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Here's a tube station you definitely haven't visited.
Leslie Green station is named for the turn-of-the-20th-century architect who designed so many of London's most characterful tube stops. The ox-blood tiles and Romanesque arches are familiar from stations such as Oxford Circus, Camden Town and Russell Square.
The passages and platforms are lined with cream and burgundy tiles. It all looks so familiar, right down to the design of the CCTV camera.
You won't find Leslie Green station on the tube map. Not the conventional one, at any rate. We're visiting a strange, parallel universe, where the network has an additional route, known as the City line.
This twisted, alternative London contains other familiar-yet-unfamiliar stations. Holden South, located near Waterloo, has a distinct modernist feel, much like the buildings of the eponymous Charles Holden.
Meanwhile, Branning Wharf Station in Docklands resembles one of the stops on the Jubilee extension. It's named after the family from Eastenders.
Towards an alternative London
Only one person has access to this alternative metro, and that's its creator Mattie Konig. Mattie, a bit of a transport obsessive, cut her teeth designing tube stations in the Tomb Raider Level Editor. The plans shown above were put together in the more sophisticated Source 3D game engine.
Her intention was to go much bigger and create a whole alternative London within Garry's Mod — a highly adaptable game full of explorable urban environments. As Mattie explains:
"Most roleplaying maps are set either in the US or Eastern Europe, as an inevitable consequence of the limited stock assets available to developers, and usually encourage little else apart from simulations of crime, gunfighting and driving. I thus wanted to create a map that... encouraged a wider range of activities for players (a trip to the art gallery? A swim in the local lido? Sure, why not?) and felt like an authentic London experience, or as authentic as possible in the Source engine gamespace."
Alas, the map is still a work in progress, and is not yet available to the public. If any games developers are reading this, please, please get in touch with Mattie and persuade her to keep plugging away, because we know a lot of people who would be utterly spellbound to wander around in this other London.
Find Mattie online through her Facebook page, and check out her other talent, making 'weird multi-genre experimental music' (Soundcloud).
