An Instagrammer and TikTok star with a passion for travelling on the Tube has committed to visiting and reviewing all 272 London stations.
Tom, who can be found under his TikTok and ’Gram name of @vaguely_mundane, started his odyssey on April 3 with a trip to the “nice and spacious” Wembley Park.
All Underground stations are ranked on Tom’s chart of S, A, B, C, D, and E tiers.
As of August 4, he is about one-quarter of the way through, with 62 stations down. Among the leaders in the S tier are Kilburn Park and Uxbridge.
Sadly, at the bottom of the list is so far Harlesden, which he described as “a little bit scabby”, although the experience was dampened by his spotting of a man “sitting in a pool of blood” outside.
But Tom, who is based in Crouch End, said he would not consider himself a Tube nerd.
He said the footage was filmed in one batch in 2019 “on a whim” but it is only now that he is piecing it together with commentary.
“I was going around with a GoPro just to prove I had been to all of the stations,” he told the Standard. “And that was about as far as my vision went.
“I know how to make engaging content so it was a bolt from the blue idea of putting all the footage together… I know there is an audience for Tube content, so I’ll see what I can do with it.”
“I grew up in rural Shropshire,” he added, “And there it is like three buses to the nearest town and you are dependent on people to get you around. Coming to London six years ago, having a train every few minutes was huge.
“There is so much to see in London and I wanted to see all of it, and the Tube is a mechanism to do that.”
Professionally, Tom is a creative strategist for social media and has found the time to balance the marathon project alongside his job.
His YouTube rankings are entirely subjective and he often asks that viewers to “mind the gap” between his thoughts and reality — which might be needed when he gives a strong rating to the maze that is Stratford Underground station.
Tom has pledged to release a video every other day and, so far, 8,784 people have followed his journey. The channel is almost exclusively Tube reviews although he does break it up here and there with the odd curveball, such as a look inside Muswell Hill Sainsbury’s — a supermarket where “the rules don’t apply”.
Tom said that although Tube nerds are tuning in, it is less about the London Underground itself and more about people seeing their local areas on display.
“I wouldn’t consider myself a Tube nerd,” he said. “There are more knowledgeable Tubespotters making more in-depth content than I could. But I look at it from a sideways glance with a bit of entertainment in there as well.”
Tom gave a mid-tier rating to Angel station, which has an escalator that is 60 metres long, the longest of the Tube stations — which will not surprise anyone who has attempted to walk up it.
He knows which stations will be in the top and bottom tiers but the idea is for viewers to wait to see when their local is featured and where it will be.
“There is a long way to go,” he added. “My release schedule is every other day and I don’t want it to be so much that I just burn out but to keep me engaged.
“The audience are now asking for the stuff.”
