The artist Serena Korda has known Stanmore Underground station in northwest London since she used it every day to get to school. She also had to pass a building that once housed a top wartime secret. Both these facts are clues to the nature of her latest exhibition, commissioned by Art on the Underground.

The building housed 57 Turing Bombe machines, the technology used by wartime codebreakers at nearby Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma code. Potential recruits to the codebreaking unit had to complete the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle in less than 12 minutes - a test suited to the chess champions, mathematicians and polyglots who formed the typical pool of applicants.

Finally, consider that Londoners sheltering from the Blitz deep in the Underground were given crosswords to while away the time, and that London transport issued crossword puzzles on the reverse side of information pamphlets - and you have the last clues necessary to discover the secret to Korda's DIY exhibition at Stanmore Tube station.

Her gilded heraldic banners gracing the entrance hall, Korda has developed a series of crosswords that form the basis of a new art installation called The Answer Lies at the End of the Line. Each person who travels to the station is invited to enter a playful and tricky alternative world of ciphers and mysterious clues, highlighting the various landmarks and stories peculiar to Stanmore. The individual puzzle themes are the Stanmore Choral Society, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, the Bird Walk of Canons Park, Stanmore Bowls Club, the London Underground, Bletchley Park, and the infamous Duke of Chandos, who made and lost a fortune in ten years.

Times Archive, 1939: English for foreigners

Foreign students at the holiday course in English at the University of London were advised to tackle the crossword puzzles in The Times and to read the books of Mr P. G. Wodehouse

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Korda has collaborated with a group of crossword setters called the Stanmore Puzzlers, who do this sort of thing in their sleep, as well as the professional setters Geoff Heath and Roy Dean of The Times, who is said to hold the world record for completing The Times crossword (not one of his own, presumably) in a time of three minutes and 45 secs. There's a cheerful graphic illustration of Dean in Korda's exhibit, complete with the challenge: “Can you beat Roy's record?”

Truthfully, no. But I think I'll hang out here a while, staring at Korda's crafty illustration of owls - which form an important clue - and her portrait of the rotund, bewigged and befuddled Lord Chandos, who's trying to tell me across the centuries that there's still a good ale to be had at the local pub, even if his fabulous castle at Stanmore didn't survive the stock market crash of 1720.

A crossword is an entry into a kind of labyrinth, but it keeps it all on square and familiar footing. That's part of its disguise. To a crossword enthusiast there is much more afoot. It's a delightful and challenging dance of intricacy and depth. I like that you can be a daring and brilliant codebreaking crossworder from the comfort of your own armchair - or, even better, by a walk through Stanmore station. Unless, like me, you can't solve them.

Even so, I'm up for the challenge. In my dreams I'm something of a “cryptoplumber”. I've read Alice in Wonderland (a book in code if ever there was one) and Neal Stephenson's hypnotic Cryptonomicon, the first and last word in cryptography. I've seen the films Enigma (2001), The Name of the Rose (1986) and The Da Vinci Code (2006). Surely I can do crosswords. In this audience-participation art installation, first, you solve the quick and cryptic crosswords in the crossword booklet available from stations on the Jubilee Line, or in the easily downloaded PDF. The “cribs” (what the Bletchley folk called their aids to cracking codes) are all located at Stanmore station, where Korda's clean-cut linocut insignias serve as ciphers for each participating group or organisation.

Let's see: 22 down in the Duke of Chandos puzzle. First name for many French kings, five letters. Got to be Louis. Which would intersect with 20 across: tropical fruit, nine letters - “Pineapple!” Good! The fact that I can't get the rest means nothing. I mean, what's a “sociable biscuit”? (five across, seven letters.)

Perhaps I would not have made it as a codebreaker, after all, although - like every film director - I like to think that I understand what the wind, birds, sunlight and sky are telling me, and my own handwriting amounts to a code I break daily. Never mind. Luckily, the full answers, as the title of the exhibition suggests, are at the end of the line. And for those content to live without answers, the linocuts in shades of moss and rust and mustard are stimulating all by themselves.

To download the PDF of Serena Korda's puzzles from Art on the Underground go to www.tfl.gov.uk/pfa