, girls and boys. The boys have violins or accordions. Often they have painted nails, sometimes even lipstick. The girls have an infant in tow. As each train comes and goes, one or two Gypsies get on it. They start at the back carriage and work their way forward, the men in scruffy waistcoats playing their musical instruments, the women begging in their long dresses, repeating their mournful spiel over and over in a high pitched monotone...

...As a rule they work the Green Line down to its southern end, then take the train back and spill out onto the platform at Lambrate for a break. No sooner do they stop begging than they cheer up at once."

Reader, I travelled all over the metro for an entire week, up and down the M2, in and out of every station, and I encountered beggars on the train exactly twice. One was the student girl singing Hallelujah I previously complained about; another was a clearly homeless man who shuffled down the train when I was on the M3. Now admittedly, Parks' book was published in 2013, so perhaps there's been a huge crackdown across the entire network in the past decade that has seen them wiped off the map. I will say that I disembarked at Lambrate, went all the way up through the metro station to the exit, and didn't see a single fake Romany ready to fleece the innocents of Milan.

This isn't to say that Lambrate was a charming country halt. Outside it was like any other urban European railway station; a bit grubby, a bit panicky. There were dodgy looking salesmen with armfuls of Temu-level crap. There were backpackers who were blissfully unaware of anyone else in the world and who stopped in front of information screens without warning.

The underpass beneath the tracks also served as a public walkway, so I went through it, delighting in destination boards listing exotic places like "Verona" and "Brescia" and "Bergamo". Places you knew about as holiday destinations stuck on the front of a train the same way "Leeds" or "Birmingham" would be in the UK. Travel broadens the mind, and also reminds you that every beautiful tourist trap is just a place where people live and work and shop.

At the back of the station was a newer extension and a car park, plus a large gyratory which I negotiated to get to the Via Ronchi opposite. It was a long straight road with flats and shops, much the same as I'd seen elsewhere in the city. I crossed over to the far side where there was a hint of shadow; it was almost noon and I was feeling both the heat and the exhaustion from all that walking.

Udine station was at a busy roundabout surrounded by bars and cafes and a small park. A group of students looked confused outside the entrance, checking their phones obsessively, in a way that implied they'd somehow ended up here against their will. Old men sat on the pavement with their cigarettes and coffees watched them with bemusement, absolutely not offering to help in any way, but enjoying their befuddlement.

Udine is also the last underground station on the M2. The track goes on the surface after here, taking over old tramways in some cases, and as such this was my last chance to experience the distinctive Milan Metro architecture I'd become very familiar with.

As though it knew this, Udine offered up an ideal example of the form. The station was clean and well-maintained. At the mezzanine level, there was not only a newsagent-slash-miscellaneous store, but also a coffee shop in one of the underground units.

Much as I love a metro station, I don't think I'd be happy sitting at a table to have my lunch in one. They're places to pass through, not to enjoy the moment. I liked the untouched 1970s aesthetics of the bar, though, and wondered if it would be allow to continue now there was a private company involved in the letting of station retail. I wondered if it'd all be ripped out and replaced with a Starbucks because they signed a deal to appear in every station on the Green Line.

The overground section was arriving at almost exactly the wrong time for me. The brief moments in cool dark depths gave me time to recover and regroup. Now I was being sent into thirty-odd degree heat, at lunchtime, covered in sweat and general unpleasantness and tired.

Cimiano station did give me a moment of nostalgia. A long station with a canopy roof, wedged between a motorway and tall apartment blocks, I was reminded of Stockholm's Green Line; specifically around Kristineberg station.

I headed down the steps to the ticket hall, which is under the railway viaduct; as at Lambrate, the underpass doubles as a right of way. The busier, more dense part of the city was to the right, but I turned left.

I was following the track along the backs of apartment blocks on a route that was theoretically parkland. It felt neglected and unloved, boring lawns and winding paths that you wouldn't let your kids play on alone. A homeless man slept on a bench in the shade.

I was following a small woman with a shopping basket, at a reasonable distance of course so she didn't think I was a pervert, winding round the car parks of flats and the back walls of homes. Now and then a cyclist would pass in the opposite direction. On a corner, a fly tipper had abandoned a fridge freezer and a broken wooden sun lounger.

My next station, Crescenzago, presented a problem for me as it was closed for refurbishment. This whole section of the M2 was getting a comprehensive makeover; indeed, if I'd gone to Milan a few weeks later, I'd have had much more severe access issues.

There was a rail replacement bus linking Crescenzago with its neighbours, but no train services at all.

We now have a dilemma. The rules - the rules I invented - say I need to get a train to or from the station for it to count. I couldn't do this. But I had walked there, and I would pass through the station on my way back into the city (and also when I subsequently collected the Gessate branch). So as far as I'm concerned, I have been to Crescenzago.

It's me, it's a Metro M, it's the station Crescenzago. Job done. As always, if you disagree, please proceed to my Ko-Fi to give me airfare and hotel money so I can return when the station reopens in September. Happy to help!

I turned into the streets then, away from the railway line, happy to have a little bit of shade. I was really flagging now. Once again I'd forgotten that I'm nearly fifty, that I can't just decide to walk ten miles a day in record temperatures without any advance preparation, that I need to lose a lot of weight. My knees were starting to complain about the lack of care and attention. I drank deeply from my vending machine water bottle and made a decision. Bus.

I imagine I was quite firmly judged by the bus driver. I was less than a kilometre from the end of the line; this was in fact the last stop before we got there. I didn't care. I had a few minutes of blessed sitting down in an air conditioned seat until we pulled into the bus station.

Cascina Gobba is a major confluence point for transport of all types. It nestles in a cloverleaf junction of the motorway, and so it's got a massive car park, a bus exchange, and fast regular trains into the city centre. There are works underway to extend a tram line to the complex, with a footbridge under construction to take you straight into the metro station.

It also had, for twenty-five years, an automated people mover called the MeLA. This was an elevated cable tramway which connected with the near, but not near enough, San Raffaelle Hospital. However, the people mover closed "temporarily" in 2024 and has never reopened. It's officially meant to be coming back, but there's no word on when or how. It should be noted that the MeLA wasn't integrated into the transport network, and needed its own separate ticket for access, which makes me wonder about its financial viability. I was mainly disappointed that I didn't get to ride it.

One thing Cascina Gobba* doesn't have is a station sign outside. This is a ridiculous oversight on ATM's part and rest assured I will be writing a strongly worded e-mail via Google Translate. As such I will have to provide a platform sign as proof that I was in fact at the station.

If you can somehow manage to see round my enormous head there, you'll notice that the station has four platforms. This is the point where the M2 splits into its two branches, and so the station is laid out to accommodate that.

Irregular font alert on that station sign as well. That e-mail just got even narkier.

On the train to Cologno Sud, I made a decision. The last three stations are all within the municipality of Cologno, spread along the track at an even distance, and I realised... I couldn't be bothered. I decided I'd go to the stations, of course, that wasn't up for negotiation; but I wasn't going to walk from one to the next. I was too hot, too tired, too irritable. I'm sorry Cologno, I let you down, but I'm not sure I really missed much.

Certainly the view outside the station wasn't exactly picturesque. The line runs on a high concrete viaduct and so the entrance is housed on a bare stretch of land that's overshadowed. Nice and cool, yes, but I wouldn't fancy wandering around here late at night.

It's this viaduct that's caused the whole line to be closed at present. At fifty odd years old it's reached the point where the concrete needs to be examined for flaws and reinforced where necessary.

Back up, onto the train, then off again at Cologno Centro behind two ATM workers arriving for their shift. I tried not to be distracted by their extremely tight trousers and headed out, through the ticket barriers, and into the extremely similar exterior space for the sign picture.

At track level, the stations are great; there is absolutely no chance a similar station in the UK would get a roof these days, and the glass everywhere keeps them bright and open. On the street though, they're no looker.

Picture taken, it was back up to wait for my penultimate train. Outside peak hours there can be a fair wait. I sat on one of the cool marble benches and drank my water. Only after about five minutes did I notice the sticky patch right next to me, swarming with ants, which caused me to leap up hurriedly. I hoped that none of them had breached my short leg and given me literal ants in my pants.

And then the end of the line: Cologno Nord.

The line had dropped down to ground level now, meaning my poor knackered legs had to climb a staircase to get to the exit. Just beyond here there's a depot for the trains.

Up, over, down to the car park and the station's back exit. The final station on Milan's longest line. The behemoth. It was all easy from here. (Yes I know there's still one branch of the M2 to go. I'll get there. Another day).

*(note to self: write children's book with a loveable character called Cascina Gobba)

The Green Stuff

2026-08-17T11:59:11.134+01:00

It doesn't look like much, but that's actually an extremely rare station sign. The Milan Metro has two types of entrance; in the main, they're voids in the street, stairs and escalators and lifts disappearing beneath the pavement. In some cases, such as at Pero, there's a small pavilion covering the entrance, to make it more noticeable. Only at Lanza is there an entrance actually constructed inside a non-Metro building, as you'd find in many other cities round the world. I'm not sure why Lanza got this special treatment.

This may be as good a place as any to complain about the street presence of the Metro. Pretty much every station entrance looks something like this:

A low wall surrounding a staircase down, with a red flag with a white M acting as the signpost that the Metro is here. The actual name of the station is tucked away. You can just about see it if you look down, but the best spot to read it is when you're halfway down the stairs. That's strange to me. It meant a great deal of confusion for the many Milanese residents who had to contend with a fat English blogger stood on a staircase taking a selfie. I suppose it doesn't objectively matter which metro station you're stood outside; the important part is that it's a station. It doesn't sit right with me though. I guess I want all metro stations to be prominent, important parts of the landscape.

Lanza station deposits you in a small piazza outside the Piccolo Teatro Strehler, one of Milan's premier theatrical venues. We were at the edge of the Parco Sempione, the extensive landscaped area behind the Castello Sforzesco, and it was an area dripping with money.

I disappeared into the tiny streets and squares behind the theatre, ending up on the Corso Garibaldi, another of those exclusive shopping streets Milan does so well. It was the first time when I was really captured by the city, having a moment of "this'd be a nice spot to live in". Obviously that's because it's the nicest, richest part.

This is not a burn on Milan. It's an exciting, vibrant city, and remember, I wasn't going round looking for the pretty bits. I was following the railway lines and nothing else. None the less, I wasn't taken with it in the same way I had been by Stockholm and Helsinki. The heat didn't help, of course, but I think it came down to money.

Walking around it felt like everything was directed towards money, the earning of it, the spending of it, a city as capitalist as it could possibly be. I didn't get that sense that the city was relaxing and enjoying itself. It was a grinding, relentless place, a city that would pick you up and spit you out and not care one bit. Come here to trade, not to perambulate.

I sank back underground for the trip to Garibaldi station. Centrale is the grand arrival point for people from all points across Europe; Garibaldi is its suburban brother, bringing workers from the region into Milan. It also carries transnational services that want to avoid the fees at Centrale. Opened in 1961, it has 20 platforms on the surface, plus another load underground.

On the M2 this means something unique: island platforms! They're kind of pointless, because the outer line is only used for storing stock, but after two days of seeing exactly the same architecture over and over again I could've cried with joy at getting a bit of variation.

Garibaldi's also got a far more modern appearance, mainly because Milan keeps building new lines through it. A tunnel was dug across the city centre to allow suburban trains to pass straight through, creating an S-bahn network that interacts with surface lines at Garibaldi; it opened in the 90s. Then, twenty years after that, the M5 crossed underneath too.

Garibaldi's home to one of ATM's customer service centres, which may be the least friendly ones I've ever seen. Firstly they're appointment only, so if you fancy dropping in to ask the best way to get to the airport you're out of luck. In fact the one at Centrale seems to employ a security guard on the door whose entire job is to turn away hapless tourists wanting to buy a day pass from a human being. On some level I admire their refusal to be anything other than obnoxious. So many railway companies pretend they're your friend while they tell you they're running fast to the terminus because their late running is more important than you getting home. ATM is unapologetically "we'll serve you when we want and not before".

The piazza outside the station is named for Sigmund Freud, presumably because all those trains going into tunnels made for comedy symbolism. It was in the final stages of a renovation when I was there, removing the parking that used to dominate the front of the station and making it more of a pleasant spot to hang out. Garibaldi's no looker, however, so I can't see it ever being a stop on the tourist trail.

Directly opposite me was a mass of incredibly tall buildings. I was stood in the Piazza Sigmund Freud and staring at massive erections; too obvious, Milan, too obvious. This was Portanuova, a former industrial district turned into the city's version of Canary Wharf.

What really caught my eye was at the base of the towers: the words Food Court. I was thirsty after sweating all morning so I walked in to hopefully get a seat and a cold drink and some aircon. Sadly, it was still largely shut up; it seemed to be designed for the office workers to get their lunch, not breakfast, so I went to the supermarket and bought a small pack of fresh fruit and a Coke. I went up to the plaza and ate it on the edge of the water features to lower the tone.

Milan is Italy's financial centre, and Portanuova is its beating heart. The headquarters of Alfa Romeo, Pirelli and Versace are here; the UniCredit Tower is the base for Italy's biggest bank and claims it's the tallest building in the country. Theoretically. The Allianz Tower, also in Milan, has the highest roof, but the UniCredit has an eighty metre spire as part of the design which pushes it over the top. I don't think that counts, personally. That's like me claiming I'm the world's tallest man because I'm wearing a really big hat.

From Portanuova I headed out into the BAM, the Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano. That translates as the "Library of Trees, Milan", which is fancy design speak for "a park". Call it a bloody park, that's what it is, that's what people understand. Giving it a stupid acronym for a name benefits nobody except a load of wankers in a design studio.

BAM is a series of lawns, trees and playgrounds spread over a wide area; it's now the third largest park in the city. I was headed to its northern rim first, because I wanted to check out a specific skyscraper.

The Bosco Verticale is two residential towers that have been covered in trees and vegetation. Designed by the Boeri Studio of architects, they're a dense mass of greenery that also includes some beautiful homes.

The screening of green has multiple benefits. It cools the interior. It filters pollutants. It absorbs carbon dioxide. It encourages wildlife. But most important of all, it looks fantastic. Water is recycled from the tenants to feed the plants, distributed via an irrigation network, and the shift of the seasons means that the exterior is always changing and developing. They're wonderful buildings and the only downside is that they've not been copied all over the world. So many boring, cheaply clad boxes springing up everywhere, glass towers that reflect burning sunlight down on innocent passers by, and you could have a series of lush vertical forests spreading across the globe. It hasn't even been copied in Milan; BAM should've been surrounded by clones of the Bosco Verticale and instead there was more terracotta cubes.

Look at it next to the UniCredit Tower - which one draws your eye? Which one is more pleasing to look at? (And do you see what I mean about the spire giving it the record of tallest building being a big old cheat?)

The steps of the Stecca 3.0 building were covered with a school trip, a couple of dozen children in high-vis jackets drinking bottles of water. Apparently it's an "Incubator for Art", which seemed a little over the head of the eight year olds on the steps, so I guessed they were visiting the district itself and had paused for a drink. It was certainly brutal crossing BAM in the naked sunshine with barely any cover; the emphasis was on arrangements of vegetation in circular spaces leaving the paths in between exposed. A few nice avenues of trees would've been more than welcome but I suppose that's very old-fashioned and undeserving of the BAM name. What do you think this is, a park or something?

Gioia was at the base of a canyon of tall office blocks, surrounded by building sites and forcing me on temporary walkways to reach it. It's another island platform, the tracks either side, and slathered in branding for KPMG, whose HQ is next door.

The next station on the M2 is Centrale, but I was saving that for the M3, so instead I continued to Caiazzo. The walls were covered with this interesting faceted blue cladding.

Look, I've already run out of things to say about the architecture of these stations, ok? Let me have my minor differences.

The next station after Caiazzo on the line was Loreto, which was of course where I'd paused my M1 journey the day before, so I cut across through the city streets in search of Piola.

Quiet residential streets, lined with blocks of apartments and trees, straight as a die and intersecting over and over in patterns of diamonds. It's funny how in the UK, there's constant handwringing about the death of the High Street, and yet here in Italy every single building seemed to come with one or two retail units that were occupied and thriving. Part of this is to do with shopping habits of course, but it's also the density of the city; those seven of eight floors of apartments all contained people who needed milk and bread and coffee and somewhere to eat out and plumbers and electrical appliances.

Perhaps, instead of letting our shopping centres fill with vape shops and charity shops, we should do something a little more radical. Demolish the vacant precincts that, even at their height, were dead after five pm, and rebuild them with stacks of flats above. Move people back into town centres. It'd also have the advantage of creating homes for the many, many people who can't get on the property ladder, giving them apartments that are liveable and where you don't need a car. I can't think of a single reason why you wouldn't do this, apart from, oh yeah, it'd cost money. So that's the end of that.

I crossed a wide boulevard with a sprightly older person who walked even faster than me, something I didn't think was possible given that I have a TurboMince. The streets on the other side were narrower but still packed with homes and businesses. Tiny hole in the wall restaurants offered different cuisines; a café with a long counter disappearing into the darkness at the back served miniscule coffees to parched Milanos.

The large roundabout at the Piazzale Gabrio Piola stood between me and the Metro station; I, naturally, went the wrong way round it and ended up doing almost an entire circle before I reached the entrance. The plaza with the staircases was covered with young, excitable people; this station is close to PoliMi, the Politecnico di Milan, the city's oldest university and one of the most prestigious in Italy.

In the hall below I found something I'd not seen anywhere else on the network, and would never see again: members of staff making sure people had a ticket. Though every station has barriers blocking your way in, there are no ticket sellers any more, and most of the stations were entirely devoid of staff. You can tap and go throughout the network - that's what I did every day - with a capped limit on how much you spend, while machines dispense passes for the more traditional sorts.

I'd guess that Piola, with its high proportion of cheap students, has a problem with fare dodging and so security guards were there to watch people go in and out. Judging by the shocked reaction of a load of girls who came down the steps with me, it wasn't a regular thing. It makes me wonder what the fare avoidance levels are throughout the Metro. This was the only time I saw any enforcement at all. Perhaps Italians are far more honest and reliable than British people.

The M2 was getting done. I had one final branch to do. The other one could wait.

Green Park

2026-08-10T13:04:51.022+01:00

I never want to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" again. No, I'll rephrase that: I don't need to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" again. I'm done. I've heard every single variation on it, every version, a different chord arrangement, done fast, done slow; I've heard it. I don't need to hear it again. And I certainly don't need to hear it played on an acoustic guitar on a train in Italy at nine in the morning.

(Here are some other songs I do not ever need to hear again: Robbie Williams' "Angels", Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline", literally anything by Billy Joel. I know you're probably adding "Don't Look Back In Anger" to that list but I have a very fond memory of spontaneously singing that with a coach of students in 1995 as we headed back from a night out at Manhattan's, Southport, and so I can never really hate it).

The point is I was not in the mood for a metro busker, though, if I'm honest, I never am. She strolled up and down the train, warbling "Hallelujah", trying to catch our eye so we'd be guilted into handing over a couple of coins. Trapping someone on a train - on a train that is an going a relatively long way without stopping at a station to let you escape - and forcing them to hear Leonard Cohen is surely a violation of the Geneva Convention. What was worse was I wasn't even getting off at the next station: that was Famagosta, which I'd already collected. I gritted my teeth and wished I had my headphones until we finally reached Romolo station.

The streets around the station were still in rush hour mode, the bus exchange disgorging commuters, the traffic carrying the slight anxiety of drivers who were that little bit behind time. The pedestrian crossing held the cars and I could feel their tension, the revving of engines as I walked by, the need to move on.

A thin boulevard of shops and then I was in a park again. Paths wound beneath trees and alongside grass that still hadn't turned yellow from the sun. New apartments had been slotted in alongside, built on top of industrial units.

I crossed another road and was then in a different park, this one named, somewhat, incongruously, for Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout Movement. I was a cub and a scout until my early teens - not especially because I wanted to, mainly because my parents thought if I didn't have some kind of enforced social activity I'd have spent my entire childhood in my room alone reading (and they were right) - so I did a little three fingered salute to the man who started it all. I wasn't a very good Scout, but I ended up a patrol leader because after a certain point every boy of a certain age became a patrol leader; I still have trouble with a reef knot, I've never been able to do that one where the rabbit goes round the tree and in his hole, and anything more complicated than that is basically an Indian rope trick to me.

There was a tree near the exit to the park, and someone had hung a small white circle of paper on it, like a Christmas tree covered in wishes in a shopping centre. On it was written E ALLORA Ti TENGO LE MANi SULLE ORECCHiE E ALLONTANiAMO i RUMORi DEL MONDE - "AND THEN I HOLD MY HANDS ON YOUR EARS AND WE MOVE AWAY THE NOISES OF THE WORLD". I'm not sure what that means, or why it's all caps except for the "i", but it's a sweet sentiment.

The park emptied me out onto another canalside. Porto Genova was a district of workshops and factories but, like other areas of its type in cities across the world, in recent years it's been colonised by bars and clubs and transformed into a fashionable district for young people to hang out in.

At this time of the morning it was recovering from the night before. The pavement was being hosed down, the seats were being set out, the shutters remained tightly fixed on every third establishment. Small hole in the wall places had opened to dispense pastries and coffee to passers by but it was an area still yawning.

Why don't we have more vending machines in the UK? The rest of the world loves them, and they're convenient and always available. In Britain you usually find them inside a store, which kind of renders them pointless; if a store is open you don't need a machine. Of course we'd never have tobacco dispensers on street corners - won't somebody think of the children - but it'd be nice to know at three in the morning that you could still get a packet of Wotsits and a bottle of Coke Zero if the mood took you.

I crossed the Navigli Grande via an iron bridge, named the Ponte Enrico Molteni after the bassist for the band Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti. He lives nearby and this was seen as a fitting tribute to him; he's not dead, though, which always worries me. Naming anything after someone who's still alive - unless they're a king or a president - runs the risk of them doing something dodgy in later life which will result in a hasty rebrand. Wait until they're dead - in fact, give it five years to be sure - and then slap the nameplate on it. (I should add, for legal reasons, that to my knowledge Ragazzi Morti is a model citizen and the renaming of the bridge is a worthy tribute to a gentleman and hero. His music's not bad, either - sort of like mid-90s American indie, the stuff they did after Grunge while we were all in on Britpop).

I do think that, if Enrico lives nearby, he should nip round with a bolt cutter and get rid of all the padlocks that have been attached to the railings on his bridge. Can we stop this? It's not original and it's not romantic and it's plain annoying. I'm sick of going to scenic bridges and seafronts and seeing a mess of cheap Yales with Debbie and Garry scrawled on it in permanent marker. They won't be there forever, because the council has to come round every few months to cut them down or the fence will collapse. Bury a time capsule or something instead, you basics.

Incidentally, look at how clear that water is! It certainly puts the Leeds and Liverpool to shame. Not a single shopping trolley or bloated corpse to be seen. The local gangsters couldn't chuck a "shooter" in there to dispose of the evidence, everyone would see it.

The Via Casale takes you away from the canal, back into the city. It was more touristy here, with restaurant menus in multiple languages. There were clusters of young travellers wheeling their suitcases over the cobbles, kicked out of their Air B&Bs, looking for some breakfast.

At the top is the Piazzale Stazione Genova, home to the Porto Genova railway station... or at least the building. Milan is in the process of rationalising its rail network, creating larger more modern hubs and redirecting tracks and services in the process. Part of this rationalisation meant that the services that previously went to Porto Genova were redirected to the much larger Rogoredo station; the opening of the M4 line meant that people in the area could access them via the Metro with a couple of changes.

The station closed in December last year and as yet there doesn't seem to be a plan for what to do with it. The booking hall is still open, though the ticket office is closed, as is the access to the platforms; there doesn't seem to be a reason for it, unless Italian railways are determined to provide access to Photo-Me booths. Even the KFC which occupies the café space has closed its door into the station building.

I returned to the piazza outside to get to the Metro station, a set of stairs descending beneath the ground with an arched roof to deflect the sun.

The Milan Metro is definitely showing its age. (Aren't we all?) A lot of the paint is peeling, there are water stains, and the concrete is chipped. This does create opportunities for street art, however - see?

When life gives you lemons, turn them into a seated gorilla having a chat with Audrey II.

Sant' Agostino station is one of the deepest on the entire system, constructed to try and cause as little disruption to the buildings above as possible. As such it's a rare Milan Metro station with two tubes carrying the tracks, one on top of the other, meaning a network of escalators and stairs to take you to the mezzanine. (Isn't the graffiti on the train in the picture above wonderful, by the way? A charming addition to the boring livery, and definitely not incredibly irritating vandalism that reduces the quality of life of everyone who sees it).

S. Agostino station is not to be confused with S. Ambrosio station, which is one stop further on on the M2. I feel like they could've put a little more thought into the station names there, so that there weren't two stops with the same name five hundred metres apart. Still, at least they're close, so if you do get off at the wrong one it's not much of a walk.

There's an extensive plaza on top of the station, though it's pretty featureless and is no doubt mainly used for gatherings of revellers and diners. (In fact, look at it on Google Streetview and it's like a war zone as the binmen clear up after some kind of public protest/celebration). The presence of two "British" pubs, the Old Fox and the Nelson, made me wonder what state the square had been in the night before. It was the morning after England beat Mexico to get to the quarter finals of the World Cup, and I imagined it had been a scene of debauched indulgence and exultance. I was impressed that Milan's street cleaners had managed to tidy it up so quickly.

However, the Old Fox's Facebook page doesn't mention the World Cup at all, even though there were events for St George's Day and they boast of the best Fish and Chips in town. I wondered if they'd politely decided not to rub England's success in the faces of their Italian neighbours, a bit like when I picked up my GCSE results with my friends Mandy and Laura and had to keep quiet about my As because they were sobbing over how many they'd failed and all the resits they were going to have to do.

The Via Olona takes you past Milan's science museum, naturally named after Leonardo di Vinci, and home to the city's railway museum. A pavilion houses a lot of old engines which I'm sure are fascinating if you like that sort of thing but, as we've established, I don't. I did consider going for a look round if I managed to finish the Metro early, but I didn't, and besides, I'm not sure any transport museum can compete with Stockholm's Spårvägsmuseet. It remains the gold standard, as far as I'm concerned, mainly because it used the transport to tell the story of the city and its people, and didn't simply stick a massive steam train in front of you and expect you to coo over its bogies.

S. Ambrogio - yes, I did check to make sure I was writing about the correct station - was given a major uplift when it was chosen to be the interchange with the M4 line.

It's not immediately obvious that there are two lines here, however. The ticket hall remains in the standard M2 style, not upgraded in any way. The only way you'll find the M4 is following the signs down below.

Another four stations under my belt. I was going to carry on writing about more on the line, but I think we all need a break, don't you? And perhaps a lie down. Come back another time for Lanza and beyond. We can get through this together.

Green Land

2026-08-06T22:18:40.921+01:00

It's weird how hotel breakfasts cause you to eat the most random of foods. I started my travels round the M2 full of a combination of cocktail sausages, frittata, and fried peppers, a combination that I wouldn't eat under any circumstances back in the UK. Somehow if you put it in a breakfast buffet I work my way along the row of cloches and shove a heap of everything on my plate. (Although I did draw the line on the Thursday when I opened one up and found peas underneath. Peas are not a breakfast food).

The point is I was absolutely stuffed when I arrived at Piazzale Abbiategrasso station. I'd need the energy. The M2 is even longer than the M1, so long that I'd already planned on leaving one of its branches - the one to Gessate - until the next day. I'd need to really push myself if I was going to complete my objectives.

I headed south on the first train that I saw, unbothered about which terminus I ended up at; I was going to have to do the other one anyway. The Abbiategrasso train came first so they "won".

Yes I do look knackered.

It's a funny little stub of a branch, only having a single stop, mainly there to tie into the two tram routes that end here. I crossed over the road and onto a wide patch of grass, and from there into the Parco Chiesa Rossa.

I felt good and raring to go. Finishing off the M1 the day before had been the right thing to do, even if it left me crawling into my bed. I felt like Milan was absolutely within my bony fingers. And if it could just stay nice and cool, as it was right then at eight in the morning, that would be much appreciated too.

The shade was welcome for me and for the other joggers and walkers using the park at that time of the morning. There were already some old people taking up space on the benches, getting in their constitutionals, and a man filling his water bottles at the council fountain.

The Naviglio Pavese is one of Milan's few remaining canals, a connection from the city to the southern town of Pavia. There used to be a whole network of waterways all over the region carrying boats and working as irrigation tools, all feeding into a circular route around Milan's medieval centre that acted as a kind of massive roundabout for boats. It was built over and turned into a road in the twenties, as were most of the other canals.

Today the main remainders are in the south west of the region, though they're no longer used as canals. There have been proposals to reactivate them as leisure facilities; indeed, now and then politicians promise to open up the culverts they're hidden in and restore them as open waterways. Nothing's happened so far.

Crossing the river I ended up in a knot of residential towers and buildings. As I walked towards my next station, Famagosta, I began to slowly acquire fellow travellers, like the Pied Piper. They were all dressed far more sensibly than me, off to serious jobs in Milan, lugging laptop bags and wearing ties. (Why are people still wearing ties in 2026? Throw them away!)

Famagosta is another fantastic interchange; multi-storey car park, bus terminal and metro station, all right next door to a motorway junction. Park and ride seems so easy here. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason why you'd drive into the centre of town.

If you were hoping for a radically different architectural style on the M2, I'm sorry. The red and green lines were planned at the same time, though the M2 opened five years later, and so they share a great deal of the same design elements. It does feel like there's been a slight honing of the plan; the ticket halls feel tighter, and the green line feels easier to get round. Or perhaps I was so used to the layout by now it had become second nature.

One interesting ("interesting") difference between the M1 and the M2 is that while the trains on the red line use the third rail, the green trains get their power from overhead lines.

The train rose up out of the tunnel and into the open air. The M2 is the only line that has overground sections and I don't like it. I didn't come all the way to Milan for surface railways. I have surface railways at home. I want tunnels and subterranean excitement. I want a Metro that sneaks along and drops you in a new, completely different place without you knowing how you got there. I don't want to see the next station in the distance.

This branch opened in 2011, another of those two-station extensions that Milan is so fond of. Being above ground, it's open and light, with a spacious ticket hall that was filled at that time of the day with busy young people.

This is not a busy young person.

The reason for all these people became clear when I got outside. This part of Lombardy has developed into a huge out of town development with offices, shops and residential towers all slotted in beside one another. It is, I have to say, astonishingly bland and forgettable. The district is still under construction and it's strange to walk round. It feels very American, very Milton Keynes, a leftover from that period in the 1970s when we were convinced that Los Angeles, with its miles of freeways and car parks and straight roads, was what we should be aiming for.

The central piazza was open and laid out with interesting paving, but I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to linger here, not even to eat their sandwiches at lunchtime. It was a void between the buildings. I took a couple of turns, knowing which direction I needed to go but not exactly how to get there, and followed a long ramp downwards. Halfway I realised it wasn't a pedestrian access at all, it was a service road, and I was descending behind the backs of the shops and the car parks and onto a strip of land between fire escapes.

Nothing about this said Italy. I could've been anywhere in Europe, the back of any mall or office complex. Thin grass had been laid out over the corners but desire paths crisscrossed them as people took the shortcut from their car to the McDonalds. A colossal Virgin Active gym was accompanied by a cinema, run by UCI, a brand that used to be familiar in the UK but was long ago merged into Odeon. They were boxy and unattractive.

I crossed in front a Carrefour so large it probably had its own weather system and skipped an exit from the nearby motorway. Pedestrians were meant to follow a carefully laid out route, but I had no need to wander deep into the car parks so I stuck to the verges. The buildings now were low 1980s business park chic, Dynasty-glass fronts done on the cheap.

All the pedestrians were going against me, walking from the station to their offices for the start of the day, formally dressed. It really could've been Bracknell or Swindon or any other lazy punchline town. It was generic and I was disappointed, as I always am when I travel hundreds of miles and encounter something that could be in England. Wow me with some exotica, Milan!

I climbed the stairs up to a long scifi tunnel. The Forum of the station name is an indoor sporting arena, the other side of the tracks; it was recently used as the host of the ice skating during the 2026 Winter Olympics. One end of the tunnel serves the arena, the other the business park.

It's naturally extremely like its brother at Milanofiori Nord. It's still another surface station though, so I'm not really bothered. Get me underground!

Red Sky At Night

2026-07-31T17:20:12.194+01:00

Spending the day up and down the M1 had exhausted me. I went back to my hotel and, after a shower, collapsed on the bed and napped. I'd wiped most of the red line away. The rest could wait for another time.

Except...

If I got up and went out, I could finish it off, and then the whole line was done in a single day. That'd be great, wouldn't it? I put on some clean clothes and went out into the city.

My hotel, the Nyx Milan, was across a piazza from Milano Centrale, but I decided not to use the underground to get to my next station, Lima. It was a simple walk across town and it had cooled down enough that it wasn't a nightmare going for a stroll. (Incidentally, I highly recommend looking for hipster hotels owned by large chains when you go to a strange city. The Nyx was full of bright colours and leopardprint and artwork like this:

They lowered the prices as a result, to try and attract the cool young things, but of course cool young things are staying in small boutique hotels or Air B&Bs. It meant that I got a very reasonably priced room in a fantastic location and all I had to do was try not to cringe myself inside out when I read the irritating copy on the menu).

The area round a large European rail terminal is rarely the high point of the city. There will be an impressive plaza out front, and some nice hotels, but if you go one street back you'll hit a dark underworld. Milan was no different. I was walking along roads built for a transient population. The restaurants were small and dirty, promising fast food and cheap prices and please don't look at how filthy the floor is. There were hostels, all with ridiculously grandiose names, the ones with two stars displaying them proudly like a child showing you it's done its poo in a potty this time. The other people on the street were either tourists like me, blithely strolling along to get somewhere prettier, or rough individuals with dark minds and pasts.

I was weirdly offended when a man in a doorway, stopping passers-by to offer them something in a whisper, looked right past me. Hey, I might look like a fat old man, but I might be cool! I might want some heroin! There's no harm in asking, is there?

Lima metro station is on the Corso Buenos Aires, one of the principal shopping districts of Milan. It specialises in the more down-to-earth purchases, unlike the madly expensive designer wear around the Duomo; this is where you or I would shop, where it's not eighteen hundred Euros for a plain white t-shirt.

Lima's position on a main shopping drag meant that its mezzanine retail outlets were in a healthier state than the slightly sad empty boxes I'd seen elsewhere on the line. There was even a bookstore, specialising in scientific texts and rarities.

The next station, Porto Venezia, is located in Milan's Gay District. See if you can spot how I knew this.

The rainbow decoration was actually put there by Netflix; they decorated the station for an advertising campaign in 2018 and the city liked it so much they left it there. It gave me the same warm, safe feeling I always get when I spot a rainbow flag out and about. This is where my people are; this is ok. If I'm in a strange place and I spot a bar with that flying over its door I know that's somewhere I can go. The rainbow flag isn't just a political statement, it's a signal.

I also love that the homos were the ones who made over a station. "The standardised look is fine, I guess, but couldn't we zhuzh it up a bit?"

I didn't actually go to any of the gay bars, by the way. I'm too old for all that now. Also, when you're an old married twat like me, you realise that the main appeal of a gay bar is meeting other homosexual gentlemen, and if you're not looking for that it's just a bar. There are bars everywhere. I realise this goes against all that stuff I put up there about them being havens but two things can be true at once; I like that the gay bars exist for me, I just don't necessarily need to use them. (This is, incidentally, one of a million reasons why the Lisbon in Liverpool is my favourite place to go; it's a pub first, a gay bar second, while still being massively homosexual).

The Porta Venezia was one of the traditional gates of Milan, a spot for defence and also custom checks. You can still see the outline of the city walls on maps of Milan, as a busy avenue has been built where it one stood, and in the original plans for the Metro there was going to be a circle line that followed it. I crossed over by the Tommy Hilfiger store - the retail establishments were about to take a massive swing upmarket - and onto the Corso Venezia.

That magnificent building is Milan's Natural History Museum. I realise this is deeply offensive to all of you reading this, but I didn't go to a single museum or historic building the whole time I was there. It was all metro, all the time. I'm so single minded about collecting stations everything else is irrelevant. My reasoning is that I can go back any time as a tourist, but this was my only chance to visit as an obsessive station nerd. That had to take priority.

Palestro, like all the stations in this post, was one of the originals, opening in 1964. The M1 hits all the main attractions of the city centre, sweeping through and out the other side, as though they were anxious they wouldn't get a second line and had to make sure it did a lot of work. (Although, strangely, it doesn't go to Centrale).

San Babila, however, is the crossover with one of the lines they did subsequently build: the M4. It means that what was once a simple station has been gifted an interchange, turning it into a hub.

The works for the new line gave the city an excuse to further pedestrianise large parts of the city centre, and the Piazza San Babila was almost doubled in size. I emerged into a clean, open square, surrounded by classy shops.

There was a large Lego store on the corner, with a bricky World Cup trophy in its window. I should note that, even though I was in Milan in the middle of the tournament, I barely knew it was on. Italy failed to qualify for the 2026 cup and the nation seemed to have taken a collective decision to pretend it wasn't happening. There weren't any rows of flag bunting outside bars, no winky tenuous tie ins in shops ("enjoy our football shaped sausage roll, not affiliated with any tournament currently running in North America"). The only places where it was represented were with global brands like Lego, where they had a corporate tie-in across the planet. It was quite lovely, actually. Next time there's a World Cup I might find a country who didn't get in and go there for the whole month.

I turned to find my next station and let out a tiny excited yelp. Venini Glass?

If you're a normal person, you might know Venini as a long-established, high-end producer of glassware. Based in Venice, they have stores in Milan, Genoa, Rome and Bologna, as well as in centres for luxurious living like Dubai and Hong Kong.

If you're not a normal person, if you are in fact a James Bond obsessive like me, then Venini means only one thing: the place where Hugo Drax makes the vials for his nerve gas, and which houses a museum of priceless glass antiquities that 007 absolutely destroys. This is in Moonraker, one of the finest pieces of cinema ever made. Snobs will tell you it's nonsense, but they are fools; Moonraker is two hours of pure pleasure. James Bond goes into SPACE! What's not to like?

I've only included this screengrab because it is fucking cool.

Of course that's the Venice store in the movie, not the one in front of me, but I was still thrilled. (Milan actually doesn't appear in any Bond films; the only mention of it is in For Your Eyes Only, set in Cortina, when doomed MI6 agent Ferrara says "I'll ring my office in Milan" for more information on Columbo. The Greek smuggler, not Peter Falk).

If the store had been open, I'd have obviously gone inside and recreated the fight scene by smashing up all the extremely expensive glassware while raising an ironic eyebrow, but alas, it was early evening, and it was closed. Shame.

I was heading for the Duomo, theoretically. Venini Glass had distracted me, and now I was walking along what turned out to be the wrong street. Being above the M4 it had been paved and benches and grass laid out to make it a pleasing place to wander. I saw a group of people eating together, and thought they'd brought a picnic, until I realised it was a soup kitchen and all the people eating were homeless. I'm quite thick sometimes.

I crossed over by San Bernardino alle Ossa, a church famous for having an ossuary; a chapel filled with skulls and bones. They're arranged in attractive displays and with artistic flourish, and I think if you are going to let yourself rot away, may as well do it in a charming nook in a historic church. Better than being buried forever to be forgotten. (I, personally, want to have an alkaline bath once I die, and then my soupy remains can be tipped into the sewers). The statue is of Pencho Slaveykov, a Bulgarian poet, and I cannot tell you how pleased I was that it was only his hand and knees and feet that had worn to a shine. In this day of "doing stuff for internet likes" I can quite conceive of people molesting him for TikTok views.

I paused in a Carrefour to get another bottle of water - they had a sign by the fridges, in three languages: if you need more cheese, please ask the cashier, which is an incredibly Italian thing to announce - and then back into the side streets in search of the Duomo.

There it was: I'd finally managed to locate one of the largest and most impressive cathedrals in Europe. Considering it is the literal centre of Milan, with streets radiating out of it, the fact that I'd failed to locate it was actually something of an achievement.

Just a pair of funny little guys, hanging out on the side of the cathedral. I followed the road then turned onto the piazza to take a look at it from the front.

I let out my second gasp of the evening. (Ok, I admit it; my gasp for Venini Glass was probably a little bit more excited). The Duomo, or to give it its full name, Cattedrale Metropolitana della Natività della Beata Vergine Maria, took six hundred years to build, only declared finished in 1965 (which means the Metro station with the same name opened a year before it was completed). It's an incredible piece of architecture, intricate and yet not overwhelming, every niche and tower decorated with some twist or statue.

The honey glow it had acquired from the late evening sun only added to its beauty. I'd be back in the piazza a few days later, when I collected the M3, but the memory I'll retain of the Duomo is that first glimpse. I stood and stared at it for a while, taking in the details, snapping photos, then I walked back through the crowds to the Metro station.

As the stop by the city's most famous attraction, as well as the interchange between two lines, Duomo is unsurprisingly one of its busiest stations. It also spreads further across the adjoining streets, with entrances dotted across different corners and roads. Inside, it got a makeover for the arrival of the M3 twenty five years after the M1 was built, and, combined with the neon glow of the new ticket barriers installed recently, it gives the ticket hall a wonderfully trippy air.

It's like Stanley Kubrick designed a metro station.

The hop to Cordusio was my shortest yet: the two stations are 340 metres apart. There's even a passageway connecting their mezzanines. Strict Merseytart Rules dictate that a train must be taken to or from the station, however, so even though it would've been quicker to walk, I rode there.

Piazza Cordusio is an oval crossing point at the foot of Via Dante, surrounded by shops and restaurants. Trams dinged their way past me to the nearby interchange. Opposite was an FAO Schwarz; I didn't even know they had branches, never mind one in Europe. A bit of digging taught me that the brand's gone under a couple of times, and is now owned by an anonymous corporation who've farmed the name out to department stores and the odd standalone. I also learned that the famous store on Fifth Avenue - which I've been to; I bought my brother a Star Wars toy from there (he was 19 at the time) - and which appeared in Big is long closed. It's now an Apple store, because joy is dead.

British cities are, in the main, Medieval, their streets evolving over centuries as a mishmash of closes and narrow lanes. An overly servile devotion to the wishes of landowners means that they rarely got replanned around new avenues and boulevards; Christopher Wren was famously thwarted in his scheme to redefine the City after the Great Fire. In Europe, however, the influence of, shall we say, dominant political leaders, means that comprehensive rebuilds of entire cities were possible. It means that a city like Milan can routinely offer up a long, impressive avenue that looks absolutely incredible on a summer's evening.

The Via Dante was built in the late 19th centuries and lined with mansion blocks. Each one was subject to strict specifications to ensure a conformity of style and shape, but a prize was offered to encourage architects to be brave with the decoration. Now it's a long pedestrian artery (although traffic used it until the 1990s) lined with restaurants. The street seating was filling up nicely and people perused the menus at their leisure. It was, admittedly, extremely touristy - one of the restaurants on offer was the Hard Rock Cafe - but that didn't stop it from being a wonderful place to saunter.

The terminus of Via Dante is the tower of the Castello Sforzesco, once the city's main defensive hub. The original plan was that the street would continue right through it - the castle had lost its purpose by the 19th century, and was seen as a blight to be demolished - but instead it was restored by the architect Luca Beltrami. He brought it back as a place of pride for the city, and converted the parade ground at the rear into an extensive parkland. I wandered around it towards the end of the week, and it's a beautiful spot to visit.

The fountain you can just about see there was lost to the construction of the Metro in the sixties; it wasn't restored until 1999.

(This post is really dragging on, isn't it? I should've made it two separate ones. I got bogged down in Moonraker. There's only three stations left though. We can make it through together.)

As a point where the M1 meets the M2, as well as the terminus for mainline railway services, Cadorna's got a larger and more impressively constructed ticket hall. The square outside has been covered with a glass roof, too, giving you a lovely place to loiter for your taxi.

It's a very Eighties-looking roof, which is odd, because it dates from the Millennium and the introduction of a direct line to Malpensa airport. I was finding this happening a lot, that the architectural style said a particular era to me and then it turned out to be a decade later. This roof screamed early Docklands Light Railway to me and here it was being Jubilee Line Extension vintage. It was as if Milan's transport authorities wanted to make sure it had got a good working out somewhere else before they'd approve its use here.

Darkness was really starting to creep in around the edges as I disappeared into the local streets. The theme here seemed to be "quiet wealth". The apartment blocks around me were heavy and ornate, discreetly exuding power and money. Through the glass entrance doors I glimpsed elegant courtyards and marble steps. Door buzzers were mounted on brass plates.

There were office blocks too, with subtle plaques confirming the presence of doctors or lawyers or architects. The kind of business that would have a walnut panelled waiting room and a receptionist who looked like she was doing this as a filler job between catwalks.

There were people walking about, women wrapped in shawls, men in casual suits, off for a meal at one of the restaurants tucked into a tree-lined avenue. A dad hauled his stroppy little girl along, whispering gently coaxing words, while she had a face like thunder.

The metro station was tucked underneath Piazza de Conciliazione, and I wondered how many times the people who lived round here actually used it. Still, the staff have to get here somehow, right?

Down the steps, down to the platform, the train filled with people off for a night out now, even though it was Sunday. The European mindset of the evening not beginning until nine pm at least.

Here it was then; the final stop for me on the M1: Pagano. Not the most auspicious of finish lines, if I'm honest.

Pagano's greatest asset is the large car park next door - something of a let down after the castles and cathedrals of its predecessors. Still, in the setting sun, even that acquired a certain charm.

One very hot sweaty day, but that was it: thirty eight stations crossed off, about a third of the entire network. I should have gone back down to get the train home but I decided on the scenic route.

Milan is crisscrossed with tram lines, mostly operated by ramshackle single cars that look like they haven't been updated for decades. I waited by the stop with a Spanish family, laden down with their shopping, for the number 10, which would take me right the way back to Milano Centrale.

Inside there was a warm wooden interior and a hard bench to sit on. It careened round the tracks, the driver seemingly believing that going as fast as possible between the stops was the key to getting about, with the pleasing ding of a bell whenever someone wanted a stop. The 10 tracked around the edge of the city centre, taking its time, and when I reached the terminus it had gone dark.

What a day. What a lot of journeys. What a lot of journeys still to come.

Red Heat

2026-07-25T13:20:24.604+01:00

I think of myself as a reasonable man of the world, one with a certain amount of cynicism and weariness about what goes on. Then something happens and I get a reminder that no, I am in fact a tiny naïf who probably shouldn't be allowed out on his own.

I was on the M1 headed across the city, and a man was stood beside me with his suitcase. He had neat, trimmed nails, apart from the little finger on his right hand, which I realised was a coke fingernail. I was scandalised. Was it 1976? Was I at Studio 54? This man was on public transport, where people could see him, with a clear indicator that he was a gentleman who used illicit substances. If I had been wearing pearls, I would absolutely have clutched them.

Reeling, I staggered off the train at the end of the line at Sesto 1º Maggio FS. I'd gone from Rho Fieramilano right to the opposite end of the M1; with two branches closed off, it was time to do the rest. The station was in something of a state. It's connected to a mainline station and that station has been completely demolished for a comprehensive rebuild. (The mainline station is called Sesto S. Giovanni, after the town itself; the metro station is named after the square outside).

This is part of a huge regeneration project currently underway. On the other side of the tracks there was once the Falck steelworks, which closed in the 1990s. After decades work is finally in progress to turn it into a new district planned by, of course, Foster & Partners. You can''t arrive at some manky old station for your new shiny development so the whole thing had to be reconstructed, this time by Renzo Piano, because there are only about six architecture firms in the whole world.

As with a lot of Italian public works projects, it's running late, to the extent that nobody seems very sure when it will be finished. Still, next to the M1 northern extension it's positively leaping ahead. That consists of two stations, one at Sesto Restello and a new terminus at Cinsello-Bettola. Approved in the early 2010s, the original idea was to have it up and running by the Milan Expo in 2015. Works didn't actually begin until 2014, so the opening date was put off for a bit. It now has a projected opening date of 2029, after multiple problems with the contractors lead to it having to be re-tendered - even though large portions of the stations were complete. You can see Cinsello-Bettola quite clearly on Google Earth, quietly rotting while it waits for new workmen to turn up.

The Milanese authorities have recently approved an eleven station extension of the M5, which should interchange at Cinsello-Bettola, so presumably the works will soon begin again. Let's hope they planned ahead when building what they did. so that a second line can be easily incorporated, otherwise they'll have to knock the whole thing down and start again.

The area around the station was a chaotic mess, not helped by the obvious difference in economies between Sesto and the rest of Milan. As in the UK, the closure of the steelworks hit the city hard, knocking wages and raising unemployment. The depression in living costs made the city attractive for immigrants, and quietly it shifted from being a staunchly trade union town to one that elected a right wing mayor.

Other industries have departed Sesto. Campari was once made in the town, and while the headquarters remains, the factory is now a museum. Being from Luton, I of course have a close personal relationship with Campari, as it's the drink that put us on the map - not necessarily the intent of the advert, but there you go.

I was disappointed to go to the Campari website and find an entire section about the brand's advertising history and its association with cinema and not a single mention of Lorraine Chase being wafted in from paradise. They try to be all sophisticated these days - Salma Hayek did an ad for them - but in Britain, if you ordered a Campari, at least one person in the bar will say "Luton Airport!". They probably won't pronounce the Ts, mind.

I've never actually had a Campari. It comes under the same category as Cinzano (another great advert of course) and Martini Rosso: drinks you wouldn't dream of ordering in a pub because you'll get called a poof. What you need is someone to have a sophisticated drinks cabinet from which you can sample various different aperitifs, but I don't have friends like that. You're lucky if you get milk in your tea with most of them.

I carried on, past the Campari factory and the Bar Campari, over a grid that went straight down to the M1; there was a slight breeze, but I didn't do the full Marilyn. Unlike in Milan, the shops in Sesto didn't seem keen to open for Sunday trading, not even the Carrefour. It left the streets feeling sleepy and empty.

A more pertinent explanation for the lack of activity was that it was midday and roasting hot and only mad dogs and Englishmen would be out in it. I imagined people peering over their balconies, watching me walk by and wondering what was wrong with me, then realising "aha. Inglese!"

I'd reached the centre of the town, as far as it seemed; a busy gyratory with shops surrounding it. I crossed the various arms with a large, slightly irate family, who didn't seem to want to be going anywhere and were complaining about it the whole time.

The Metro can sometimes be a cold, dark place to descend into. Passageways under the roads branch and branch again, leaving you disoriented, while corners conceal who knows what. The repeated audio messages to be aware of pickpockets don't help with the atmosphere. Every time I took the steps a part of me wondered what I would find, though I experienced no problems with crime or safety at all; a couple of beggars, the odd person pushing through the ticket barriers, the low level criminality you get in any big city.

Sesto Marelli was my third station in the city of Sesto, and another one that was a terminus for a while - in this case, between 1964 and 1986.

Though you wouldn't know to look at it today, Marelli had to be comprehensively rebuilt twenty years after the rest of the line following an arson attack in 1982. The "Offensive Proletarian Revolutionary Movement" set fire to the padded seats on a train that terminated here; it quickly spread and the entire station went up. This was when Sesto S. Giovanni was at its most lefty. It took only five months to have it up and running again.

It does remind you that Milan's commitment to a unified, standardised look for its stations, while great from a budgetary perspective, is a bit disappointing if you're an architecture fan. If there was an arson attack on a British railway station it would be rebuilt in a then contemporary style, and now it would be so gloriously 1980s you wouldn't be able to pass through without getting a whiff of hairspray.

I came out of the station onto another long, straight, road (wow it's almost as if the Romans were big around here or something). I was crossing from the city of Sesto into the city of Milan, and large signs warned me about a congestion charge coming into effect. The border was marked by a gleaming glass building, as though Milan wanted to underline how modern it was next to its rube neighbours, while beyond apartment blocks alternated with low stores and industrial blocks.

There was barely any shade. I clung to the right hand side of the street, where the walls and fences cast a small, half metre of darkness that could keep me cool. When I reached a car park, lined with trees, I was practically giddy; I walked under the branches, enjoying the respite, past a Mondo Mini Market which I imagine sold nothing but the bloodiest hunks of meat chopped by a man with a machete and a grunt.

From here on, the stations appeared with startling regularity, every half a kilometre or so. I'd barely have gathered my thoughts about the last one before the red M appeared on the horizon again.

Villa S.Giovanni made me feel about eight hundred years old. There was a photo booth in the ticket hall, and it advertised its wares with the slogan Foto Vintage! I realised that the concept of using a photo booth was like having a man with a big moustache making you stand still for five minutes while he hid under a blanket and fired a bolt of gunpowder. It was being sold as a trip back in time rather than anything practical.

Fortunately there was a far friendlier and more modern machine for me. These vending machines were scattered all along the M1, and they were an absolute god send for me. A couple of taps, the ding of my phone against the bar, and I had an ice cold drink in my hands. The BF and I share a credit card when we're abroad and he messaged me to query all the tiny amounts that were showing up on it, worried that it was one of those hacks where they take a few pence to test the water then hit you for five grand. I explained no, it was just that whenever I saw one of these, I bought myself another cooler. (Coke Zero, more often than not: number 32).

The system showing its age a bit there. The Metro is sixty-odd years old now, crafted largely out of concrete, and it's of a vintage where I imagine there are discussions about refurbishment throughout. The M2 was undergoing work as I was there, and they recently announced that the whole Cologno branch will close for a month so that work can be carried out on the concrete viaducts that carry it.

I had a precotto for dessert in a restaurant once. Like a set custard. Lovely.

More hot, steaming walking. My t-shirt was wet through; I looked like I'd been for a swim. Which wouldn't have been so bad if there were sweaty Italians as well, but apparently nobody else in Milan felt the heat, and they all wafted around in light separates looking refreshed and wholesome. Meanwhile, here I was, Jabba the Hutt, sidling up behind them on the train and leaving drips on the seats.

The street opened out into a wide triangle of parking and there was no escape from the merciless sun. I was sweating so much I was dehydrated; I'd drunk about eight litres of liquid over the course of the red line, and I hadn't so much as thought about urinating. When I finally got back to the hotel and forced some pee out it was thick and green. Every bit of water I poured into myself immediately came straight back out my sweat glands.

There was a plaque at Gorla commemorating a man named Renato Briano. Usually, in the UK, this is a tribute to a loyal railworker, or a victim of a terrible accident. Briano, on the other hand, was assassinated by members of the Red Brigades in 1980, which was a bit of a shock to discover. It's easy to forget that Europe in the 1970s was plagued by bombs and terrorists and assassinations on a large scale; that anarchists were detonating shopping centres and shooting politicians across the entire continent. The 21st century is nothing special for having terrorist attacks, it's just a different source.

Swipe my phone, through the barriers, steps, platform, train, platform, steps, through the barriers, back up to street level, and here was Turro.

I was seriously flagging now. I'd been out since 8am, remember, and the day had only got warmer and more brutal. I paused under some trees by the side of the road and guzzled an entire bottle of water in an extremely undignified fashion, until I spotted two teenage boys walk round the corner and approach me. I attempted to gain a look of decency so they wouldn't spot my flaws and beat me up, or worse, laugh.

None of the Viale Monza had been what you'd call exclusive. It was, essentially, a dual carriageway for getting traffic out of the city and off to the nearby regions. The homes and shops had been working class, functional, but now I was reaching the inner city. The graffiti became more frequent and more prominent, the litter ramped up, and the stores felt that little bit darker and less hospitable.

The presence of railway bridges didn't help. Nothing good happens under a railway bridge. They're noisy, dark spots for people to lurk in. I welcomed the brief moment of shade as I passed under, but couldn't help noticing the young woman seemingly hanging out there for no real reason. She was wearing a crop top and tight shorts and had a fan pointed at her face, and maybe she was just enjoying the respite from the sun too, but equally there was a chance she wasn't.

A second railway bridge - there are extensive depots round here, plus the approaches to Milano Centrale - and then another commemorative plaque: this time to the victims of a fire in a private cinema in 1983. A pair of neo-Nazis burned it down to demonstrate their superiority over the "unworthy," killing five patrons and a sixth person who was trying to help. The fact that it was a pornographic cinema lead to a level of stigmatisation of the victims, and the totem was put there forty years later in an attempt to mark that, yeah, they didn't actually deserve to die for watching a mucky movie.

The cinema is now an evangelical church. Personally I think a film showing pornos probably has a net better influence on society than organised religion but that might just be me.

What is there to say about Rovereto that couldn't equally apply to any of the other stations on the Viale Monza?

Pass.

Pasteur station is currently subject to discussion about getting a name change. People are concerned that commemorating the works of a great man who prevented the unnecessary death and illness of millions gives out the impression that pasteurized milk is something to be supported. It's going to be renamed RFK, and then everyone can drink poisoned milk and love it.

(It's not really, that was my feeble attempt at satire, but give it time.)

This was going to be my last stretch of the M1 for the time being, I decided. I needed to go somewhere there was air conditioning and lie down. Yes, there were still a load of stations to go, but they could wait. I'd get to Loreto and then go back to the hotel.

It was important to me to get to the Piazzale Loreto because that was a pivotal spot in Italy's World War II history. At the western end is the Monumento ai Martiri P.le Loreto - the Monument to the Martyrs of Loreto.

In 1944, during the occupation of Northern Italy, a German military truck was blown up, allegedly by the Italian Resistance. No Germans were killed - in fact the only casualties were six Milanese citizens - and subsequent investigations have suggested it was a deliberate false flag so they could crack down on the partisans. They did so in an extremely brutal fashion, taking fifteen resistance men from a prison and shooting them in the Piazzale Loreto at dawn on the 10th August 1944.

The bodies were left in the sun all day, guarded by the SS to ensure they weren't moved. Fascists were encouraged to defile them while passers by were forced to look at them. They were an example of what happened to resisters. (The leader of the shooting, by the way, then collaborated with the CIA and got a series of good jobs in the government of West Germany; he wasn't tried for the murders until 1999). The brutality actually had the opposite effect, scarring the minds of the people of Milan, and inciting further resistance.

The Piazza Loreto then became home to another display of corpses eight months later. On April 27th, 1945, Benito Mussolini was caught trying to escape Italy at Giulino di Mezzegra near Lake Como. He and his entourage were executed and their bodies sent to Milan. In an act of vengeance, the bodies were strung up for the public to abuse at the same spot the martyrs had been murdered: the corner of Viale Andrea Doria and Corso Buenos Aires on Piazza Loreto. There's no statue to mark that, as you'd expect, and the spot has been subsequently redeveloped. In fact, what's there now is... a McDonalds.

If I'd have been in a better state, I'd have gone in and had a special Anti-Fascist Big Mac with a side of Fuck You Mussolini Fries. Instead I headed straight for Loreto station, one of the most important on the network as the interchange between the M1 and M2.

Loreto's had a slight makeover compared to its brethren on the M1; it's lost the rubber floor and acquired a zig-zag light feature that brings a welcome dash of colour to the ceiling.

I descended to the M2, the lower of the levels, for my train home. The rest of the line could wait. I needed a shower.

Red Rover

2026-07-22T20:32:26.043+01:00

QT8 is a very strange name for a metro station. You don't get many stations that are abbreviations. You instinctively want to run it together to form words: cutie-eight. And now I'm thinking of when John Gardner introduced an assistant to Major Boothroyd in his Bond novels and nicknamed her Q'ute. Those early Gardner novels were weird. They uncomfortably straddled Ian Fleming seriousness with Roger Moore insanity - I'll just say one breasted woman eaten by giant snakes. If you know, you know.

QT8 actually stands for Quartiere Triennale Ottava. It was a district constructed as part of the eighth Milanese Triennial, an art and architecture festival that has run every three years (on and off) for a century. The idea, lead by a planner named Pierre Bottoni, was to build an "ideal" district - a showcase development of the future. They drew ideas from all over the world, particularly the English Garden City movement, and built a district on the edge of the city that was full of greenery, with smaller blocks of apartments and a break from the rigid street plans found elsewhere in Milan. The buildings were also prefabs, to accommodate the post-war need for homes.

I came out of the station behind a gaggle of excitable Sri Lankans lugging cricket equipment. I personally thought one of the advantages of moving to Continental Europe would be never having to deal with cricket, the world's most boring sport. It's like moving to London and still playing American Football; you don't have to do that now, you can play a proper sport that isn't eight parts ridiculous. Cricket takes entire weeks and no sport should ever last that long. This is why the Olympics is so great; the entire Games last a fortnight and there are a million different events you can flick between to satiate your limited attention span. I guess you can drink a keg of beer at a cricket ground and nobody minds, but these gentlemen seemed to have only athletic equipment.

I'd left the station outside the Church of Santa Maria Nascente, an unusual circular building. I was hoping to hear the strains of a Latin Mass floating outside but there was nothing. Being in Italy on a Sunday morning had filled me with aspirations of seeing parades of black clad widows headed to church but there was nothing of the sort; like many cities Milan is deeply secular these days.

The greenery around the wide avenues was welcome. I'd gone only one stop from Lotto but it felt like an entirely different city. There's a man-made hill here, Monte Stella, constructed out of the rubble left over from the war (Milan is weirdly flat, with very few even mild hillocks, and there's not a massive river in the centre either; it makes you wonder why people set up a city here in the first place). Monte Stella is the green heart of QT8, with the homes circling it and its slopes given to all kinds of leisure activities - this was no doubt where my cricketing companions were headed.

I paused to refill my water bottle at one of the free water fountains that are scattered throughout the city. The spigots are shaped like a fish, and have a neat little trick; if you block the flow with your thumb, it shoots out a hole in the top of the head, making it easier to drink from directly. These fountains would be literal life savers over the next few days, popping up on street corners and in piazzas to allow me to rehydrate and wipe away some of the sweat. And once again - this is free for everyone.

I was sauntering now, strolling under the canopies, enjoying the morning. Joggers went by, somehow looking more refreshed than me even though they'd been actually running. A school named after Martin Luther King appeared to my right, I Have A Dream painted across its front, while a random fence post had been topped by a tin of Tennents Lager, an unexpected bit of Scottish litter in the middle of Lombardy.

I crossed a hefty road junction and found my way towards Lampugnano station. It was constructed as a park and ride, with a hefty multi-storey attached, and at its base is a bus station which is home to FlixBus and a lot of other long-distance coach services. (Where the hell did FlixBus come from, by the way? I swear I'd never heard of them a decade ago and now not a single contestant on Race Across The World can go anywhere on the continent with it being on a bright green single decker).

The net result of this is that ATM don't really expect anyone to walk up to Lampugnano; they're all interchanging between various means of transport. It meant I was dodging moving vehicles and crossing bus lanes to try and reach the station.

When I got there though, I had a surprise: a station building! Every stop so far had been a hole in the ground - this was the first time the Metro had an actual street presence. I dashed over, avoiding the homeless man asleep on the bench and the various people idling about - possibly for a bus, possibly for more nefarious reasons - and took my photo.

The presence of an above-ground ticket hall didn't induce a sudden rush of architectural magnificence, however. It was a concrete box with a little bit of natural light.

It reminded me of some of the stations towards the end of the Green Line on Stockholm's Tunnelbana, the ones built in the fifties to serve brand new estates on the edge of the city. Lampugnano was opened in 1980, however, so instead of it feeling like an architect embracing a modern construction method to make a statement, it smacked of "this is cheap".

I'm personally not a fan of trains - as I've always said, I like railway stations, not railways - but I know some of you are so here you go: a video of an M1 train arriving. Please don't ask me what class it is because I have no idea. (Equally, please don't tell me).

One hop on and I was at the next station: Uruguay, or, as my brain pronounces it thanks to Homer Simpson, U R Gay. Which would make standing under it and taking a picture kind of a burn if I wasn't, you know, gay as a window.

I rose up into a wide stretch of parkland between two roads, surrounded by apartment blocks and well-used. Children yelped in the playgrounds. People much fitter than me played sports.

By a bus layby was a water house, a supersized version of the water pump I'd used earlier that dispensed still and sparkling water. Two old ladies were stood beside it with shopping bags packed with empty bottles, filling each one in turn; I silently disapproved, but apparently part of the purpose of the water house is to reduce people using plastic bottles so I guess they were being eco friendly. It still felt a little like they were taking the piss.

The blunt bulk of the Bonola shopping centre loomed up ahead of me, and I followed its flank in search of a way in. I was out of luck. There didn't seem to be a pedestrian entrance at all. Eventually I gave up and walked through the car park underneath to a sloped travelator.

I wasn't here to shop. I was here to have a few moments of blessed air conditioning. I thought that, perhaps, I might have a coffee and a small snack, if I could find somewhere suitably middle-market for me. I wanted a corporate chain of some sort, somewhere I could be anonymous and hide away and not have to be confronted by waiters or tipping or speaking too much English to bewildered Italians. I wanted an Italian Greggs, basically, where I could buy something pastry and slip away. I was out of luck, however, as everywhere seemed far too classy for me, far too "eatery".

I'm not saying that the Bonola was an exclusive mall, by any means; quite the opposite in fact. I just mean that what it had was still overwhelming to me. I am chronically afflicted with shyness, with awkwardness and anxiety, with a fear of doing or saying the wrong thing. I don't have the confidence to pull up a chair and get waited on, to order a single coffee and a croissant, to casually cast down a few coins to clear my bill and wander off. I need the regimented world of customer-shopkeeper, an exchange of goods for money, then I can go. I was soon headed to the exit, back down to road level, without so much as a Coke passing my lips.

Incidentally, on entering the mall I was confronted by a large sign telling me that photography was strictly prohibited inside, so please enjoy all three pictures I took inside, to stick it to The Man. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of the lady who came up the opposite walkway moments later who was wearing a Fido Dido t-shirt and made me think I had somehow slipped into a wormhole back to 1991.

Bonola station was located through a couple of underpasses decorated with graffiti and gentlemen of the road. It gave me another above ground building, and I want you to cast my mind back to where I complained about how dull Lampugnano was. How I thought it could do better. Well, Bonola was trying for something.

I didn't expect that something to be bright blue paint all over it. I'm not sure about the mindset here. I mean, it's not attractive, so we can rule that out immediately. It's not tied to the corporate appearance of the line, because, as we've seen, the M1 is a bold red. I could only think that the blue was some kind of special anti-spraypaint coating to put off the local "artists". Perhaps it was more of a psychological barrier, with nobody locally wanting to post their tag on such a hideous background.

Inside they'd made a valiant effort at a bit of a feature with circular rooflights. Unfortunately, ATM had missed that you need to keep those features clean and well-maintained, otherwise you're drawing people's eyes to a mess.

That's not a skylight, it's an angry sun about to go nova.

Long-time readers (hello you!) will know of my fondness for a station clock. The Milan Metro has an example in most of its ticket halls, and it's a good one: sturdy, clear, and always showing the correct time.

I was at San Leonardo, which was the terminus of this branch of the M1 between 1980 and 1986. Its station building has not been blighted with blue paint.

In fact, that was the first surface building that looked like it was in a good place.

The sun was baking down now, burning at the streets and hapless English bloggers who didn't really take in how going to Italy in a July heatwave would fundamentally alter their body chemistry. Everything about me was wet and clammy. Everything was moist.

Still, I did finally get to see my devoted Italian parishioners, as the church that gives the station its name had reached chucking out time (I don't think that's the correct theological term). Groups of elderly people made their way slowly out of the front door and dispersed to the surrounding homes. I don't think there was anyone under the age of fifty, which doesn't bode well for the future of the Catholic church.

Molino Dorino - the next station, and not, as you may think from that name, an adorable mouse in a children's cartoon - was built as a single station extension in 1986. It was hard not to imagine the Milanese authorities didn't so much plan metro extensions, more come up with them on the fly when they realised they had some money left over. "Turns out we got more council tax than usual this year, fellas - shall we build a bit of underground railway?"

The real reason for the extension was to get another park and ride on the map. Molino Dorino is nestled in the corner of a major road junction and has been gifted with a car park that looks like a modern fortress, turrets and towers overlooking the roundabout as you approach. There's another bus exchange here, and the metro station building is... oh dear.

It just doesn't work. It's horrible! Leave it bare, for goodness' sake. Anything to distract from this sky blue abomination.

It's a lot better on the inside, though it suffers from an overabundance of empty shops. I can see why they'd have built it with a mini-mall inside, what with all those bus customers too, but now it looks sad. ATM have recently signed a deal to regenerate their commercial spaces, handing them over to a private company to try and get some life into them. It's a shame they couldn't do it themselves but it's not hard to see what needs to be done. People don't buy newspapers any more, they don't smoke, they bring a bottle of water from home; the on-the-go facilities that would've traditionally filled the mezzanines are all dying off.

Pero station brought something truly shocking. At the track level, every station on the M1 looks more or less the same. A central tunnel - usually with pillars dividing the two directions - and platforms on either side. It's so standard I've had problems differentiating between the pictures I've taken, having to zoom in to the name to make sure I don't stick a Gambara in the Wagner section by mistake.

Pero gave me an island platform.

Perhaps heat stroke was setting in but I found this far too thrilling. It's not a true island - the escalators and stairs are all in walled off sections behind it, leaving only passageways to access the southbound tube - but still, the variation was welcome.

Above ground Pero had another pleasing sight - a small head house for the escalators and stairs. This shift in architectural style is probably due to it being constructed in 2005, long after the rest of the line (it's the newest station on the M1, for the time being). Putting the entrance in a dedicated building at the centre of a small piazza feels like a far more 21st century way of building a Metro station.

I was now forced to go back down underground for another train, something I hate doing unless it's really necessary. Unfortunately the final station on this branch wasn't constructed for people to walk to at all.

Rho Fieramilano serves the huge exhibition centres of the same name, a complex surrounded (like the NEC in the UK) with motorways and industry. Milan is extremely keen on its exhibition centres; I've never known anything like it. They've hosted the World Expo twice (in 1906 and 2015) and both the red and green lines terminate at complexes of boxes for exhibitions. Fieramilano, meanwhile, is the modern replacement for a centre in the city itself, bits of which are still in use.

I've never been to a trade exhibition in my life so I'm not really sure what they involve, but surely they're not that frequent and busy? There are twenty pavilions at Fieramilano so clearly they're getting a lot of use. I began to think about all the industries that must turn up there to look at booths covered in inventions, clusters of dental hygienists and plasterers and psychotherapists all gathering in breakout groups to hear the newest innovations.

It also made me think about Expos. The Wikipedia page for "World's Fairs" shows that, after the Brits invented them with the Great Exhibition, we hosted one more in 1862 then decided we couldn't be bothered any more. It's strange that the UK has absolutely no appetite for hosting this multinational event ever again - as far as I'm aware we don't even bid for it. You'd have thought somewhere like Manchester or Glasgow would be all over that to bolster their credentials as an international city.

I went through the glass topped ticket hall - which, in the July heat, was like a greenhouse; it's lucky Italy isn't a country that gets hot very often, eh readers? - and emerged above ground. I'd not gone to the exhibition centres themselves but had instead looked for a pedestrian entrance, the one that is theoretically for people not attending a convention.

I may as well have been on the surface of the moon. Long expanses of concrete with footpaths nobody used. Bridges carried conventioneers around on air conditioned, traffic free routes, while us peasants hunkered by their little staircase into the underworld.

I'd gone from an idealistic version of city life to its dystopian cousin. It could only get better after this.

Red Route

2026-07-18T15:55:23.205+01:00

The Milan Metro has five lines named, understandably, the M1, M2, M3, M4 and M5. I decided to tackle them in order, because of course I did, so early on a Sunday morning I boarded an M1 train to its southwestern terminus: Bisceglie.

That's the terminus for the time being. Milan has the habit of extending its metro in dribs and drabs, a couple of stations here, three more there, and as we'll see these extensions don't always go to plan. Earlier this year a three kilometre extension to Olmi was approved from Bisceglie, with new stations there and at Parri and Baggio.

I walked up the steps to the exit behind three excitable teenage boys lugging large, oddly shaped bags. One of them had his on a trolley, which made me think they might be golfers, but up top all became clear. Bisceglie has a bus terminus built above it and there was a coach waiting for the boys and their mates. It seemed they were members of a youth orchestra of some sort, and the bus station was swarming with kids clutching their instruments. It was all pleasingly wholesome: a load of enthusiastic youths off on a Sunday morning to bash their way through Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

I let the boys get ahead a respectable distance then hovered on the steps to take the sign pic.

They don't get any better just because I'm abroad, folks. And yes, I'm wearing a hat. The July sun in Milan was absolutely merciless and when you're blessed with a Tefal Head like me, certain protection needs to be taken. I do appreciate that it gives me a vague air of "background drinker in the Rovers circa 1976" but I am far too old to wear a baseball cap and if I wore a straw trilby I would almost certainly get beaten up. And with good cause.

I walked along the wide avenue towards my next station with a broad grin on my face. This is where I can be at my happiest: indulging my strange little hobby in a new city, knowing I had dozens of underground stations ahead of me. This is the dream for me. I could do this forever, working my way from metro to metro, then going back to the start to see what's changed.

Half-eight on a Sunday morning isn't exactly the time to experience Milan's vibrant personality but that was fine with me. I was happy strolling down a wide boulevard, shaded by trees in the courtyards of neat apartment blocks, watching cars and trucks roll towards the city.

All too soon, I'd reached my second station. The Milan Metro isn't big on surface buildings. The majority of its stops are reached via staircases at the side of the road going down to a ticket hall built below the surface.

There was a wait of a few minutes for the next train and I watched one arrive at the opposite platform. As you'd expect for the Continent, Italian trains drive on the right; this fact absolutely refused to log in my brain and I'd spend the next few days being surprised when a train appeared in the tunnel behind me. I may not be the cleverest person around.

Primaticcio was the next stop, constructed underneath a road junction with exits at each branch. As you'd expect, I immediately walked out of the wrong exit, and had to cross the road to get to where I actually wanted to be.

I slid onto a back street here, one cooler and more shaded, where the apartment blocks hugged the pavement and hosted small businesses at their base. A gay couple emerged from one of them, carrying light bags that looked like a picnic in waiting, and took off in their small car with a rev of the engine.

There was a curious building on one corner; a little bit of internet searching claims it's a synagogue, but there was no signage saying so. Unless this is sadly how Jewish people have to be in 2026, concealing where they worship.

A woman with a tiny dog passed, getting its walk in before the day turned roasting, and I advanced on the station at Bande Nere. Is it just me or does that sound like the hero of a Spaghetti Western? "Quake with fear, banditos, for Bande Nere is here!" And then his horse would rise up on its back legs and a load of dodgy ethnic stereotypes would scatter.

I will say that the positioning of the station signs is a bit of a problem. You only get the name of the station on the staircase going underground, which meant every time I stopped for a sign selfie, I had to pause halfway down and whip out the camera. Fine when it's a quiet suburban stop, not so great when I got to the busy inner city. There were a multitude of strange looks caught in the background as the days wore on.

Bloody hell I look awful. The hat makes me look even more of a dweeb than usual.

At platform level, Bande Nere was much the same as the previous three stations. Milan's station architecture is not awe-inspiring and unique. The lines were built with value in mind, so the design elements are pretty uniform; two side platforms, columns between the tracks, cladding on the walls. You get there via a staircase and, sometimes, an escalator, though that more often than not is up only. There are exceptions - and they were extremely welcome when they came - but each line's format is repeated endlessly along their lengths.

Case in point: at Gambara the cladding stopped being lime green and became this pink and grey speckle. Gambara was the terminus of this branch, opening in 1966; the stations as far as Inganni then opened in 1975, with Bisceglie opening in 1990. The change of the cladding is the only hint that there was any gap between the openings, like rings on a tree telling you its age.

The mezzanine areas were built to house commercial properties, and some of them still house one or two - usually a newsagent-cum-snack shop-cum-tobacconist-cum-ticket office. Most of the retail space is a bit sad, however, the windows covered with ATM logos and up for rent.

Let's see if I can manage a half-decent selfie?

Nope.

The Piazza Gambara lead me onto a diagonal route to my next station. I was taken with a grand looking building on one side of the road which I assumed was a museum of some sort; it actually turned out to be a historic nursing home for the elderly, the Pio Albergo Trivulzio. It's existed for centuries as an alms house, providing care for the poor, and the painter Angelo Morbelli did a great number of artworks of the interiors and the people within. Apparently he was fascinated by the place; these days you'd get called a pervert if you turned up at the door of a nursing home and asked to study the residents.

More apartment blocks, six or seven stories high, a variety of styles and eras but all with balconies and outdoor spaces. I kept looking up at the terraces, hoping to see a louche Italian enjoying one of those tiny coffees, but it was still too early. It's a skill how they manage to have a single shot of pure caffeine served in a thimble and yet it still takes them half an hour to drink it; if they were in a Starbucks an employee would push them out with a broom to clear the table for someone drinking something heftier.

At De Angeli, the street cleaners were out with their trash bags and grabbers, picking up litter from the flowerbeds. The fact that there was a group of them, all in hi-viz, makes me think they may actually have been doing community service, but it was still nice to see.

Appropriately at De Angeli a heavenly light shone down and obscured the sign.

Wagner, my next station, is the last on the Bisceglie branch. I'd already completed one spur of the M1 and it had taken less than an hour. At this rate I'd have done all five lines by Wednesday and I'd be able to go out to Lake Como and relax with George and Amal Clooney for the rest of the week.

Instead of continuing towards Pagano station and the city centre proper, I decided to cut across to the other branch at Buonarroti. The two stations are barely 300 metres apart, at either end of a straight road; you can't deny that the Milan Metro gives you convenience.

It was gone nine am now, and the city was beginning to wake up. Restaurateurs were raising shutters and turning over chairs on outdoor seating. Doors were being propped open to allow a breeze in. There weren't many actual customers, not yet, but you could feel the life slowly seeping into the piazzas and pavements.

The Buonarotti of the station name is Michelangelo Buonarotti, better known to us English speakers as the Michelangelo, of David and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fame. There's something quite sweet about Milan insisting on his formal name for the piazza, like he's being scolded by his mum. The statue at its centre, however, isn't of Michelangelo at all, but is instead of Giuseppe Verdi. He looks very casual, hands behind his back and jacket pulled away.

The Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, which the statue looks at, was founded as another retirement centre for musicians and opera singers by Verdi himself. His tomb is inside and it continues to give a home for divas in their declining years. I wouldn't fancy giving those ladies a substandard lunch, I'll say that much; even in their 90s I bet they can throw a grade A hissy fit.

From Buonarroti to Amendola, and a surprise. The station originally opened as Fiera, because of its proximity to Milan's Exhibition Centres, and so it was built to accommodate crowds. The ticket hall was put under a plaza and given a large multicoloured roof.

Ok, it could do with a bit of a clean, but it was incredible how much the daylight lifted the ambience of the space. With black walls and black rubber floors, the stations on the M1 can seem particularly dark, with only the red of the line theme as a contrast.

There's also a large statue in the square by the station, called Ragno agonizzante, which translates as "Spider in Agony". And yes, it does look a bit like a dead spider, one of those desiccated ones you find curled under the sofa when you move it to hoover. Why you'd want to have a piece of artwork representing this in your city is another matter.

I walked along the Via Monte Rosa, a mix of brand new office buildings and older apartments. Graffiti for a gang of football "ultras" - rebranded hooligans - carried the number 1312, which I have learned is code for ACAB. There was a branch of Popeyes, which irritated me; I accept that British people have terrible taste in food and will accept any American nonsense that gets pushed our way, but you think the Europeans have a bit more class.

Further up there were some soldiers by the side of the road, prepping for the day ahead. I'd already spotted a gaggle of them outside Milan Central when I arrived the day before. It seemed that they were being deployed at crowded parts of the city, presumably to reassure us that if a terrorist were to attack, he'd be swiftly shot by one of the nation's soldiers. I'll admit I hadn't even considered that I might be murdered by a lunatic until the presence of the army raised the idea.

Now I don't want to disparage the soldiers of the Italian army and their no-doubt fine history of bravery and combat. I'm not going to peddle tired stereotypes about them being lazy and perhaps less disciplined than their contemporaries elsewhere. I'm sure they've been in many conflicts over the years, and I'm sure they've won some of them. I will, however, note that these soldiers in particular had gathered round a fan to cool themselves, and I'm not sure you'd get away with that sort of behaviour if you was a British soldier in, say, Afghanistan. It didn't exactly scream "fearsome killing machines".

Piazza Lorenzo Lotto is a square that has existed at the centre of Milan's leisure activities for decades. The fiera was close by, the city's racecourse abutted it, and on its northern edge was something I really wanted to see: Milan's Lido.

Opened in 1931, it still houses the largest swimming pool in the city, along with other sports facilities. I love a lido. Every town should have one, especially if you can put a lid on it in winter for ice skating. Swimming is so much more pleasurable when it's under a blue sky, and with global warming, you don't even have to heat the water. A rare upside to the death of the planet!

The Lido di Milano is, however, in a bit of a parlous state. It closed for refurbishment in 2019 and since then work has been fitful. It begins, it stops, it begins again; the completion date has slipped from 2023 to, possibly, the end of this year, though nobody seems very hopeful it will actually happen. In fairness, it is a large job, with additional facilities being added to turn it into more of a multi-use sports facility, but that still doesn't explain the hikes in costs and the sheer length of time being taken.

I skirted the edge of the piazza, heading back to the metro station entrance. This was made more complicated by the roads being churned up as the city installed a dedicated trolleybus lane through the centre of the square and down the middle of the adjoining roads. Eventually I made it to the entrance on Via Monte Rosa, having done an entire 360 degree circuit.

As with Amendola, Lotto was built for the crowds, and below ground it was expansive. On a quiet Sunday it all seemed over the top.

Lotto also gave us our first interchange on the M1, to the M5 line. The original three metro lines meet in the heart of the city, but the twenty-first century additions skirt it to the north and south, providing bypasses and alternative places to change.

I was going to continue with the rest of the Rho branch, but I think both you and I need a rest at this point before this turns into a slightly more boring War and Peace. Come back another time for more pointless perambulation. I can't promise you it'll be interesting, but it will at least be thorough.

Ciao Bella!

2026-07-14T14:55:13.503+01:00

For the past few years I've been lucky enough to travel to a large European city to visit all the stations on their metro. It started with Amsterdam, then there was Stockholm, and last year it was Helsinki.

This year, I planned on it being Hamburg. I started reading about it, bought a book, and then I thought: isn't Hamburg a variation on Amsterdam/Stockholm/Helsinki? Another large Northern European port? Aren't you repeating yourself?

I cast my net across the continent a little wider. For monetary reasons, it had to be somewhere not too far - my dreams of visiting Baku's Metro were sadly put to one side. It had to be big enough to get my interest - out went Thessaloniki - but small enough to collect in a week - that ruled out Barcelona. I'd really rather not get killed while visiting it too, so sadly that was the end of Kyiv or Moscow. It'd also help if it wasn't in the middle of a major extension, too, so I wouldn't feel like I'd missed out on something, so Lisbon will have to wait for another year.

I finally came to a decision. I was going to... Milan.

First opened in 1964, the Milan Metro has 125 stations spread over five lines, the newest of which opened only last year. Actually the official map above is a little busy because it includes the S lines, suburban rail routes that pass through the city in a tunnel. Wikipedia has a much clearer version with only the metro stations on it.

That's manageable, I thought. I broke out the Excel spreadsheet and worked it out. It was more than manageable. It looked like fun.

So there was the task: one week, five lines, travel around the network and hopefully don't get burnt to a crisp by the roasting Italian sun. It was exhausting, sweaty work, but I'm happy to tell you I did it. In fact I'll tell you exactly how in a series of long and tedious blog posts over the next few weeks. Sorry about that.

Dock Tales

2026-06-17T22:54:29.197+01:00

You might come to this blog for many reasons. The trains. The photos. My witty repartee. If you come here to admire the scenic beauty of England, then I'm afraid this post is not for you. Outside Birkenhead North station is a vast hinterland of abandoned docks and industrial units. This is the back streets, the abandoned parts, the leftovers of Britain. And here I was walking through it.

For once, I was in familiar territory. This bit of the Wirral is familiar to me because it's the location of the Bidston Recycling Centre, the peninsula's number one spot for getting rid of rubbish, and as the owner of an awful lot of rubbish, I've been here a fair few times. Many's the afternoon I've trudged back and forth with arms full of wood or broken tiles or, on one particularly sad day, boxes of VHS video tapes that nobody else wanted.

It lends a certain piquant aroma to the surrounding area, particularly on a hot day in June, and there's no real way to disguise it. Still, it could be worse; for many decades, the tip was simply the Bidston Dock, and rubbish was poured into it without any consideration to separating your paper from your food waste. The pile has now been grassed over to form a hillock and nature reserve - one that has carefully placed stink pipes scattered around to let out the methane.

Crossing a bridge that wasn't really necessary any more, I reached a building site. Piles of rubble and metal were being shifted from side to side. This will soon be a David Lloyd Health Club, boasting the largest padel facility on the Wirral, indoor sports courts and a cafe. It'll also boast an open air swimming pool, with the CGI images showing sun loungers scattered around the edge like a Benidorm getaway. Remember a few sentences back when I was talking about the smell coming from the tip? Yeah.

I managed to get over the busy dual carriageway - one gentleman stopped his car and waved me across, which was good of him. The flowers here are a tribute to PC Dave Phillips, who was killed here by a car thief as he tried to deploy a stinger in 2015. I went up the steep hill, towards the district of Poulton, past a working men's club and a church with an open door inviting you into their cafe.

For decades there was another railway station in a cutting here: Liscard and Poulton. Opened in 1895, it was the only interim stop on a branch line to the ferry terminal at Seacombe, and as such had an important role getting Liverpool commuters across the river. It was never incredibly successful, however, and when the rest of the Wirral Railway was electrified in 1938, the branch was left powered by steam. That decision hung a noose over the branch which wasn't finally tightened until 1960, when the whole route was closed and the tracks lifted.

The deep cutting was instead repurposed into a far more twentieth century route - the approach road for the brand new tunnel under the Mersey, the Kingsway. Nothing remains of the station as a result. There would've been an island platform where the central reservation is now, and the booking hall has been replaced with an electrical substation. If you squint you can just about see the slope on the right hand side of the road that was where access was, but you have to use your imagination.

The only indication that there was ever a railway here is in the street running alongside, which is still called Station Road.

I crossed back over Mill Lane and followed a bendy avenue that paralleled the tunnel approach. A woman in a pink tracksuit unplugged her electric car from the public charger built into a lamppost; across the way, a group stood on the doorstep of a house, laughing and gossiping. A small side road had the unusual name of Paula's Way - I've not been able to find out exactly who Paula was - and then there was a wide road with stores that seemed to have escaped from another era. The credit union was alongside a sewing store and a supplier of fruit machines; even the paper shop still had a sign for the Daily Post, which hasn't been published since 2013.

A footbridge takes you back over the motorway here, and I've always been fascinated by it when I passed underneath because someone has decided to paint it in the Merseytravel colours. There's absolutely no need for it to be in grey and yellow, but there it is, and I enjoy it. I walked over, keeping my eyes averted from the speeding vehicles below, instead taking in the many black stickers plugging a men's hairdresser in town. Their use of the phrase English Barber had a vague dogwhistle to it.

A row of Victorian terraces now descended back towards the dock, with huge storage tanks providing the full stop at the bottom. Most of the houses had venetian blinds or a thin film stuck to the glass to stop prying eyes, though a couple were old school with net curtains. On the corner, an abandoned toilet sat alongside the wheely bins, vaguely hoping a kind dustman would cart it off for them.

I turned to the side, where a pub had been converted into a pair of houses, and down a one way road augmented with a chicane of kerbs to slow joyriders. The pedestrian entrance to a recreation park was crowned with piles of fly tipped rubbish; bits of plywood, black bags, an upside-down pushchair. I'll remind you that ten paragraphs ago I was talking about a massive recycling centre that would've happily accepted all that, but I guess it's simply too difficult for some people to give a shit.

I was on the Dock Road now, an unlovely stretch of tarmac between yards and garages. Anonymous business units surrounded by parking sit opposite tyre centres and scaffolding. Some of that has been swept away for a new grey building, angled in the middle to follow the dock, which will form the new HQ for an MDF manufacturing plant. It's still unfinished and looks far too clean and pristine amongst the rest of the grimy units.

Round another corner, and I was confronted with the new face of the docks. It's been nearly twenty years since Wirral Waters was unveiled to the public, an ambitious plan by Peel to fill the land round here with skyscrapers and businesses and turn it into a glistening Dubai on the Mersey. You'll be unsurprised to learn that literally none of that ambitious plan has actually happened; in fact, Peel's complete lack of activity has been the cause of raised eyebrows, with some accusing them of land banking. Where the Dock Road meets Duke Street, however, there is an actual sign of progress.

Miller's Quay is a development of six brightly coloured apartment blocks that wouldn't look out of place on a dockside in Frankfurt or Amsterdam. They're a bright, bold statement of intent, a big show of investment, and even better they've been completely occupied since almost the first moment they opened. There have been a few teething problems - parking was a problem for a while, with many residents preferring to leave their cars on the street rather than pay the fees, until double yellow lines were laid down - but it's a remarkable success. They're even getting their own Sainsbury's, a little grey and orange blob now under construction, which is a canary in a coal mine of gentrification.

I wasn't sure whether the public realm around the towers was public after all. The signage was vague, and in 2026, you kind of expect anywhere nice to be patrolled by stern-faced security men intent on kicking you out. I walked between two of the buildings boldly, as if I had a right to be there, and found a lovely little promenade on the waterside with plenty of benches and planting.

I'm not one hundred percent certain I was meant to be there, but I had a nice little stroll and nobody leapt out to demand to see my papers. Next to Miller's Quay, however, there's a large plot of undeveloped land; it was marked for an apartment block for over 55s, but the delivery partner pulled out. I wouldn't want to be a pensioner round here - as I said, it was only just getting a supermarket, and there are no buses along the Dock Road except for, bafflingly, the N1 night bus when it passes through the new tunnel on the way to Birkenhead Bus Station. I can't imagine there being many old dears who've much need for a bus at four in the morning.

The footpath has been upgraded along this side of the road to full luxurious dockside living, though on the other, its's still a strip of grey tarmac beside factories. It was a strange, schizophrenic place, working and living coinciding; I doubted that many of the people on the fourth floor of Miller's Quay finished their cappuccinos on the balcony then wandered over for a shift at the skip hire place across the road.

The East Float apartments were the first to be redeveloped into residential in the docks and for years they've stood on their own, isolated, the home of pioneers who gambled that they were buying into the new Albert Dock or Canary Wharf. Beside them are some interesting red modular homes built by Urban Splash; there was meant to be an apartment block behind, but the division that built houses went into liquidation. Only now is there work going on to build the block, a pile driver relentlessly banging into my thoughts as I passed, although its design is not quite as interesting as the first phase.

I'd walked the whole length of the float now, right down to where a lifting bridge allows ships to pass through from the Mersey. The docks still see a lot of maritime use, even today; there's frequently a naval ship moored up for restocking or refurbishment. It's nothing like it used to be of course, and with all the actual freight handled across the river in Liverpool, it's no wonder Peel are scrabbling around for new uses for all that land.

The problem is, they don't really seem to know what to do with it. As I crossed the bridge, I approached the derelict Central Hydraulic Tower. It once supplied power to the whole dock complex, and it's designed to resemble the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. It's a beautiful building that's fallen into disrepair.

The first plan for the tower was that it'd be a bar and restaurant, with a rooftop lantern giving you views across the river to Liverpool. There would also be a new hotel. That fell through, and instead it was proposed to be something called a "Maritime Knowledge Hub", linked to the Wirral Met College next door. That's also fallen through, and in the meantime, the Grade II-listed building is quietly collapsing.

It's really hard to know what Wirral Waters is, or will be. The feast of glowing glass skyscrapers was never going to happen - everyone knew that - but it doesn't feel like there's any kind of purpose here now. It's as though Peel will simply allow anyone who turns up to build on their land. A new factory? Sure! Apartment blocks? Why not? Down here, on the edge of the docks, there was the college, plus an office development, with a scheme called Egerton Village ("a dockside restaurant and bistro, small independent retail units, artists’ studios, managed workspace and even a central public events space") meant to occupy the space in between. If you've got the money to build, you can. It doesn't seem like a place.

It's a development in search of an identity. To me, the obvious solution is to fill it with apartments; the one thing this country needs is homes, and a vibrant new waterside village based around the docks couldn't miss. I stood at the side of the road; behind me was the Liverpool waterfront, while in front of me acres of open water stretched away. Surely someone could do something with it all.

The grey sky that had been amassing above my head finally broke. I'd planned on walking back along the Corporation Road to Birkenhead North, closing the loop, but I didn't have a coat and I'd already walked a fair few miles. Instead I headed to Hamilton Square and bought myself a cup of tea.

Today actually marks the anniversary of this blog; the very first post was on the 17th June 2007. Somehow I've managed to push through it for nineteen years, despite the general trend of the internet and increasingly vitriolic calls for me to stop, and I have you, the readers, to thank for that. Your readership - and generosity - has always been appreciated. Thank you again. Here's hoping we'll all still be around for the twentieth.

6. Birkenhead North

2026-06-15T22:58:57.487+01:00

Opened: 2nd January 1888, though its name was Birkenhead Docks back then. It was renamed to Birkenhead North in 1926.

Line electrified: 1938.

Number of platforms: Three. One platform serves Liverpool trains, the second New Brighton and West Kirby trains. The third is technically a through platform but is mainly used for stabling and turnbacks these days.

Points of interest: A planter commemorates Philip Rodney Perkins, 08.09.1955 - 05.12.2025 - Goodnight God Bless.

On the outside wall is a mural dedicated to Charlie Landsborough, a folk singer who grew up nearby. I have a close personal connection with Charlie because I'd never heard of him until I started work in the music department (or "Sounds" as we called it, because we were very cool) at Birkenhead's WH Smith. I quickly learned that not only does Charlie have a dedicated fanbase on the Wirral, but also that they'll turn up on the day his new album is released demanding a copy at nine in the morning. We used to regularly have arguments with head office that yes, we definitely should have thirty copies of a CD by this man they've never heard of because they will sell in about eight minutes, and their reticence is yet another reason why WH Smith went down the dumper.

Birkenhead North also has a massive and very popular car park attached to it. After about eleven am you'll find yourself cruising the aisle for a spot for a good while. There used to be electric chargers here too but a while back they disappeared.

As the point where the Wirral Line splits in two, and in close proximity to the Birkenhead North depot, this is also a spot where the train crews will swap over, meaning there's a mess room for them. Look closely and you can see the fenced off yard where they can have a fag.

Attractive Local Feature sign: None. In fact I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever find one of these because every station so far seems to have managed without one.

Original blog post: 9th September 2007

What's changed since then? The lift-accessible bridge opened in 2014, and there's a now-faded sign to commemorate the occasion at the foot of the steps. A vending machine has appeared in the waiting area, plus a toilet. There's a sign on the footbridge that points to trains to West Kirkby and it's been there for years now and nobody seems to be in a rush to correct it.

The local area has also been extensively redeveloped since then. New houses have been built all around the station, replacing the Ilchester Square social housing with small well-kept semis and a stretch of parkland. This also meant that the notorious New Dock Hotel was demolished. I always like to mention it, because it was nicknamed "The Blood Tub"; there were lots of reasons given for this nickname but my favourite is that there were so many fights on a Saturday night that the landlord used to use a broom to brush the blood out the front door.

Proof of visit:

I would never permit a full-length photograph today because you'd see my beer gut and nothing else.

Tickets Please

2026-06-10T09:59:56.566+01:00

Nostalgia is a terrible disease that runs right through the railways. "Oooh, it was better in the old days!" is a curse. There is always someone to point at steam trains, or third class tickets, or British Rail, or train doors you have to hang out the window to open, and say "that's so much better than what we have now". You can sit on an air-conditioned, electric train, almost silent as it glides along, with power sockets and tables, and there will still be a railway fan who will say "I used to like it when you could open the window to hear the screech of the rails and choke on the diesel fumes. Bring that back!"

This post is going to come with a tinge of nostalgia, and I apologise in advance. But I'm using that nostalgia as a way of asking a question about Merseyrail's future. My question is: what happened to all the ticket collectors?

When I first moved to the north - bloody hell - thirty odd years ago, I lived in Ormskirk. Every time a train pulled onto the platform there, a man would appear at the exit and politely collect your ticket.

When I first started visiting the BF via Birkenhead Park - bloody hell - twenty-nine years ago, a man would appear at the top of the ramp and collect your ticket as you passed.

It was a simple and effective way of enforcing ticket sales. I remember distinctly seeing scallies turn round and get on the next train out of Birkenhead Park because they couldn't produce a little orange card.

Last Bank Holiday Monday, I went to New Brighton, and at the exit there were some ticket enforcement officers who stopped everyone as we went through. And they were managing to collect a fair few dodgers in the process. So it is still possible to do it. There seems to be no appetite, however.

You can, basically, ride Merseyrail for free. You're gambling on there not being inspectors on the train but I very rarely get my ticket checked. I'd guess about once every ten journeys. If you're not going to Liverpool, Birkenhead (Conway Park and Hamilton Square) or Southport - where there are barriers - you can get away with not paying. How is this still a thing? Why aren't there barriers everywhere?

I get that they're expensive, of course, and some stations would need a major reconfigure to be able to accommodate them. There's also the issue of having a member of staff there to assist. Other railway companies across the world have managed it. San Francisco's Bart has recently finished installing them, and they've discovered that not only has revenue been protected, but also vandalism and anti-social behaviour at the stations and on the trains has gone down. The network has become a sealed unit only for people with a ticket.

And if you're not going to put barriers in, well, how about bringing back the bloke at the exit? It was actually a good idea. It actually worked. It might also stop me and other law-abiding citizens feeling like a mug when we pay for our ticket and never get checked.

(Yes the bloke at Birkenhead Park was a bit fit and it was always a pleasure to see him but that's not what this is about ok? Besides he'll be pushing sixty by now).

Notes On Camp

2026-06-04T17:11:30.930+01:00

With the new stations of the Wolverhampton-Walsall line behind me (the WolWal Line? Wolvall?) I shifted from one side of New Street to the other. It was in a state of low-level chaos; a problem with the lines going south had caused a huge backlog of delays and cancellations. Dejected passengers lined the platforms waiting for trains that wouldn't come. My own, tiny, local train was delayed by twenty minutes, and as it passed the losers standing by I sank down in my seat so it wouldn't look like I was revelling in my good fortune.

We rose up out of the tunnel, giving us a great view of the HS2 station slowly coming together at Curzon Street. That exact same day Heidi Alexander had stood up and announced that everything would be late and expensive and also, not as good as it was meant to be, and I looked at that vast swathe of concrete and workmen and trucks and diggers and wondered exactly when I'd be able to stand outside it and take a sign selfie. If, indeed, I could still stand at that point. Perhaps my carer will take the picture for me.

The train pulled onto the Camp Hill Line, Birmingham's newest suburban route. I wondered how the people in the houses lining the track felt about this sudden uptick in noise; a rarely used freight line transformed into a commuter line. I bet there's a lot less nude sunbathing in the back gardens now.

The most distinctive part of Moseley Village station isn't anything to do with what's been built; that's all distinctly perfunctory. Metal walls, orange lampposts, all the same playbook. The thing that draws your eye is the entrance to the tunnel beyond the platforms.

Is it just me or is there something vaguely... vulva-like about that? It's the keystone at the top, poking over the splayed curves of the tunnel. It's a little bit dirty. Obviously I'm no expert in this matter but you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to see the symbolism of a train sliding into that.

I politely averted my eyes and went up the stairs to the newly laid out plaza on top. It's a large, bare stretch of block paving that's been clearly designed as an event space. I could see the shadows of artisan soap makers, organic candle stalls and expensive streetfood yet to come scattered across the pavement. It's certainly a cut above Willenhall's cycle lane and zebra crossing.

It quickly became obvious why Moseley Village got the full town square treatment. It turned out this place was posh. Right outside the station was an M&S Food Hall, and it very much continued on that theme. Restaurants and beauty salons cascaded down the hill towards the main road. Estate agents with expensive listings. An old church high on a mound above us. At the junction, a dual carriageway had a vague air of boulevard with tall trees and benches to relax on. The original station here, closed during the war, had been called simply Moseley; you could hear the letters from the residents' associations demanding that Village suffix to show they were a cut above.

This sounds like reverse snobbery, and it is a bit, but it didn't stop me finding Moseley charming. It was certainly an improvement on the grim industrial backstreets of Darleston. I turned up a hill, where a pub poster advertised a forthcoming appearance from drag queen Harley La Rue. Where Class Meets Sass it promised, which I puzzled over for a while until I realised my Southern accent was standing in the way of the rhyme (Where Clarse Meets Sass). I wonder where the dividing line is for that long A. Perhaps the Watford Gap.

The road gently rose up the hill and I realised once again that I should really check out the gradient lines on the OS Map before I plan these journeys. It went up and up, past lines of neat villas and new shiny cars parked close to the kerb. The Moseley Dovecot, a remnant of a great house that was once in the area, stood behind a fence on a patch of green.

I passed a Jewish primary school and a cul de sac of identical terraced homes that was choked with cars. A builder's yard and then, on a whitewashed wall, a picture of an eggman raising his hat to passers by; beneath him, the road sign had been adorned with the Prince symbol. I couldn't decide which was more incongruous.

Blocks of flats now intruded on the street, new and old, while the big mansions had multiple buzzers and concreted fronts. A funeral home had a large stained glass window presiding over passers by, and I found myself humming Slumber Inc without even thinking about it. I am nothing if not predictable.

At a curve in the road my second station appeared, Kings Heath (no, there isn't an apostrophe; yes, it is annoying). There are only three new stations on the Camp Hill line; it terminates at Kings Norton, an already existing station that lacks an apostrophe. It's amazing that this new, exciting transport link in England's second largest city is three stations and two trains an hour in each direction but there it is; we settle for what we can get.

At some point, the trains will go into Moor Street, where there is more capacity than the ridiculously overcrowded New Street, but before that happens Bordesley station needs to close so that new chords can be built. The proposal to close it is already out there, though there isn't a suggestion of a replacement on the Camp Hill route once the new lines are built (the Metro's newest extension will take over the slack). When this will happen is, as always, entirely guesswork.

Kings Heath also has a small pedestrian space outside, though it's more of an infill between the curve and the road and the straight front of the footbridge; I can't see anyone holding a craft fair there.

I took a seat on the platform. There was another man there who also carried a camera. I imagine Men Who Like Railway Stations have been swarming all over the line for the last couple of months; there are probably dozens of YouTube videos about it all in deep detail. This is probably all old news to you. But you get it when I write it, so tough.

The final station is the jewel, the one that everyone likes: Pineapple Road. What a lovely, evocative, fun name. It's the kind of whimsical station name you wouldn't think would pass muster in the boring old 21st century; after all, for most of the 20th century it was called Hazelwell. Pineapple Road is a great fun name, one that calls to you.

It is, of course, nothing special on the ground. If a kidnapper dumped me on a platform on the Camp Hill line and ran off with my glasses so I couldn't read the sign I wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Two platforms, metal awnings and stairs, lifts and footbridge.

Still, I hoped Pineapple Road, of all the stations, would offer a little bit of artistic licence. A moment of character. I was excited to spot some metal fretwork and I stopped for a good look.

I'm afraid to say it depicted random wild flowers. There wasn't a single pineapple to be seen, which simply isn't on. It's called Pineapple Road. It's on the Camp Hill line. It's begging for a level of flamboyant extravagance hitherto unseen in the West Midlands. There should be small pineapples on top of every pillar, lamp post and help sign. There should be pineapple murals and pineapple brickwork. You shouldn't be able to move for the pineapples.

When I win the EuroMillions on Friday (£137 million, watch this space) I will personally pay for a two metre high golden pineapple statue to be erected outside the station. I will give the station the campery, the whimsy, the sheer delightful personality it deserves. I will make it the destination it should be.

Small Wins

2026-05-27T12:05:30.058+01:00

It's very easy, at this moment in British history, to allow yourself to become despondent about the state of the nation. About the inability of government, media and thought leaders to advocate for change. About the failure to deliver any world changing projects or schemes. About the general attitude of "will this do?"

It's easy, in all of this, to miss when something good actually happens. When there is a change that will directly improve the lives of people in the country.

Which is why I went to the Midlands.

In the last few weeks the West Midlands Railway has acquired two new lines, long orange streaks across the map on routes that weren't previously open to passengers (at least, not in this century). Those railway lines gifted a total of five new stations to the map. Five new chances for travel, regeneration and opportunity. Obviously I had to visit them.

My first port of call was Willenhall, on the new line between Wolverhampton and Walsall. It's a former freight line that now lets you travel between two major conurbations without having to go into Birmingham city centre first. It doesn't sound much, but that's the kind of small link that makes a big difference. Any chance to avoid New Street is surely a plus.

Willenhall will not be confused for one of Europe's great termini. It has two platforms, two shelters, and some seats. There is no ticket office, but there is a ticket machine. It's been decked out in bland grey with some splashes of corporate orange here and there.

It was already being well used when I arrived, with a dozen people disembarking with me (and one girl rushing down to the platform a full minute after the train had left; she tried to style it out, pulling her phone up and leaning on a wall, like she really wanted to hang out on a railway station for an hour).

I went up to the road bridge, which has been gifted with a cycle lane and plenty of pedestrian space. It turned out the town centre of Willenhall was less than a minute's walk from the new station; it could not have been more convenient. I would've been pretty annoyed if I'd lived there in 1965 when it originally closed, removing a handy link, but there are so many reasons I'm glad I wasn't around in 1965 (grrr, Beeching!).

I didn't go into the town, instead turning right past a memorial and the library. There was some lovely Festival of Britain font going on over the old entrance - there's a new glass one to the side, with disabled access - and the "flag of Willenhall" on a gatepost. It was designed in 2014 and references the town's history as the home of lockmaking - it was the site of Yale's factory for decades. I am, officially, over flags in any way shape or form right now; the discourse has ground me down. Sure, you want a flag, stick it up. Stick up all the flags you like. It won't make your wife come back.

The road twisted and turned, past a church tower and a half-dozen pubs - some open, some not. Drinking culture has changed so much in the last couple of centuries as we've realised that (a) getting lashed on your lunch break probably isn't a good thing and (b) getting lashed in general isn't great for your health and certainly won't give you washboard abs. It's sad seeing these former pleasure palaces laden with "for sale" signs but Britain is changing. It's a new world, and that world involves protein shakes and gyms. And also, let's be honest, quite a lot of cocaine. It's a world I'll quietly absent myself from, and I'll be over here, resting a pint glass on my beer gut.

As I walked, it became clear that Willenhall was crying out for a fast, direct link into the city. There were the occasional signs of regeneration - blocks of flats, new town houses - but mostly what I saw was post-industrial collapse. Empty buildings. Debris. Sadness. Small homes with peeling paint and grass growing out of their roofs.

I passed The Meat Shop - a woman was emerging with a bulging white carrier bag, filled with who knew what - and a bus stop with a pair of giggling sixth formers flirting with one another. TLC Bargains had a slogan of SMACK WHACK BANG and an astonishing Instagram account featuring "the Black Country Del Boy". Please do check out the video where he extols the virtues of a spice grinder while wearing a pair of fake breasts. I don't know why.

I turned right at the Sikh Gurdwara, as always enjoying the little bit of exoticism that had crashed landed into boring old England, and descended past a delicious-smelling McDonalds (it was lunchtime after all) towards the railway bridge. The Robin Hood pub, judging by the cards on the back of the bench in the window, was hosting a birthday party. Two elderly people came round from the car park, peered inside, then went in.

The A454 quickly followed, passing over my head while the railway had gone underneath (there was a canal a bit further on, too; a rare one-two-three of transport). In a layby, a truck driver sat in his cab and ate his lunch; a second van backed into the space next to him and the driver similarly pulled out a sandwich. I was leaving the residential streets behind and moving into the industrial.

A company proudly celebrating its 29th anniversary with a special badge on the side of its unit - that's not how anniversaries work - and an ad for Darlaston Gym Boxing hung on a green fence. At the traffic lights, a crane towered over my head, as I turned left to follow the long brick wall of the Imperial Works. Once a nuts and bolt factory, it had become home to various engineering businesses over the years, but now seemed derelict.

It was obvious to me how Darlaston station would help this area. It was thick with industry - trucks were constantly passing me or reversing - but there was still a lot of blank, vacant space that was crying out for a rebuild. Offices, homes - you could slip them in here now, with a canal view and a local station. It needed a bit of ambition and a lot of money but it could be done.

I avoided being run over by a self-drive hire van - they were still getting used to the controls, clearly, and were very apologetic as they lurched out of a side entrance - and passed a rack of traffic trapped in a four-way roadwork. There were so many different businesses around, so many names I'd never heard of, doing work I'd never know about. Receiving deliveries of who knew what, processing invoices from other small anonymous companies, making a nice little profit that bought the owner a decent car and paid for a Christmas party.

Houses returned with a crash: a sudden block of old people flats and a row of 1970s houses. One of them had torn up their lawn to replace it with a large, fake stone fountain, about two metres high. Sadly the water wasn't turned on, otherwise I'd have nipped over to drop in a few coins and make a wish.

The new station isn't on Station Street; road changes have left this as a cut-through lined with a terrace on one side and garages on the other. At the end, there was a vast self-storage unit. The only business that seems to be expanding everywhere is storage, as we own more and more things but live in smaller and smaller homes.

On top of the railway bridge I got a glimpse of the station below. The embankments were still scarred from construction, bare and yet to be turfed, while a team of men with a tanker and a hose were doing some pumping on the newly laid drain - not a great sign, let's be honest. They blocked the way for me to get a decent sign picture with their equipment so I'm afraid this is the best you'll get. It does say Darlaston, I promise.

Actually getting into the station involved a walk up a long road that provided access to the neighbouring cemetery. I got the feeling that TfWM didn't expect many people to walk to this stop, a suspicion confirmed when I rounded the corner and saw an acre of bare tarmac laid out for parking. It was, I'd say, about 10% full, but it was early days. I'm sure in a few months you'll find it hard to get a spot.

Like its brother at Willenhall, Darlaston station is no looker. It gets the job done. There are lifts to get you over the tracks, seats, a roof to hold off the rain.

Darlaston station won't change the world. But it will improve a little part of it. Get your wins where you can.

Class

2026-05-13T18:51:43.299+01:00

When I disembarked at Blundellsands & Crosby, there was a girl ahead of me. She was about seventeen or eighteen, wearing a loose thin shirt over a crop top and tiny white shorts. In the crook of her right arm was a cooler. She peered into the window of the waiting room and then, when she couldn't see whoever she was meeting, she pulled out her phone and began hastily tapping.

I guessed that she was on study leave from her A-levels and was using the opportunity to go to the beach with her mates. I didn't blame her. It was an incredibly beautiful day. The blue sky seemed to reach up and over us, a huge dome of bright.

Blundellsands Road West, the route to the beach, is a parade of elegant Victorian mansions and classy villas set behind long gardens. Some of them have been converted to flats, but a lot haven't; large cars with personalised number plates park on block paved driveways. In between them are prep schools and junior schools and kindergartens. It meant that I heard, in the mid morning air, nothing but the joyous sound of children playing.

The road ended in a merger between land and nature, a no man's land where the grass and the sand butted right up against the tarmac. There was a sign indicating where the nearest toilets were in both directions, and then, a little way behind it, a memorial bench for someone I never met but none the less mourned.

Seb Patrick was a writer and podcaster who grew up on Merseyside, moved down to London for work, then returned in his thirties with his wife and daughter so that he could give them a better standard of living. I knew him through his podcast, Cinematic Universe, and we followed each other on Twitter. It was a social media relationship, where we would interact, swap jokes, but didn't actually know anything about one another. I found him funny and interesting and the updates on his readjustment to living in Liverpool were charming.

Seb died suddenly in 2020. He was 37. All deaths are tragic, of course, but there was a real loss to this one. He was too young, had too many responsibilities, had too much going on in his life.

Social media is a strange phenomenon. Every day I get small moments from people's lives sent to my phone. Every day I quietly build up a picture of a person, a figure behind an avatar, a real human being with a cat and a house and a job. I don't know them. In many cases I don't even know their real name. But I've been getting these little nuggets of their existence in my world for years now. I've never met them but they are in some ways more real to me than actual relatives. I have cousins I've not seen for thirty years and have no idea what they're doing now, while there are people I've never met at the other end of the country where I could probably write their autobiography for them.

Are these people friends? No, not really. But they do become a valuable marker in your life. Humans are social animals and that social interaction can come from a million different ways. It's why I get annoyed when people talk about the "importance" of social media, of Twitter and Bluesky as agents of change and political forces. Yes that happens, but also, some people are watching a television programme and laughing and want to share it. That's properly important to me.

The path rose up, slowly, over a ridge of dunes, as though it's holding off the view until the very last moment. Then you see the long expanse of wide sandy beach and rolling tides and in amongst them, the Iron Men.

Another Place by Anthony Gormley is 100 iron men, based on his own body, and scattered across the beach staring out to sea. The tide washes over them, deposits barnacles and sand on them, and they remain impassive throughout. It was originally a travelling artwork, with Crosby Beach the third place to host it, but Merseyside fell in love with it. After a good deal of campaigning - and despite resistance from the council - it became a permanent part of the landscape in 2007.

It still unnerves you, to see them staring out to sea, but there's also something hopeful and pleasing about them. Certainly the beach users that day were enjoying playing around them. Small children ran up and stared at them while dogs danced around them. It's a massive draw for the area and really, the best kind of public art; wanted, loved, cherished.

I followed the promenade south, taking in the view. Crosby Beach has a strange mix of idyll and practicality. The sands are long and glowing, but behind them are wind turbines, and oil tankers, and the red cranes of the Liverpool docks are constantly in sight. It's a holiday but there's a reminder of work at all times. It's probably done them a favour. Anywhere else in the country and this stretch of uninterrupted sands would be a major destination. Instead it's a secret Scousers keep to themselves.

Sand had swamped the path at some points, a bone of contention between the locals and the council. They argue that the sand stops access to the promenade, which is true, but the council is forced to point at the sea and say "you know how this works, right?" Sefton Borough Council is not King Cnut, and it can't stop the waves. The beach wants to join the dunes behind it and it's not going to let a strip of paving get in the way.

The path opened up to real the frankly gob-smacking form of Crosby Leisure Centre. It's a scifi vehicle that somehow arrived in suburban Liverpool; you expect a woman with a suspiciously large beehive hairdo to come sashaying out. The architects claimed that the roof is to allow the sands to blow over the top without impediment. I believe this is architect speak for "it looks really cool".

I followed the path round the edge, able to see inside to the swimming pool where people larked about in the water. Sadly the building is not a full flying saucer. Only the front half has the amazing sloped roof; at the back it's a brick block, tucked away from the sea where you can't spot it. Still, what a front that is.

I walked onto Bridge Road, a strip between the railway and the beach that was showing signs of being gentrified. It had a mix of industrial units and shops, garages and cafes. The micropub was alongside an electrical wholesaler; the cash-only Chinese takeaway with the racially suspect cartoon in the window was over the road from a cafe offering breakfast-lunch-gelato.

A roadsign welcomed me to Brighton-le-Sands; I choose to believe they added "le-Sands" as a deliberate two fingers to the more famous Brighton's pebbly beach. (It never fails to astonish me that Brighton's nudist beach is shingle. You must be pulling stones out of crevices for days). Squat office blocks were headquarters to engineering firms and vaguely maritime industries. At some point people are going to spot that you can get a three bed semi a two minute walk from the sea for under £300,000 and suddenly the cash and carry will be a nightclub and the chippy will become a coffee shop but until then it's a nice mix of people.

I turned inland, past a row of neat new houses built with electric chargers and double driveways, and a missing cat poster ("Diddy"). I was approaching the railway line, and a cynical part of me thought that a missing cat within one street of an electrified rail probably isn't coming back. I hope I'm wrong.

The other side of the line counts as Crosby, if not technically than certainly in the minds of the residents, and as such it has no need to be gentrified; it was always like that.

Now we were in a world of elevated chicken shops with expensive burgers, of restaurants designed to be featured on the 'Gram, of "CAMRA Pub of the Year 2025". Women in snatched outfits pushed babies in designer onesies. Salons offered "natural facial rejuvenation". And then, in the middle of it, a football ground.

Marine AFC play in the Northern League North, which, as far as I can work out, is the bit below what in my head is still the Vauxhall Conference. I tried reading the Wikipedia page on it but my brain started closing down through sheer boredom. They're below the proper football teams who play in the four divisions that I'm vaguely aware of, let's put it that way.

They've played here since 1903, but that could all change quite soon: they announced plans for a new stadium in Thornton last year. I'm not sure what's happening there, but Rossett Park will supposedly be retained as a "community resource". A great ambition, if it happens; not to be too cynical but a large space in a sought-after residential area that's no longer being used for its primary purpose screams "flogged to a property developer for a huge profit". Fair play to them either way.

I crossed the road with two yummy mummies to where a Carnegie Library occupied a triangular site. The actual library closed in 2013, in the early days of austerity (ah, the memories of when we were told it was a bit of temporary belt-tightening) but because it's one of the marvellous gifts to the nation from Andrew Carnegie, it sat empty awaiting someone who could treat it with a bit of sympathy to restore it.

That new occupier is going to be Moose Coffee, the local breakfast chain that has people queuing around the block for their food. I have a slight resentment towards Moose because their very first branch was round the corner from me in our village; however, that one rebranded as Home and Moose went on to become a Liverpool phenomenon. It's a bit like seeing a really popular band in their early days. I'm wandering around going "I was having Moose Coffee before they even opened a branch in Dale Street" but unsurprisingly it doesn't have the same cache as the Pistols at the Free Trade Hall.

I darted across the road and into a small oblong of park. It was thick with trees and dog walkers. I paused for a moment and had a drink of water. I realised how much I was enjoying myself. This is going to out me as a terrible snob - well, this and everything I've ever written on this blog - but it was nice to be wandering around an area without worrying a drug dealer was going to leap out and accost me. The run of Leasowe-Kirkby-Walton wasn't exactly showing the city region at its best. Now I was in a nice area with nice shops and parks and it was nice.

I followed Coronation Road into the centre of Great Crosby, another string of cafes and old-fashioned businesses that were somehow clinging on. A carpet shop, a solicitors, a decorator's centre that ironically could've done with a lick of paint.

The centre of the village proper is a Y-shaped section of pedestrianisation. Shops and bars line the pavement, tables spilling out for sunny days like today. Even the Greggs had space outside for your al fresco steak bake. A couple of new developments had inserted blocks of apartments into the centre, with more being constructed further down; a pleasing dose of densification where you'd expect the locals to fight against it.

I wandered through its impeccably clean streets, wondering where to have my lunch. I was tempted to go to Greggs and have one of its chicken sausage rolls in solidarity now that it's become a front in the culture wars (they only introduced them to get Muslims to shop there!!1!!1) but that felt a bit vulgar. Besides I got distracted when I spotted a bookshop.

I need to stop buying books. No, really, I do. It's becoming a terrible, terrible burden. I can't wander past a bookshop without getting the urge to run in and buy another novel I can add to the "unread" pile. It's a total waste of money. I walked round Pritchards, desperately trying to find something to buy, and at the same time, resisting every fibre in my body that said I should. After a full circuit I was able to leave, empty handed, breathing heavily but relieved that I'd spent absolutely nothing. (I have since bought two more books from other shops).

A walk back to the head of the pedestrian area, where there's a Sainsbury's, and I was able to spot a changing of the guard. A phone box had been loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck and the workmen were preparing the way for a flatscreen advertising board - sorry, I mean a BT Street Hub, because you can technically still use them to make a telephone call, not that anyone ever will. I'd never seen a phone box being carted off to the knacker's yard before and it gave me a momentary pang of sadness. Then I tried to remember the last time I'd used one and I don't think it was this side of the millennium.

I'd done a full circuit now and was still no closer to finding somewhere for lunch. I mean, there were obviously a lot of options, but most of them fell between "too posh" or "too generic" (yes, there was a Costa). Finally I realised where to go, where I should've gone right from the start.

My thanks to The George for giving me the lunch I needed.

This trip - and also the pint of beer - was funded by your contributions to my Ko-fi. Thanks once again!

5. Blundellsands & Crosby

2026-05-06T12:11:09.611+01:00

Opened: 24th July 1848 as Crosby. Renamed Blundellsands for Crosby in 1865, then Blundellsands & Crosby in November that year.

Line electrified: 1904

Number of platforms: Two, with a waiting room on each.

Points of interest: Quite a few, actually. On the northbound platform is a blue bench, built by a local schoolboy, and dedicated to Brian Boggild. He was the ticket man at Crosby for many years but sadly died of Covid in 2020. I'm guessing he was an Everton fan.

Running under the end of the platforms is a small pedestrian underpass to allow people to continue on their way without the need for a level crossing. It connects Blundellsands Road East with Blundellsands Road West.

The subway has been decorated with a cheery mural of children playing to celebrate Sefton Council's fiftieth anniversary. I'm not quite sure what the connection with this underpass is beyond it being in Sefton but it's nice anyway.

It certainly makes what could be a pretty dark space that little bit jollier.

On the southbound platform there's another piece of art in the form of a mosaic depicting local points of interest.

I can't seem to find any information about who created the artwork, or when. If you know, please get in touch and I'll happily update this page. (Remember when Merseytravel had an entire Art on the Network programme? Ah, the good old days before austerity). The mosaic could do with a little bit of care, though, because it's been protected by a clear plastic screen, presumably chosen over glass because it's less likely to be damaged. Which would be fine except the plastic has turned yellow in the sun.

There's also a small coffee shop, The Green Kiosk, which serves reasonably priced beverages from a tiny shed right outside the station entrance.

Attractive Local Feature sign: Considering all the other points of interest, and its proximity to Crosby Beach, it's a surprise to find there isn't one.

Original blog post: 19th December 2007

What's changed since then? I've aged considerably.

Proof of visit:

Let Me Count The Ways

2026-05-01T17:24:57.743+01:00

Patchway looks a lot more modern than it actually is. A station first opened in the 19th century, it has upgraded lifts and a footbridge, as though someone actually cares about it as a destination. The reason for all this up to date tech is simple: electrification. The Great Western Main Line got wired in the 2010s, meaning that the footbridge here had to be rebuilt higher up, and inadvertently making it a much nicer place to visit. It's yet another argument for electric trains across the entire nation, which is why it isn't happening. Making sense isn't a good enough reason I'm afraid.

The station's main claim to fame is that it serves the Rolls-Royce manufacturing complex, and they even have their own entrance from the platform. Looking at the acres of vacant land I wondered if this was going to be another part of the Brabazon new town, but apparently not. Rolls-Royce are still doing well here, producing aircraft components, and probably also some terrifying murder machines that we'd rather not think about.

I left the station by the car park, where a group of men in their sixties were meeting up for a trip into town, manfully shaking hands and being polite to one another. Absolutely no hugs here. Station Road is a small, narrow country-esque lane which, judging by the speed of the drivers who passed me, is used as a rat run. There's an estate the other side of the trees, but they're weirdly kept separate, in case they go mad and decide to use public transport.

At the end is Gypsy Patch Lane. Is that okay? I don't know if that's okay. It's a wide road that forms part of a chain crossing the top of the city, lined with corporation homes set back behind gardens and front gates. I followed an elderly man returning home; he absent-mindedly picked a piece of litter out of his hedge before going into his home.

Across the way was a pub called Stokers which, unlike a lot of estate pubs, still seemed to be thriving. A quick look at their Facebook page revealed the reason for this:

SCOTCH EGG FRIDAY. I repeat: SCOTCH EGG FRIDAY. What a concept. While other pubs are branching out into gourmet eats or tapas, Stokers is slapping down eighty scotch eggs and doing a roaring trade. That's what you want with your pint, not some padron peppers or a croqueta or two: an egg wrapped in meat with maybe a bit of pickle chucked in as well. I'm writing this from nearly two hundred miles away, and I'm furious I'm not there. Admittedly, I'd probably get my head kicked in - it doesn't look like the kind of pub that welcomes fat train station spotters - but so long as I got one of those cheese and cracked black pepper bites first I'd be happy.

Stokers also had a bonus claim to fame in the car park. Computer, zoom and enhance.

Waiting to feed the students later that day was the legendary Jason Donervan. I felt quite starstruck seeing it across the road, like when I went to Sunderland and saw Amy's Winehouse. Also Jason Donervan never sued anyone for saying it was gay so it's already one-up on the Aussie soap star.

I was quite happily wandering around, hoping that those clouds wouldn't get any darker or more rainy, when I saw a bus stop. The problem was, this bus stop was so good, I actually told it to fuck off. Out loud. Look at it.

It would appear that Bristol has a network called metrobus (no caps needed, it's the future). This is an actual Bus Rapid Transit network, with four express services running around the city.

The bus stops themselves incorporate dispense the tickets, so you can buy before you board, plus seating and a next bus indicator.

Obviously buses are rubbish, in the main. However, part of the reason they're rubbish is they're easy to get rid of - how many "this stop is not in use" signs have you noticed? - plus they're slow and get caught up in traffic. If you give them their own dedicated lanes and busways and modern vehicles that are easy to use and understand, people will be all over them. I was wildly impressed (although a bit of reading up has shown me that they're not necessarily all they should be; bus lane provision has been spotty, meaning the vehicles get caught up in the traffic with everything else).

It's not the only bit of Bristol's transport planning that surprised me. While I was reading up on the stations I discovered that there are actual local government plans for an underground railway service.

Obviously this is all heavily caveated. They're talking about it being possibly a mix of over- and underground services, so it might be a tram network with a couple of tunnels rather than a full metro. The proposal came from Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees, who's now in the House of Lords and his position has been abolished entirely (there's a Metro Mayor for the West of England instead). Funding was allocated to look into the proposals, with a suggestion of four lines, each of which costs one billion pounds. That sounds like far too low an amount to me (Line 4 of the Milan Metro, which opened in 2024, cost €1.7 billion) and the amount will be rising every moment there aren't spades in the ground.

None the less, I'm thrilled by the optimism. This is exactly what the regional mayors should be doing. Not monkeying around with the odd station or new bendy buses; big, transformative projects that will comprehensively change the city. Even Andy Burnham - perhaps the most powerful city leader in the country - only tentatively talks about an underground system for Manchester, even though Manchester should've got one about, oooh, a hundred years ago. The idea that there is a city in the United Kingdom actually pushing for modern, transformative public transport is thrilling, and gives me a little bit of hope for the future. I look forward to riding on the Bristol Tube one day. I'll probably be in an oxygen tent by then but that's not the point.

I turned off Gipsy Patch Lane - nope, still not okay - and onto a fast road running between parkland. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I started to spot rooftops appearing behind the trees, as a housing estate quietly surrounded me. Unlike the corporation works I'd been walking by before now, this was very private, a network of cul-de-sacs hidden away. It turned its back on the main roads, showing them blank walls. It didn't feel welcoming at all; it viewed strangers with suspicion.

I negotiated another roundabout, and paused in the Tesco Express for a bottle of Coke; the staff were loudly complaining about a fellow worker and his laziness, shouting across the aisles. Beyond that was another pub, though this one was extemely closed. They clearly hadn't got the memo about Scotch Egg Fridays.

The road sloped down and there was the entrance to what was, in its own way, one of the most significant railway stations in the UK.

Motorways were springing up all over the UK in the 1960s and 70s. While they had ordinary, boring official numbers, they also often acquired other names in planning, names designed to capture the imagination of the locals and distract them from the six lanes of viaduct crashing through their neighbourhoods. Linguists looked to America, because in the 1970s everyone wanted Britain to me more like thrusting, exciting, everyone driving everywhere America, and they alit on the term "parkway" - a term for a fast road that is usually scenic and surrounded by trees. It might be a lie - if you've ever got a cab from JFK into Manhattan you will have travelled along a series of Parkways, and it's about as scenic as the bottom of a wheelie bin - but it sounds nice, particularly to naive British people who didn't know much about these new roads and heard the word "park" and thought of ducks and lakes and grass. As such, the M32 motorway, which goes from the M4 into the centre of the city, was dubbed the "Bristol Parkway" and then, a few years later, when a new station was opened quite close to junction one, it was also called "Bristol Parkway," to let people know that it was conveniently located for that great motorway.

Something strange then happened. People forgot that the M32 was called the Bristol Parkway at all, and instead associated the name with the station. They thought that Parkway meant there was a place to park, because the new station had, in fact, been built with a large car park to enable commuting. In a rare example of 1970s British Rail actually capitalising on some good publicity, they started using Parkway as a generic term meaning "we've got a large car park you know". Hence Liverpool South Parkway, Tiverton Parkway, Oxford Parkway, and a load of other stations across the UK that don't have a big motorway next door. It's a strange story of the British public being told a word means one thing and deciding, comprehensively, that it absolutely doesn't. I still think Parkway is an incredibly boring thing to stick on the end of a railway station name, and I object to it every time I see it, but that's not Bristol Parkway's fault.

The station has proved so popular it's been repeatedly expanded over the years, with the latest rebuild coming in 2001 and looking very turn of the millennium. A metal roof and plenty of circulation space, though not many actual seats, plus the obligatory branch of Costa. There were originally two platforms - there's now four - and the car park has been upgraded to a multi-storey, with a further satellite car park up the road. It's a roaring success, so I shouldn't be sniffy about it, but I have to admit I'm not a fan.

It might be that it felt a bit tired. Twenty-five years is usually about the length of time railway companies can go without doing any maintenance to a station - "it's still new!" - and the building and public areas all felt cluttered and in need of a good scrub. It needed to be stripped back of all the extras that had arrived over the years and restored to its clean lines.

I went down to the platform, where I learned that Bristol Parkway is Home of UWE Bristol, and got on a train to Temple Meads. There were still a couple of stations left in the city for me to visit, on the south side, but I didn't like the look of those clouds, and I didn't have a coat. Plus I fancied a pint. You're a great city Bristol. I hope to revisit you very soon.