While commuters on the Northern and Piccadilly lines have fumed and jostled,
the inspectors have been ooh-ing and ah-ing about bricks and colour schemes.

The reaction of the poor tax-payers who use the Underground to this
questionable use of public money can only be imagined. The rest of Whitehall
may be tightening its belt, but the heritage industry is as remorseless as
ever, finding more and more things for us to appreciate simply because they
are old.

”The stations awarded listed status are as valuable to London’s architectural
story as many more famous buildings like the Houses of Parliament,’’
declares Simon Thurley, the chief executive of English Heritage, in one of
the year’s most fatuous overstatements.

Is he seriously putting Chalk Farm station on a par with Sir Charles Barry’s
architectural masterpiece? Does he expect visitors to London to make a
detour to West Acton station and take photographs? It’s no good beating the
drum for conservation if you cannot keep a sense of proportion.

Nostalgia, of the kind to which the English are so prone, can be a
debilitating condition. Is there any nation which spends so much time
looking over its shoulder and so little time looking forward? The
Underground may be a part of our cultural heritage, but it is also, and far
more urgently, a problem crying out for a solution.

One of the newly listed stations, on the strength of some glazed red tiles, is
Oxford Circus, which must rank high on the list of Parts of the Planet to be
Avoided at All Costs: a sweaty, heaving hell hole of a station, heartily
detested by all who use it.

If it could be knocked down tomorrow and replaced by a functional modern
station, the cheers of joy from shoppers and commuters would be heard in
Paris. But now that it has been listed, its demise can only be retarded by
red tape.

”It was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good
thing, to make it too common,’’ says Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. The
listed buildings racket is a textbook case. A worthy initiative, aimed at
conserving our built environment, has become a bureaucratic excrescence.
There are more than 370,000 listed buildings, mainly in the Grade II
category, and the way things are going, every village in England is going to
have one.

To buildings of grace and distinction have been added mere cultural
curiosities, so that officially listed ”buildings’’ now include red
telephone boxes, decaying lidos, concrete bus depots and the zebra crossing
on Abbey Road immortalised by the Beatles.

It is not wrong to want to conserve our heritage, and it is not wrong to
interpret that heritage in its widest sense. But the listing of obscure
underground stations, unloved by those who use them, is a conservation
gesture too far. It is symptomatic of a country that has got its priorities
wrong.

We should be concentrating on getting people from A to B as efficiently as
possible, not trying to turn stations into cultural shrines. The
long-suffering commuters at Wood Green and Hendon Central deserve better.