TikToker visits and ranks all 272 of London's Tube stops - these are the best and the worst
- Tom Rees grew up captivated by how the Tube allows Londoners to 'zip around'
- READ MORE: Businesswoman books entire Florida hotel to avoid 'riff-raff'
A Tube station enthusiast inspired by viral trainspotter Francis Bourgeois has taken social media by storm, ranking all 272 of London's Tube stops and building a 'community' of transport fans.
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 Cockfosters, Uxbridge, Chesham, and Canary Wharf – while less favoured spots like Stonebridge Park and Barking make the bottom tier.
Tom Rees has taken social media by storm, ranking all 272 of London's Tube stops. He has amassed 50,000 followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube
Uxbridge, a terminus for both the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines, is one of Tom's favourite Tube stops
Tom told PA Real Life: '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 Tube and its people-moving power 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 20 minutes wandering the area before moving on to the next station.
'I was mostly interested in discovering all these places, the good, the bad, the ugly, and in a broader sense, it's definitely given me a much better mental map of London,' Tom said.
'Grand millennium architecture': Canary Wharf Tube station gets the thumbs up from Tom
Tom says the 'northern leg of the Bakerloo line' often looks 'knackered', particularly disliking Stonebridge Park (above)
Tom captured footage of each station to create 'video proof' of his travels.
He joked: 'I was clearly on some sort of ego trip where I thought that someone might ask me about it.
'I had all this footage on a hard drive, and I didn't do anything with it. I didn't have any plans for it. It was literally just a record.'
But, when Tom visited the final station on his list, Oval on the Northern Line, he found the experience 'anticlimactic'.
Throughout his career, Tom has worked on social media marketing and found the field captivating.
He realised it was important to 'identify a niche' to grow an audience on platforms like TikTok, and was inspired to create his own outside of work.
So, he decided to use the footage he already had, and 'repurpose it' into TikTok and Instagram videos, by adding snippets of him talking to the camera, giving his opinion on each station.
Around April 2023, Tom created his @vaguely.mundane social media handle and began uploading his videos every other day until September 2024.
Oval on the Northern line was the final station on Tom's Tube odyssey
Above is Cockfosters on the Piccadilly line, which Tom describes as a 'fine' Tube station
Highbury & Islington Station was a huge disappointment for Tom
Tom used a tier system to rank the stations from best to worst, finding it impossible to pick just one favourite station, which he said would be like choosing a favourite song, as 'it changes all the time'.
He said: 'It's all gut feeling but if a station hasn't been looked after very well, or it's been allowed to get rusty, or the signs are all sun-bleached and stuff like that, that's not going to help.
'On the flip side, if there's some sort of novel artwork or architecture going on, that's all very good stuff.
'Examples that I do really like, and are top-tier, would be something like Uxbridge, which has stained glass windows. I think I probably likened it to a cathedral.
'A different sort of station might be something like Chesham, the very furthest station on the whole Tube network in Buckinghamshire.
'You kind of go winding through fields and hills on the Tube train – it's all very romantic and a contrast to that inner-city bustle.
'But then you've also got Canary Wharf, which is sci-fi and grand millennium architecture.'
Chesham is the very furthest station on the whole Tube network in Buckinghamshire. Picture courtesy of Creative Commons picture licensing
Tom, who grew up in rural Shropshire, has always been fascinated by the Tube
Tom used a tier system to rank the stations from best to worst, finding it impossible to pick just one favourite station, which he said would be like choosing a favourite song. He said: 'I think London's network stands out because it's the first, but also because there's so much variety in the stations'
He thinks the 'northern leg of the Bakerloo line' often looks 'knackered', particularly disliking Stonebridge Park - and he finds Barking 'quite a miserable place'.
He added: 'Highbury and Islington, I gave that an E tier, so the bottom tier, mainly because if you compare it to old pictures of how it looked in Victorian times, for instance, it's so far removed from that – it's quite sad now to see how far it's fallen.'
In summer 2024, Tom also visited all 15 of Glasgow's subway stops in one afternoon.
'It's great that it exists. However, it's not the nicest in terms of the actual stations, and there's quite a lot of damp smells underground there,' Tom explained.
'I think London's network stands out because it's the first, but also because there's so much variety in the stations.
'I may well visit other cities and do their networks, but I don't imagine I'd be rushing to do a like-for-like equivalent of my Tube series.
'I think in most other cities, even like Paris, most of their stations are homogenous, they're all quite similar.'
Since completing his series in September 2024, Tom has moved on to rating London's mainline stations, setting himself the challenge of 'finding an interesting place' around each one.
'It is definitely going to be tricky in some places, but I'll give it a go,' he said.
His stops so far include The Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse – a former experimental lighthouse that now hosts a 1,000-year-long musical composition that's been playing since 1999.
He also discovered Billingsgate Roman House and Bath underneath an unassuming office block in the city.
Looking to the future, Tom's goal is ultimately to 'have fun' and he does not intend to make content creation his full-time job.
He added: 'I would have to be a lot bigger than I am to feel comfortable transitioning into doing it full time.
'The thing I'm proudest of is the community it's helped build – there are people who know each other through liking my Tube reviews and my videos, and are now friends.
'That makes me feel happy.'
