The secret film studio you pass on your commute.

Many disused tube tunnels under London are snapshots in time — the advertising present on the day of closure still pealing from the walls.

At first glance upon entering, the closed Jubilee platforms under Charing Cross are more of the same — a door back to the mid 1990s when the angle of the tunnels in relation to the line’s eastward extension meant trains no longer stopped there.

Except on closer inspection, this is an alternate 90s. It’s familiar, but something doesn’t sit quite right.

And, as you walk along, the experience is less time capsule, more time machine — one section of tunnel feeling cringe-worthily 00s, another jarringly contemporary.

There’s an explanation for this. To sate the film and tv industry’s fixation with the tube, these platforms have been given over to filming locations. As such, real-world adverts for real-world products couldn’t do.

Instead these ghost platforms are adorned with fake advertisements, cooked up by production company designers to be indistinguishable when glanced behind actors embroiled in a chase scene.

When you’re stood still, able to look properly, the deceit is laughably explicit. For example, an ersatz art house film’s poster proclaims it’s ‘Showing now at Cinema, Cinema’.

What emerges on any particular stretch of tunnel is a distillation of the visual culture of the era a film was made in. It wasn’t so much an alternate 90s you saw, but a generic 90s, perhaps even an essential 90s. The design language of the moment is rarefied and reflected back at you, easier to see now it’s been abstracted from meaningful content.

This might be a new form of cultural critique of consumer capitalism. But it’s also just kinda silly.

Witness — one bored set designer gave the lead role in their faux action blockboster to ‘Hugh Jass’. Good one.