The Circle line is not a circle

Until 2009 the Circle line was a closed loop. Then it was extended west to Hammersmith, and now a train leaves Hammersmith, joins the loop at Edgware Road, goes all the way around and finishes back at Edgware Road. In the game you can see this: Paddington and Edgware Road each appear twice. The route is shaped more like the letter Q than like a circle.

The northern side of the loop, from Paddington through Baker Street, Euston Square and King's Cross to Farringdon, is the stretch where the world's first underground railway opened on January 10, 1863.

West: Hammersmith to Paddington

Just outside Hammersmith station, The Ark is a boat-shaped office building clad in glass and aluminium, finished in 1992 beside the flyover. At Paddington, a bronze statue of Paddington Bear stands on the concourse, unveiled in 2000. Nearby, over the Paddington Basin, is Thomas Heatherwick's Rolling Bridge, from 2004, a footbridge that curls up into an octagonal coil to let boats through.

North: Baker Street to Farringdon

The Sherlock Holmes Museum is at 221B Baker Street. It opened in 1990 and is a recreation of the detective's Victorian rooms, in a townhouse built in the 1810s, well before the stories were written. Farther east, at King's Cross St Pancras, the red-brick Gothic front of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel was completed in 1873 as the Midland Grand Hotel. Behind it is William Barlow's train shed, from 1868. Nearby stands a bronze of Sir Nigel Gresley, the locomotive engineer who designed the Mallard, which still holds the world speed record for a steam locomotive, set in 1938.

At Farringdon you reach the end of the 1863 line. Smithfield Market, designed by Sir Horace Jones and completed in 1868, has traded meat on this site for centuries, and it is London's last surviving wholesale market. Hatton Garden nearby is the old diamond and jewellery quarter, with close to 300 jewellery businesses in a few streets.

East and south: the City, the river and Westminster

The Barbican Conservatory opened in 1984 above the Barbican Theatre's fly tower, to hide the stage machinery, and it ended up as the second largest conservatory in London after Kew. At Tower Hill is Tower Bridge, opened in 1894, still able to raise its twin road spans to almost vertical. Its Gothic towers were designed to match the Tower of London rather than to show the steel frame beneath.

At Monument, the column by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, finished in 1677, is 61 meters tall and stands exactly 202 feet from the bakery in Pudding Lane where the Great Fire began in 1666, so its height matches the distance. At Cannon Street the London Stone, a worn block of limestone behind glass at 111 Cannon Street, has been a landmark since at least the medieval period, and nobody knows what it was for.

Along the Embankment you pass Cleopatra's Needle, an Egyptian obelisk carved around 1450 BC and put up on the embankment in 1878 after it was nearly lost at sea on the way. Then Westminster, where the Elizabeth Tower, known as Big Ben after its Great Bell, was completed in 1859. A five-year restoration finished in 2022 and the clock faces were repainted in their original Victorian blue and gold.

West again: South Kensington to Notting Hill Gate

South Kensington is the stop for the Natural History Museum. Alfred Waterhouse designed the terracotta building, which opened in 1881 and carries carved animals on its facade, extinct on one wing and living on the other. A blue whale skeleton named Hope has hung in the entrance hall since 2017. The ride closes the loop at Notting Hill Gate, where the Churchill Arms is covered in thousands of flowers in summer.

Ride it yourself

The Circle line in the game follows the same order as the real trains, including the two stations it visits twice.