An urban myth (mentioned in an article in the Fortean Times #105) tells of a subterranean race living in a fabulous network of tunnels unknown to us ground dwellers. They live on a diet of cast-away takeaways, vagrants and addled commuters and they shun the daylight.  London's contribution to the myths of animals living in the sewers is the sewer pig, a story at least as old as Henry Mayhew, who mentions it in London Labour and the London Poor.  It is probably as old as the sewers themselves.  In Michael Moorcock's Mother London a writer with an obsession with lost tube tunnels becomes intrigued by tales of an underground race living long-unseen by surface dwellers in disused tunnels and side-sewers, and finally he finds them. More recent, and less gothic, is Tobias Hill's tale of tube life Underground, which mixes prosaic London locations with grisly murder and long-lost tunnels. His hero also ventures into one the deeper younger tunnels spaced along the Northern Line which were later bought by companies offering commercial archiving services. And 2006 saw the publication of Conrad Williams' London Revenant, which uses the real strange and dark places under London as a jump-off into territory even darker and stranger. Published in 2007, Tom Becker's Darkside deals with an alternative dark London accessible either through a sewer pipe by Blackfriars Bridge or Down Street Underground station (below). A Stephen Poliakoff film called Hidden City was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1988. It stars Charles Dance as an academic who is approached in the street by a straggly young blonde girl who's seen something strange on some old film, and needs his help tracking down another canister. Their quest takes them through a lot of the famously hidden and abandoned parts of London - the Kingsway Tram Tunnel, the Goodge Street Tunnels, Postman's Park and the St Pancras Hotel, for examples. As something of a lost grail for tunnel-types and fans of lost and abandoned London it's fitting that this is viewable only as a murky downloadable copy of an old VHS tape. Or in the BFI's swanky videotheque.
		The Underground  provides related legends of bricked-up trains full of skeletons in dark and dusty suits and of lost and miraculously preserved stations.  This  theme has been covered by fiction as disparate as the 1972 film Death Line and an episode of The Goon Show called The Scarlet Capsule, the mysterious 'mind-the-doors' chant being a shared theme. There is supposed to be an office block in the City which has a basement room where, if you open an old door behind a filing cabinet, you find yourself on a long-disused station platform, where the chocolate machines take pre-decimal money and posters advertise long-forgotten films. Ghost stations which do exist include Down Street (see photo left). Closed in May 1932 its brick walls are visible when travelling between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park on the Piccadilly Line. (Tours of Down Street can be booked through The London Transport Museum.) Then there's Spring Grove (Piccadilly Line), Tower of London and Lords (Metropolitan), British Museum and Post Office (Central), and Bull & Bush, King William Street, City Road and South Kentish Town (Northern). There are 40 in all. Now (November 2011) comes the news that a businessman is trying to persuade TfL to let him buy up, and put to use, 26 of the these disused tube stations. The term 'ghost stations' has become de rigueur, but Ajit Chambers has set up The Old London Underground Company and is hoping, by making some of them into tourist attractions, to open more as money-making restaurants and nightclubs and such like. He takes an Evening Standard journalist down Brompton Road station, which was used as an anti-aircraft control station during WWII and was where, we are told, Rudolf Hess was interrogated. The article was preceded by a news item earlier in 2011. London's cartoon-character Mayor Boris Johnson is very enthusiastic, but let's hope that something good will come of this anyway.

 

Aldwych Station This station was closed on Friday September 30th 1994, and it now features in almost every film made in London which needs some London Underground ambience. This is due partly to its good location, and partly to its large lift -  ideal for moving location camera gear. If you've seen Nil by Mouth, Sliding Doors, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere or This year's love, amongst many others, you've seen a film filmed down the Aldwych.  Lately it's featured in the Harry Potter films and TV series Spooks. You can hire it for a party for up to 350 people, and in early 1999 it hosted an art experience by John Berger and Simon McBurney called The Vertical Line. In 2000 it was opened to the public as part of that year's Open House weekend, but it was filled with some truly tedious modern art, and you couldn't get below ground level to the platforms. There's been an unused platform there since 1908, used for storing paintings from the National Gallery during World War I, for testing tunnel finishes, and for training by the fire brigade and Transport Police. Dover Street The film Wings of the Dove  featured a handsome Edwardian station called Dover Street, which is what Green Park station used to be called. The webmaster of the excellent Underground History website linked to below is of the opinion that this is a set, if an unusually accurate one, but is keen to hear from anyone with certain knowledge. The characters also travel through an authentic sequence of stations, even if the do look like the same set with different name panels!		Down Street Euston Station There are many tunnels and lift shafts beneath Euston that haven't seen commuter action in many a year - some have been closed since 1967 and some since 1914. For this knowledge, and some mighty fine photos, thanks to Robert Stainforth. I especially like the scraps of 1960s posters. Goodge Street At the end of one of the platforms of Goodge Street Underground station a sign warning of a deep shaft is evidence of a deep and once secret complex of tunnels built as air raid shelters in the Second World War. (More shelters were built along the Northern Line at Belsize Park, Camden Town, Clapham Common, and Clapham North.) Also said to have been used as a transit camp by soldiers on their way to Suez in 1956. There are entrance buildings in Chenies Street opposite the station entrance and further along Tottenham Court Road, opposite Heals. Photos here Update: an e-mail I received from an old soldier in August 2007 seems to confirm this story, as he stayed there in 1952 on his way from his base in Newton Abbott to the Canal Zone. He writes: 'I only spent one night there. With the noise of the trains in the other tunnels that was more than enough!'

 

Tim Bradford The groundwater diaries Trials tributaries and tall stories from beneath the streets of London Flamingo 2004 The reviews in these pages tend to be positive. No-one pays me to write this stuff so I only read what I think I'm going to like.  I thought that I was going to like this one: the chapters have weird titles and the pages are full of odd drawings and peculiar layouts. But let me quote. Talking about how rivers tend to be named after pre-Roman goddesses, we are told that the naming of the Thames derives from a pre-Indo-European tongue and referring to the Goddess Isis. Some posh Oxbridge rowing types still call it that. Well we've got names for posh Oxbridge rowing types, like 'big-toothed aristo wankers' etc. The next paragraph deals with Samuel Johnson's famous quote about being tired of London meaning that you're tired of life saying: He may have been a fat mad-as-a-hatter manic depressive in a wig, but there is something in his thesis. And so on. There is a non-thin line between entertaining irreverence and boneheaded blokishness and after several pages of this kind of stuff I was unwilling to persevere and find out if this book ever stepped back over this line.

J.E.Connor London's disused Underground Stations Connor & Butler 1999 A mine of good stuff about long-closed and spooky stations, their old signs just visible through the murk, posters for long-forgotten films and chocolate peeling from their hidden tile walls. The entry for the old British Museum station mentions talk of an Ancient Egyptian ghost, and that the 1935 film Bulldog Jack featured a station called Bloomsbury which had a secret passage leading into a sarcophagus in the British Museum. Stations like Hounslow West tend to lack the glamour of the above, but there's a map, some fine photos, including lots of tickets and nuggets of fragrance amongst the dates and stats in what is essentially a buff's book. To go with it there's... J.E.Connor Abandoned Stations on London's Underground  Connor & Butler 2000 Which could easily be confused with the above book, having a title which almost rearranges the words in the other book's but is, in fact, a companion volume containing less info but more pictures. It's well worth getting too, having some lovely old black and white pics (left is one of City Road Station) of dusty tunnels and stations and entrances in streets in the 1920s with blokes in flat caps sitting around, whilst a woman out of a P.G. Wodehouse story strolls past (page 45). And more old tickets (in colour this time) and maps.

Andrew Emmerson and Tony Beard London's Secret Tubes Capital Transport 2004 The first book on its subject in a few years sets out to provide the facts, and thereby lay to rest romantic conspiracy theories and other woolly conclusions. The chapters attempt to be thematic rather than chronological, but consequently lack flow somewhat. The subjects covered range from the adaptation of freshly-built tube lines as wartime shelters to the building of new tunnels for use as shelters during the war. The transport-centric viewpoint is not well camouflaged, but the book also covers the mail-railway and the Whitehall tunnels. The detail ranges from the interesting to the excessive, but the photos are fascinating in a functional way. A bit of a buff's book then, but with enough style and fascinating stuff to interest us dabblers.

Stephen Halliday Amazing & Extraordinary London Underground Facts This looks like one of those gift books that live in toilets rather than on bookshelves, but it's better than that, and a stylish production too. It's a mine of information from the basic facts to the arcane, with chapters devoted to each of the lines, as well as to the entrepreneurs in the early days, the tube during the war, the catastrophes and bombings, and such. The author has form - he wrote The Big Stink, reviewed elsewhere on this site, as well as the esteemed Underground to Everywhere, which confirms this as being no mere cheapo hack job. An efficient and pretty introduction, then, and of interest to enthusiasts too.

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