Gas-powered kingmaker: how the UK welcomed Putin’s man in Ukraine
If you want a physical manifestation of Britain’s unquestioning acceptance of oligarchs and its refusal to examine the origin of their wealth, you need to take a walk past Harrods towards the Victoria and Albert Museum.
After about 200 metres, you will see on the right-hand side of the road the unmistakable burgundy glazed tiles of a tube station. That is your destination. You can’t get on the underground here, because the station stopped accepting passengers decades ago and became a Ministry of Defence office. But it still has the platforms and shafts of a tube station, and that’s why it came to the attention of a former banker called Ajit Chambers in 2009. Chambers had a plan, which he revealed at one of the public events that Boris Johnson used to hold when he was the mayor of London.
Chambers told Johnson that he had identified 40 disused London underground stations, and he wanted to transform them into tourist attractions. “San Francisco has Alcatraz; Paris has its catacombs,” he said. “I have a proposal. I have been trying to get it to TfL.”
Johnson jumped in. “It is brilliant. I love it,” he said. “London underground. OK, we are going underground.” TfL – Transport for London, which oversees the capital’s trains, buses, taxis, trams and other modes of public transport – is one of the few bodies run by the mayor, so this was something Johnson could theoretically do something about. He promised that his staff would evaluate the proposal and follow up.
There were a few obstacles to Chambers’s plan. For one thing, although dozens of stations have been closed over the years, there aren’t 40 actual ghost stations in the sense of places you could walk into and convert into something new. Most have been demolished. For another
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