Waterloo

The busiest station in Britain, two of its best theatres, and a graffiti tunnel underneath the tracks.

Waterloo is a station and the district that grew around it. The first trains ran in 1848, and it is now the busiest railway station in the country, with more than twenty platforms and tens of millions of journeys a year through it. The name, and the bridge, come from the battle of 1815. That bridge has a story of its own. The present Waterloo Bridge was put up during the Second World War, when much of the labour on it was women's because the men were away; it is still called the Ladies' Bridge, and the view from the middle of it, with the City one way and Westminster the other, is the best from any bridge in London. The theatre came before the trains. The Old Vic opened in 1818 and has been going ever since, with Olivier's National Theatre company based there for a decade before it got a building of its own; the Young Vic next door does the newer work. Behind the station, Lower Marsh keeps a street market and the shops that go with it, and Roupell Street is a complete row of workers' houses of the 1820s that film crews use whenever they need Victorian London. Under the platforms is Leake Street, a tunnel Banksy opened to painters in 2008; it is legal to paint there, and the walls change from week to week.