Student walkers fly high on Underground

A casual conversation with a friend that a “fun day out” could be spent, walking the length of the Northern Line from High Barnet to Morden, inspired student Eitan Okrent to think: “Why not do the whole of the Underground?”

And so Tubeathon was born, a massive effort devised by Okrent, in which 27 teams of young people walked to almost every station in the official London Underground, to raise money for the Lives Not Knives charity.

At the end of the event, which took place last Sunday, the 120 footsore walkers — around 80 per cent of whom were Jewish — celebrated raising nearly £9,000 for Lives Not Knives.

The “almost every station” part is because it is impossible, says Okrent, to reach Heathrow’s tube stations as a pedestrian. But everywhere else is accessible by foot, and part of the enjoyment of the day for the Tubeathon walkers was being able to see — sometimes for the first time — the parts of the city above ground that they had perhaps previously only visited as tube travellers.

Each team took pictures when they arrived at their designated stations, and Okrent and his group of organisers are now busy putting together an album of all the pictures. “We wanted it to be bulletproof so that no-one could challenge what was done, and to show that everyone had indeed walked from tube station to tube station”.

Okrent, in fact, has form when it comes to the Tube, as last year he and two friends took part in the Tube Challenge — which is a competition for the fastest time to travel to each of the 272 stations. After an exhausting sounding 19 hours on the Tube, the trio managed 264 stations — but raised £1500 for the Homeless Action in Barnet (HAB) charity. Okrent, a self-confessed tube nerd, said: “Even I didn’t want to get on a tube train for quite some time after that”.

This time, however, Okrent was not participating, but organising. He said: “I knew I wanted to do something for young people in London, and I also knew that knife crime is a real problem. Lives Not Knives has a brilliant reputation, and it has all kinds of mentoring schemes to bring young people together and attack the root of knife crime”.

The issue is, of course, one that has haunted City Hall. Okrent paid tribute both to Mayor Sadiq Khan “who posted about the Tubeathon on his Insta account and gained us many donations”, and to Barnet and Camden’s London Assembly member Councillor Anne Clarke, “we couldn’t have done it without her help”.

Okrent, who lives in Finchley, is 17 and in his last year at Christ’s College, which gave him space at the school for the after-walk celebration. He is also a member of Noam Masorti youth movement, a barmitzvah teacher and the family are members of New North London Synagogue.

Currently, he is studying hard for his A-levels, after which he says, he plans to train as a commercial pilot, an ambition he has had since he was a child. From under ground to sky high, you might say.