In the late 1980s, when I lived in Wood Green and worked at King’s Cross, the underground line I used most was the Piccadilly Line. Between Caledonian Road and King’s Cross, if you look out of the correct side of the train, a break in the cables that run through the tunnels heralds a fleeting glimpse of the deserted platforms of a disused station. This was York Road which was closed on 17th September 1932. It certainly caught my imagination and I desperately wished that I could have the opportunity explore the place. Ghost stations are exciting to me - I used to imagine nodding off after a night out only to wake up as the train drew into York Road, and 1932.
I acquired a diagrammatic history, which mapped all the disused stations (there are over forty of them). The map details their opening date as well as that of their closure - if you write about the London of the past, you don’t want to have a character boarding a train at a station they simply could not have used. Even for the open ones, you have to check that they had the same name back then and the map details and dates name changes too. Tower Hill was Mark Lane until 1946, Green Park was Dover Street to 1933, and there is a very complicated story involving the names Charing Cross, Embankment, Trafalgar Square and Strand.
When the London Transport Museum began offering Hidden London tours I absolutely had to go. Sadly there was no tour of York Road available, but over the years I’ve been to Aldwych, Baker Street, Charing Cross, Clapham South, Dover Street, Down Street, Euston, Highgate High Level, Holborn, Kingsway Tram Tunnel, Moorgate, Piccadilly Circus, Shepherd’s Bush, and St James’s Park - 55 Broadway.
Before first attending, I pictured the stations as having been sealed off on their day of closure, with everything left as it was - posters advertising long gone musicals and railway outings to seaside resorts at the height of their popularity. Sadly, it isn’t quite like that and you have to apply a hefty dollop of imagination to picture these spaces as they once were. There have been many uses for such extensive subterranean spaces over the years - from storage of cleaning equipment to priceless works of art, from shelter for the public, to shelter for organisations and the government.
But you soon get the hang of reading these dark tunnels and passages. The guides, young, old and in between, tend to be excellent. Not only do they have a great knowledge and love of their subject, but they have an enviable ability to convey the information articulately. They do not speak in jargon nor do they ‘dumb it down’.
One thing that has struck me is that there is very much more to a station than you see when using the tube. Besides being dark, dusty labyrinths far larger than I had imagined, each station has something different to offer. Down Street was used by the government while the Cabinet War Rooms were being prepared during the Second World War. Holborn features wartime London Transport staff accommodation. Moorgate retains the apparatus that protected the tunnellers as the tube was being bored - a Barlow-Greathead Shield. Clapham South still has some of the accommodation used by those who arrived from the West Indies on the Empire Windrush. Aldwych and Charing Cross’s old Jubilee Line platforms are used by film companies, depending on which period their stories are set in. Euston has an old passenger subway, which actually does have surviving advertising posters from the 1960s. Dover Street allows access to some spectacular ventilation architecture.
Almost all of them retain sections of the Leslie Green tiling that typified underground stations built during the great expansion in Edwardian times. Imagine over forty new stations opening in central London over a period of eighteen months - all with the same oxblood tiles on the outside, but each with their own distinct coloured tiling inside.
Many of the tours are of disused areas of stations which are otherwise still open and the station staff are very tolerant of their visitors. But a word of caution - the next time you find yourself alone on a deserted platform waiting for a train, do not pick your nose or take any remedial action to prevent a threatened wardrobe malfunction - at least not at the listed stations. There is a chance that twenty strangers may be standing in a dark, dusty passage, and observing you through a grille.
The London Transport Museum does a fantastic job of promoting the history of the city’s transport system. As well as the Hidden London tours and the museum itself, there are open days at the Acton Depot where they store the vehicles, signs and posters they don’t have room for at the Covent Garden site. They also arrange trips on heritage vehicles, such as the restored 1938 tube stock and Metropolitan No 1 steam locomotive. Separately, the London Bus Preservation Trust has a London Bus Museum at Brooklands - but I'll come to that another day.
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