Longest Tube interchange: 10 Tube stations where changing lines takes longest
It’s not just your imagination: You really are spending hours of your life wandering around the labyrinthine tunnels that connect the different Tube lines at Bank and Monument.
But as far as long Tube interchanges go, it’s not actually London’s worst. That dubious honour goes to Paddington, where the connection between the Bakerloo and Hammersmith & City line will set you back 15 minutes.
If you’re unlucky enough to have this as part of your daily commute, you’re spending 2.5 hours a week just walking from one end of Paddington station to the other.
A recent Freedom of Information request from postgraduate student Prakash Kumar to Transport for London (TfL) has revealed how long the interchanges are between platforms at all Tube stations.
Excluding National Rail, there are a whopping 62 connections in the London Underground system that will set you back more than five minutes.
That the mazes connecting Bank and Monument rank highly among the worst offenders won’t come as a surprise to many City workers. The walk between the Circle and District lines and Waterloo & City is the longest of all at that station, as TfL estimates it’ll take you 10 minutes from one end to the other.
TfL recently released three-dimensional maps like the one above that reveal how London Underground stations really are.
Looking at Bank, it’s not hard to understand that the tunnels can take so long to manoeuvre, not least in rush hour…
London's quickest connection, meanwhile, can be found in Uxbridge, where changing between the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines takes a mere minute.