Tube fan ranks every stop on the London Underground

A Tube station enthusiast inspired by viral trainspotter Francis Bourgeois has taken to social media to rank all 272 of London Underground's Tube stops.

Tom Rees, 29, a marketing operations manager from rural Shropshire now living in Islington, north London, grew up captivated by how the Tube enabled people to "zip around the city".

After moving to the capital, he set out to visit every Tube station armed with a GoPro to document the "good, the bad, and the ugly".

His favourite Tube stops include Uxbridge, Chesham and Canary Wharf, while less favoured spots like Stonebridge Park and Barking make the bottom tier.

Around April 2023, Tom started posting his reviews on TikTok and Instagram where he uploaded a video every other day until September 2024 when the series ended.

He uses a tier system to rank the stations from best to worst, finding it impossible to pick just one favourite station, which he says "changes all the time".

"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," he added.

Tom gave Highbury & Islington station an "E" tier rating, which puts the station on the bottom tier.

He said it was "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".

When he ranks the stations 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 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."

He added: "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."

He describes Canary Wharf as "sci-fi" with its "grand Millennium architecture".

He thinks the "northern leg of the Bakerloo line" often looks "knackered", particularly disliking Stonebridge Park and he finds Barking "quite a miserable place".

The Tube reviews started in 2019, with Tom spending around 20 minutes wandering around the area before moving on to the next station.

He said: "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."

So, he decided to use the footage he already had, and "repurpose it" into TikTok and Instagram videos, by adding in snippets of him talking to the camera, giving his opinion on each station.

But when Tom visited the final station on his list, Oval on the Northern Line, he found the experience "anticlimactic".

Tom said he had started the journey "probably around when Francis Bourgeois was blowing up" after he noticed a gap in the market on subjective reviews on Tube stations.

He said: "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."

Tom posted his evaluations on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube where he has amassed around 50,000 followers across the platforms, with his most popular video seeing more than two million views on Instagram.

"I couldn't believe it when my videos started getting views, but there's a real community of people who follow my videos now," he said.

Now, he 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.

So far, he has been to 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 - and has also discovered Billingsgate Roman House and Bath underneath an unassuming office block in the city.

Tom does not intend to replace his full-time job with content creation.

Instead, his ultimate goal is to "have fun" with his platform.

He said: "The thing I'm proudest of is the community it's helped build – there's people who know each other through liking my Tube reviews and my videos, and are now friends.

"That makes me feel happy."

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