Covent Garden Underground Station – 'the tube', as Londoners call it – is at the corner of James Street and Long Acre. With very little space at their disposal, the architects decided to use lifts, and not escalators, to take passengers down to platform level. For many years only two lifts were working here, and London Transport appealed to passengers to use other nearby stations, such as Leicester Square. However, the lifts have finally been modernised. Even so, the thronging numbers of tourists here can cause unpleasant overcrowding at weekends, so you might prefer to avoid using the station in any case. The station here opened in 1907, when the area was a working-class market region – so no real effort was made on the architecture of the station, which is quite prosaic.