The myth and
reality of another London existing under our feet breeds seductive stories.
They involve the dark, the dirty, the unknown, urban myths, and the fear and
suspicion of what 'they' might be up to.
Chapman Pincher in the Daily Express in 1959 wrote of Ten miles of
reinforced tunnels built under London after the last
war at enormous cost.
These tunnels… are below Whitehall, Leicester Square, Holborn and Victoria
The Buckingham Palace Tunnel
There are several rumoured escape
tunnels from Buckingham Palace. One is said to run under Green Park to
the Piccadilly Tube line, giving the royals a speedy escape route to Heathrow.
Another is said to give access to the Victoria Line - which runs under
the Palace - for a similar escape, and one is said to lead to Wellington
Barracks just over the road.
More likely is the tunnel running
along the Mall to the underground citadel called Q-Whitehall which is rumoured
to stretch as far north as Holborn. Supposed evidence of this complex is
the huge extractor fan outside the Gent’s toilets in the ICA, which the
ICA say is nothing to do with them, and the top-secret fortress on the
corner of the Mall and Horse Guards Road which is said to be an entrance
to Q-Whitehall. This complex also probably connects to 10 Downing Street
via the atom-bomb-proof bunker which was built under the Ministry of Defence building
at a cost over £110 million in the early 1990s.
The South Kensington Tunnel
Not very spooky, but a well known
tunnel used by visitors to the South Kensington museums coming from South
Ken Underground station.
'But, why was it built?' you ask. Well it
was built for visitors to exhibitions held on the site of what is now Imperial
College. After the success of the Fisheries Exhibition of 1883 and the
Health Exhibition of 1884 a tunnel was built and a toll of 1d (one old
penny) was charged. There followed the Inventions Exhibition of 1885 and
the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, then the exhibitions moved
to Earls Court, leaving the Metropolitan District Railway with a tunnel
going nowhere. It was for years opened only on special occasions, and a
suggestion in 1906 that it be extended to serve the Royal Albert Hall was
rejected.
On the 21st of December 1908 it was opened permanently, free
of charge, and new exits serving the Victoria & Albert and Natural History
museums were opened in 1913.
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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.
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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' mantra 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). |
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| 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. 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. Chancery Lane There is a former Ministry of Defence bunker under Chancery Lane tube station, with inconspicuous entrances in High Holborn and Furnival Street. |
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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 said to have been used as a transit camp by soldiers on their way to Suez in 1956. 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!' |