Since it first opened its gates to passengers a quarter-century ago in November 1999, the Jubilee Line Extension has lost none of its vitality. This was a world of innocence and idyll: one that did not yet know the World Trade Center attacks or the invasion of Iraq (though was soon to experience the full horror of Queen Elizabeth II being forced to link hands with Tony and Cherie Blair in the Millennium Dome). Macy Gray’s “I Try” and Robbie Williams’ “She’s The One” were riding high in the music charts and the dawn of the year 2000 was just over a month away. As a pimply teenager, I walked through the sleek battleship grey of the Jubilee Line’s new and cleverly lit stations and thought the future felt secure.

Westminster station is a particular delight: the deep-level Jubilee line platforms are reached by a 128-foot descent of escalators through an underworld of concrete and polished steel. This cavernous void is the closest thing in physical life to the “Imaginary Prisons” of Piranesi’s etchings: its monumentality all the more surprising for being subterranean. Unlike most infrastructure projects, its use is raised to the level of an experience.

At Westminster, even the construction itself was a feat: To avoid interruption to the existing District & Circle line station just below ground level, its platforms were lowered incrementally at night while the line was closed. Big Ben stands just over 100 feet away and detailed measurements of the tower were taken every day to calculate specific injections of grout to limit the London icon’s movement to no more than 1.4 inches.

The station’s aesthetics simultaneously proclaim an unexpectedly English combination of modernity, austerity, and the future. Here, utilitarianism is a mere masque: the pretence of structural expediency in fact redeploys industrial style in the cause of aesthetic pleasure. It is refreshing that a quarter-century later this — and other Jubilee Line Extension stops — still convey a hint of science fiction and a world yet to come.

How integrated these stations look is all the more surprising considering the variety of architects involved. Roland Paoletti CBE gained experienced with Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway, whose chairman Sir Wilfrid Newton had left to lead London Regional Transport (TFL’s predecessor) in 1990. Newton commissioned Paoletti to set the overall tone of the stations so that they shared an “underlying philosophy and essential elements”. But while his in-house team took on Waterloo and Canada Water stations, Paoletti engaged a series of prominent firms to craft other individual stations: Sir Michael Hopkins at Westminster, Will Alsop at North Greenwich, Ian Ritchie at Bermondsey, Sir Norman Foster at Canary Wharf, to name the most notable.

At Canary Wharf, a capacious thumbnail of glass lures the passenger into a station of cathedral-like proportions deep in West India Quay. You might expect the steel-and-glass looks to leave the user cold, but a 2013 YouGov poll voted it the most loved of London’s Underground stations and it was estimated to have increased land values around it by £2 billion in the first five years since 1999. Foster’s station even had a silver-screen cameo in a chase scene during the 2016 Star Wars film Rogue One.

The generosity of public space on the JLE is no mere act of gratuity: Newton and Paoletti — as well as their Tory minders — wanted to spend well, but spend once. Future-proofing the line required broad passageways, ample provision of escalators and lifts, and convenient emergency exits. Each was designed to have step-free access. And during peak periods, trains on the Jubilee line run every two to three minutes  — a level of frequency only beaten by the Victoria line with a service every minute and twenty seconds.

The JLE was also central to London cementing its strong but continually challenged standing as a global financial hub. The Docklands Light Railway is a fun little toy train but had failed to provide the district with the transport oomph it needed to complement the City and take on world-level status. Today it is hard to imagine losing money on London property, but Canary Wharf’s poor connectivity combined with the economic recession of 1990-1992 proved sufficiently challenging for its developers, the Toronto-based property giant Olympia & York, to declare bankruptcy. O&Y’s chairman Paul Reichmann had taken a major gamble with the 83-acre project but was inspired by the confidence of Margaret Thatcher’s free market reforms — as well as her commitment to extend the London Underground to reach the redeveloped Docklands. It wasn’t until 1993 — years after Maggie’s downfall — that Conservative Transport Secretary John Macgregor gave the start-work order for the Jubilee Line Extension.

In these first years of Canary Wharf’s redevelopment, Olympia & York had completed ten major buildings offering an extra four million square feet of office space. One Canada Square was the tallest building in the United Kingdom when completed in 1991, and held that title for more than two decades — but before the Jubilee line came to Canary Wharf it was often as much as forty per cent empty.

It was a thoroughly Conservative vision that pushed and delivered this project

Providing Canary Wharf with a high-capacity, frequent service connection to central London via the Jubilee line helped secure the capital’s role as the linch-pin between Europe and the world. In the intervening quarter-century, thirty new skyscrapers have been built offering millions more square feet in office space in addition to significant retail and residential development. During the year before the coronavirus struck, vacant space at Canary Wharf was as little as three per cent. The 2022 opening of the Elizabeth line has only increased the Docklands’ connectivity, and London City Airport links the district easily with Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, and beyond. It’s a shame they didn’t hook Canary Wharf up directly with the Channel Tunnel to further suck continental vitality into the hands of London-based middlemen and money managers.

The artistic and architectural excellence of the Jubilee line was no mere dilettante’s caprice: this infrastructure project unleashed economic forces that still drive and dominate modern Britain. It was a thoroughly Conservative vision that pushed and delivered this project, even though it only first bore fruit in the early years of New Labour. The Jubilee line shows us what a forever-Conservatism might have achieved were it not for the devastation of the Blairite landslide and the subsequent collapse of the centre-right’s confidence in its own ideas and its ability to deliver them. Considering the state not just of the Conservative party today but the entire United Kingdom, it is tempting to enjoy the Jubilee line as a memory of what we could once achieve, while looking upon these mighty works and despairing.