Birthday trip to Metro-Land

I can't believe a year has passed since I wrote about my mothers 90th birthday. Every birthday after 90 needs something special by way of celebration and this year for her 91st my son and I took her on a special trip run by the London Transport Museum on a 1938 London tube train. We travelled from Amersham to Harrow on the Hill and back - an area once known as Metro-Land.

The name "Metro-Land" was created in 1915 by the publicity department of the Metropolitan Railway. "Metro-Land" was the advertising slogan developed to entice workers from cramped homes in Central London out into the rural paradise of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. "Metro-Land" became the name of the annual publication of the railway's booklet which described the area the railways served through north west London and beyond. The Railway set up a separate company to develop housing and shops along the Metropolitan's line.   Much of the area was extensively developed between the World Wars and created a distinctive atmosphere.  Posters which carried the name Metro-Land depicted a sylvan landscape where ladies in hats picked flowers and drifted through sun-speckled meadows.

 Some of our fellow passengers dressed in their best vintage 

This 1938 tube train was still in service in the 1980s - cigarette adverts!

 Gorgeous art deco light

I remember 'strap hanging' when I first lived in London

Mum and son

"Through Amersham to Aylesbury and the Vale,

In those wet fields the railway didn't pay.

The Metro stops at Amersham today."

Metro-land John Betjeman