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Hidden London Discovering the Forgotten Underground
By Chris Nix, Siddy Holloway and David Bownes with Sam Mullins
New Haven CT and London: London Transport Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2019 Hardback. 240 pp. ISBN 978-0300245790. £17.50
Reviewed by Hugh Clout University College London
On 10 January 1863 the world’s first passenger-carrying underground railway was opened in London, its track having been excavated from the surface and then covered over. Hauled by steam locomotives, its gas-lit wooden carriages transported passengers from Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross mainline stations eastward to the margin of the City of London. One and a half centuries later, the Elizabeth line (also known as Crossrail 1) will provide a state-of-the-art east-west rail link across London when it is finally opened in 2021, substantially over budget. Up to five million people use the capital’s Underground network each working day but few are aware that ‘behind locked doors and lost entrances lies a secret world of disused stations, redundant passageways, empty lift shafts and cavernous ventilation ducts’ [23]. Focusing on ten case studies and using recent photographs and a variety of archival material, four experts from the London Transport Museum reveal the diversity of these lost spaces, explain how they came to be abandoned, and show how some found new uses. London’s underground railways were not conceived as parts of a single integrated system but were built by privately financed bodies that competed with bus and tram companies for profit. Not until 1933 was the London Passenger Board set up, amalgamating several organisations into what became known as ‘London Transport’. London’s first disused underground station is King William Street that was by-passed and abandoned as early as 1900, only ten years after the City and South London line started to run trains between Stockwell and the heart of the business district of the City. It was innovative in several ways: electric traction was employed rather than cable haulage; hydraulic lifts were installed giving access to platforms; and the tunnel was carved out at depth by an ingenious device known as the ‘Greathead Shield’, rather than being cut from the surface. Parliament required this machine to operate beneath existing streets, which resulted in tight curves along its track. Gradients up to King William Street were too steep for electric motors to cope with and trains would often grind to a halt, having to be pushed forward by the following locomotive. Platforms were inadequate, leading to severe overcrowding. The solution was to abandon the station and the old tunnel and replace them with a completely new stretch of line that served London Bridge main line terminus. Like many subsequently abandoned features, King William Street was used as an air raid shelter during World War II, in this case for up to 2,000 people. Another section of the old tunnel, this time south of the Thames, was opened as a shelter on 24 June 1940, six days after the start of the Blitz. The secret spaces around Piccadilly Circus station originated in a different way after it was realised that the lifts down to platform level were completely inadequate to cope with the volume of passenger traffic. The solution was to install escalators which are depicted in a remarkable ‘stomach diagram’ [63] that reveals the complexity of tunnels, passageways and escalators as well as the brand new circular ticket hall. When the station was re-opened in December 1928 after refurbishment, it was heralded as ‘a new heart for London’ [59]. During World War II its many abandoned spaces housed works of art from the Tate Gallery as well as giving shelter to thousands of Londoners each night. King William Street was not the only location to be abandoned, with several little-used stations on the Piccadilly line being closed in the early 1930s in order to accelerate journey times from the outer suburbs. These included York Road, Brompton Road, Dover Street and Down Street, the latter being adopted as the bunker headquarters for national railway operations during World War II. Earning the reputation as ‘the safest place in London’, Down Street became ’a vital, secret and secure communications hub for coordinating freight, troop and passenger trains’ [81] and even gave night time shelter to Winston Churchill while the Cabinet Rooms were being reinforced to withstand bomb blasts. Brompton Road housed London’s anti-aircraft operations command centre, and Dover Street accommodated essential London Transport staff. These deep stations were indeed safe but platforms closer to the surface were vulnerable. As my father, then a Metropolitan Police inspector, once told me, a bomb that hit houses adjacent to Bounds Green station on 13 October 1940 caused parts of the tunnel to collapse, killing sixteen among the many people sheltering there. Two days later, Balham station was hit, leading to the death of sixty civilians on the northbound platform. Disasters such as these increased public demand for safe shelters. During November 1940 locations for deep shelters were identified at a number of inner but especially suburban stations. Those along southern stretches of the Northern line were particularly important. The rotundas giving access by lift to these specially excavated deep tunnels remain prominent features. By the summer of 1942 the Clapham shelter, 36 metres below the surface, was ready to receive 8,000 sleepers. After World War II it provided emergency housing for bombed-out Londoners, accommodated young European visitors, and received newly arrived Jamaican immigrants. In central London, the deep shelter near Goodge Street served as an intelligence headquarters for American forces. With peace restored, deep tunnels and passageways found new uses, including the storage of archival material and – in at least one instance – the hydroponic growing of salad vegetables. Euston main line terminus, which was opened in 1837 at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, was served initially by the Metropolitan railway and then by two other companies that opened completely separate underground stations. Eventually these were linked by passageways but an abundance of secret spaces remained to be used as ventilation ducts and storage areas. During the 1960s the Victoria line was constructed through Euston, adding to the complexity of passages and escalators and enabling a dangerous ‘island’ platform to be replaced by a much wider, and safer, area. Further south, the district known as the Strand experienced substantial changes in underground provision. The original ‘Strand’ station (renamed ‘Aldwych’ in 1914) was served by a short branch line from Holborn which was intended to be the start of an extension running south of the Thames but this never came about. Years later, Aldwych was an important wartime shelter and also housed treasures from the British Museum. The station was finally closed in 1994 and has been used for making films and television programmes. A little further west, another company built an underground station named ‘Strand’ beneath the forecourt of Charing Cross mainline station. In due course, it too was named ‘Charing Cross’. In 1965, an official report proposed the construction of a new Tube, originally known as the Fleet line and later renamed the Jubilee line. It was to join Charing Cross to Aldwych before heading into southeast London. New tunnels were dug from Charing Cross almost to Aldwych but a new route was decided upon via Westminster, Waterloo and London Bridge and onwards into Docklands. Jubilee line facilities at Charing Cross station were left stranded by changes in transport policy, with the platforms being closed in 1999 leaving an abundance of abandoned space. ‘Hidden London’ is not, of course, confined to central London. North End (Hampstead) station was abandoned even before it was opened to passengers. Its origins lay in the thwarted ambitions of Charles Tyson Yerkes, an American businessman, who wished to develop the surrounding fields into a suburb. Deep underground, its tunnels and passageways years later formed a civil defence flood-control bunker during the Cold War. In the 1930s Highgate High Level station was the object of an ambitious plan for modernising and expanding passenger services in north London by linking the deep-level Tube to over-ground lines. This project failed to materialise and Northern line trains run only beneath the surface. Further north, two surface extremities of former ‘underground’ lines have become heritage railways. In Essex, the stretch between Epping and Ongar has several lovingly restored stations and is served by occasional steam or diesel trains to the delight of railway enthusiasts. In Buckinghamshire, a working museum at Quainton Road tells the story of how the Metropolitan railway (now terminating at Amersham and Chesham) failed in its attempt to develop this distant rural location into a railway junction. Hidden London is a mine of fascinating information that will appeal not only to railway enthusiasts but also to many who use the Tube each day. Its array of photographs reveals abandoned areas that most members of the public do not have the opportunity to visit. Its diagrams and reproduced archival documents are a delight to examine. It is not simply a coffee-table book since each example of abandonment is described in detail, with appropriate footnotes and bibliographic references to aid further enquiry. By focusing on case studies there is inevitably some repetition between sections with, for example, the story of tunnels, platforms and escalators being used as night shelters being recounted several times. The book ends abruptly with no attempt to offer a comprehensive conclusion. Detailed discussion of the London Transport headquarters at 55 Broadway, SW1, which is still standing and hardly exemplifies abandoned space, is surprising. Conversely, attention might well have been drawn to the Bethnal Green disaster of 3 March 1943 when 173 people died as they rushed down to seek shelter in the station. Likewise, the story could have been told of how unfinished tunnels on the Central line between Leytonstone and Gants Hill were used to house an aircraft factory from March 1942 until the end of the war. Without doubt, the publishers must be congratulated for producing such an attractive book at a very affordable price.
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