A tube station enthusiast has taken social media by storm by ranking all 272 of London’s tube stops.
Tom Rees, a 29-year-old marketing operations manager from rural Shropshire now living in Islington, north London, grew up captivated by how the tube allows Londoners to “zip around the city”.
After moving to the capital in 2017, he set out to visit every tube station two years later, armed with a GoPro to document the “good, the bad, and the ugly” and build a detailed mental map of London.
In 2023, he turned his footage into TikTok, Instagram and YouTube videos under the handle @vaguely.mundane, ranking stations and amassing 50,000 followers across all platforms with his most popular video earning more than two million views on Instagram.
His favourite tube stops include Uxbridge, Chesham, and Canary Wharf – while less favoured spots like Stonebridge Park and Barking make the bottom tier.
Now exploring London’s mainline stations, he is uncovering hidden gems such as a lighthouse in Tower Hamlets playing a 1,000-year-long song and a Roman bath under an office block in Billingsgate.
Tom said: “It was probably around when Francis Bourgeois was blowing up, so I knew there was an audience for it, and I’d not seen anybody doing a review of these stations with a more subjective take.
“I couldn’t believe it when my videos started getting views, but there’s a real community of people who follow my videos now.”
Despite “not being interested in trains themselves”, Tom finds the way the tube enables so many people to “zip around the city” fascinating, especially given his more rural upbringing in Shropshire, where there was “very little public transport”.
He added: “The idea of just being able to turn up on a platform and be whisked away to a distant corner of this massive city, it was always something that I found very exciting when I visited London growing up.”
When Tom moved to London in 2017, he began to wonder what the areas at the end of the tube lines – such as Chesham, Epping, or Upminster – were like.
In 2019, he set himself the challenge of visiting every tube station, spending around…
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