Locked eyes on the District Line... and other love stories

Katie Strick's new podcast celebrates our city's most heartwarming meet-cutes, starting on the Underground

- Katie Strick

IT was a Saturday afternoon in the autumn of 2012 and Tess Gardiner, a 23-year-old press officer, was on her way to a friend’s party near Oxford Circus.

She’d clocked him immediately — the tall handsome man who’d boarded the same Overground train at West Drayton — but thought nothing of it, except for subconsciously or perhaps somewhat consciously choosing to get onto the same carriage as him when it turned out that he was also changing onto the Central line at Ealing Broadway.

She did not know it then, but Tess’s decision to board that particular carriage would change her life. The man she now knows to be Ben — a 22-yearold advertising exec and, as of June this year, her husband — took out the novel he was reading, as did she, and the pair began a subtle game of eye-flirting for the next few stops into central London.

“I don’t know what it was about him,” she says, looking back. “It was almost like I recognised his face and needed to know who he was... I just thought to myself, ‘I’m going to get off this Tube and never see this person again’. I didn’t have the balls to go up and start a conversation in front of everyone, but I just thought, ‘Sod it, I’ve got nothing to lose, I’ll give him my number.’”

Tess was lucky enough to have a bag full of paper receipts at her disposal. She settled on a nicely London-feeling one for a ticket to watch the Paralympics that summer. “When the announcer’s voice said the next stop was Oxford Circus I went over to him and thrust the number in front of his face,” she recalls.