IanVisits
ianvisits.co.uk · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Ian Visits is a London-focused blog by Ian Mansfield covering the Underground, transport projects, and lesser-known places in the city.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend it for London stuff, calling it a serendipitous resource for Londoners with a mostly transport-related focus.
105HN people shared it
48linked it in comments
262stories submitted
6.8Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground15 people · 362 points · first shared 2017 · 157 comments on HN
- 2Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground (2017)6 people · 76 points · first shared 2022 · 59 comments on HN
- 3Homepage6 people · first shared 2012
- 4A Look at HS2's Old Oak Common Station4 people · 77 points · first shared 2019 · 129 comments on HN
- 5London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground4 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 6Do Londoners dream of electric buses?3 people · 67 points · first shared 2018 · 96 comments on HN
- 7Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free2 people · 434 points · first shared 2021 · 147 comments on HN
- 83D Diagrams of London Underground Stations2 people · 155 points · first shared 2022 · 53 comments on HN
- 9The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)2 people · 110 points · first shared 2023 · 86 comments on HN
- 10The London office where swinging pendulums keep cyber threats at bay2 people · 85 points · first shared 2024 · 58 comments on HN
- 11The chemical attack that forced the Northern line's extraordinary repair2 people · 13 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 12Tracking smartphones is helping TfL update it’s Journey Planner2 people · 9 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 13National Portrait Gallery Buys Rare Photographs of Ada Lovelace for the UK2 people · 7 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 14The era of Light Reflectors in London’s alleys2 people · 6 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 15Tackling the Tube's Roar: TfL's battle against tube tunnel noise2 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
throwaway2037 · 2026-06-11
> I live 3h walk from central London - I know because I've walked it, for fun
This sounds like a great blog post! Or you can collab with https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/
beardyw · 2024-02-28
Sorry - what sites. Stand outs for me are
Samuel Pepys Diary - now over a year into it. Feed aligned with weekday and approx date.
Ian Visits - great serendipitous resource for Londoners.
https://www.pepysdiary.com/
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/
paltaie · 2026-02-13
Not a perfect match but I instantly thought of ianVisits for London stuff. It's a similar vibe to this but is mostly transport-related: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/
ablation · 2025-09-16
For anyone else who wants to dig into more of the lesser-spotted parts of London, here are a couple of other content creators/writers I enjoy:
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/
https://www.youtube.com/@JagoHazzard (mostly train/tube-related but does go a bit broader too)
DrBazza · 2024-06-09
Which reminds me of the lamp posts in Canary Wharf - the original ones are all uniquely enscribed: https://londonist.com/london/best-of-london/a-lamp-post-tour-of-london
And half the bollards are old cannons. https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2022/11/28/the-london-street-bollards-tha…
And the old cobbles were wooden. - https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-time-when-londons-streets-wer…
drcongo · 2022-07-19
Great article on the why here: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/cooling-the-tube-engineering-heat…
gourneau · 2021-09-07
Can anyone recommend art data sets like this, but with images?
I am trying to compile as many as I can. So far I have these:
* https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2021/01/21/over-700000-paintings-from…
* https://www.artic.edu/articles/902/public-access-to-our-public-presenc…
* https://artvee.com/
Symbiote · 2021-07-31
That is a pessimistic spin on things. They're opening the final part of the line (the new tunnels), they're confident of doing this in February, and there's a clear plan on how the rest will open in stages in the following 12 months or so.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2021/07/12/crossrail-to-make-changes-…
Erwin · 2021-01-21
I'd also like to recommend the rest of Ian's site, as it has lots of periodic, often geeky, information about London, especially Underground. Like his weekly review of alleys: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/category/alleys/
lathiat · 2019-05-29
The London Underground definitely does that. Also in part because it reduces the heat output. The underground has been heatsoaking for decades and it’s hitting problematic temperature levels.
This article is a great read:
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the-tube-engineeri…
Apparently about half of the heat generated in the tunnels is/was from braking. And the tunnel temperatures have risen from 14-30C since around 1908.
Is a good read about the engineering challenges.
HenryBemis · 2017-10-08
Great article, especially for us living and working in London!
Bastinjn beat me to this (and got my upvote of course): https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2015/07/12/3d-maps-of-every-undergrou…
My favorite one is Bank/Monument.. such a maze!! pick the "wrong" exit and you may walk an extra 15mins for no reason!
jsingleton · 2015-09-03
Nice. I remember using that to see the ISS over London on Christmas last year. Great sight.
http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2014/12/16/space-station-to-fly-over-l…
Jamiecon · 2012-06-26
Absolutely wonderful. I have been looking for something like this for a long time.
You may want to consider contacting some of the London / tube bloggers for advice or assistance if you haven't already:
http://london-underground.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/3d-tube-maps-diagrams…
http://london-underground.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/3d-london-underground…
http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/
I suspect they'd be delighted to assist.
Also good to know we have a TFL rep on HN (@mcdowall). Promise I'll go easy ;-)
genmon · 2020-02-11
For an more in-depth look at some of the capacity benefits of HS2, this article on the London end of HS2 by ianvisits.co.uk is definitely worth a read:
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/08/20/taking-a-look-at-hs2s-huge…
On the redevelopment of Euston station:
> Building not just more platforms for HS2, but critically, the extra tunnels for those trains to use shifts intercity services to the HS2 line, releasing lots of capacity in the old tunnels for suburban services. If that doesn’t sound too important, then where’s the UK’s most congested train... it’s the 17:46 out of Euston which carries more than twice the number of passengers that it’s designed for. When completed, HS2 is expected to more than double the number of seats out of Euston station during peak hours.
It seems building HS2 is only part of the cost. A lot of it is also paying down "infrastructure debt" that hasn't been touched for decades.
tobylane · 2025-11-12
In a locked room off that car park is a bit more of that fortification. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/visiting-roman-ruins-hidden-under…
Y_Y · 2025-05-26
The cement can negatively effect the water retenction of the clay, as does of course the temperature. The water needn't seep into the tunnel, just be moved away from it to adjacted areas.
There's a nice article here which goes into more detail: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/cooling-the-london-underground-22…
waiwai933 · 2024-11-10
London's are available at: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/3d-maps-of-every-underground-stat…
chedabob · 2024-02-21
It opens once a year to the public. This is from last year https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/tickets-alert-tours-of-the-bt-tow…
quietbritishjim · 2023-11-21
I hate to break it to you but Victoria line modernisation, including cooler trains, has already happened in 2009. Here's an example IanVisits article about that:
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/today-marks-the-final-trip-of-the…
eesmith · 2023-11-21
Being done. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/cooling-the-tube-engineering-heat… (from 2017, 59 HN comments from 2022 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31694445) says
> Elsewhere, they’ve been using cool groundwater to cool some of the stations. An experiment at Victoria station was the first, as water from the River Tyburn was used to cool the air in the station. This was only an experiment, but at Green Park, a permanent version was installed in 2012.
> There, five boreholes were drilled deep down into the ground, and here cool water is sucked up to the surface, used to cool a separate water supply which is pumped down to cool the platforms, and the warmed groundwater is also pumped back into the ground.
kmlx · 2023-11-21
vidarh · 2023-10-11
Atmospheric railways were attempted a few different times, with similarly bad results. This page has a quite a bit more detail about one of the attempts:
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/croydon-experimental-atmospheric-…
pjc50 · 2023-10-11
Burying TBMs is not uncommon. The HS2 ones are being buried for an indefinite period due to UK government flipflopping. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/hs2-will-bury-two-tunnel-boring-m…
There's one in New York. https://untappedcities.com/2017/02/09/the-200-ton-tunnel-boring-machin…
Steve44 · 2023-10-08
Canary Wharf in London has a installation of six Swiss railway clocks which, invisible to most people passing by, has a clever way of synchronising.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/see-londons-six-swiss-railway-clo…
> The second hand takes 58.5 seconds to rotate around by 59 seconds, then the second hand pauses. It waits until a nationwide pulse is sent to every Swiss railway clock that a minute has passed, then the clock jumps to the minute and carries on for another 58.5 seconds.
Anticlockwise · 2023-08-30
Drinking alcohol because water was unsafe is a modern myth. Prior to (and for a long time after, too) the germ theory of disease, water was evaluated purely by taste. They drank lots of water. Thus the whole "cholera epidemic because one well in London was near where poop ran off" thing.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-myth-of-medieval-small-beer-1…
joshvm · 2023-07-15
A relevant discussion about the same issue in London caused by over a century of public transport (in deep tunnels though). I'm not sure the argument that surface climate change has no effect is true, using a single heat wave year as an example. I guess it's a long term trend and it probably takes time for the ground to warm (still small compared to 15C from the tube).
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/cooling-the-tube-engineering-heat…
zeristor · 2023-06-25
This is from 2008:
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/cart-marking-287/
r_hoods_ghost · 2022-07-15
Something that is very cool (hah!) is that originally they used the coolness of the deep tube lines as a selling point in summer[1], but over the last century the surrounding clay has absorbed so much heat that the ambient temperature is something like 30°
[1] https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/cooling-the-tube-engineering-heat…
Plasmoid2000ad · 2022-06-01
Does Manhattan suffer from heat soak in the underground?
I know in London, the Underground has generated so much heat over so many years, it no longer cools in Summer but instead retains heat overnight meaning it's sweltering even deep underground in many stations for much of the year.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/cooling-the-tube-engineering-heat…
It's always somewhat surprising to me that given a bit of time, a seemingly inexhaustible resource like heat capacity of the ground or ground water can actually be depleted once we put our minds to using it.