Scafell Pike and the Underwater Gnomes

Ah yes, Scafell Pike. Perched in the west of the Lake District, it holds the title of being Britain's highest mountain.

It may not seem like much of a mountain, especially compared to the Alps, or the Andes, but it is a mountain nonetheless. The threshold for when a hill becomes a mountain, according to Ordinance Survey maps, is precisely 609.6m (2000ft), so at 978m Scafell Pike can safely be called a mountain.

We have 317 mountains in total in the UK - did you know that? No, me neither. Just googled it. A lot more than I thought there'd be. I mean, I know there's quite a few up in Scotland, and a handful in Wales, but over 300? Really?!

Up until last September there were apparently only 316 mountains - Calf Top Hill in the Yorkshire Dales was reclassified from a hill to a mountain when it was remeasured and found to have been 2cm taller than before, meaning at 609.602m it was now 2mm over the 602.6m threshold, and now officially a mountain! I'm hoping that if I grow an extra 2cm I'll be reclassified as a Victoria's Secret Model.

Calf Top Hill - sorry - I mean mountain, in Yorkshire

But anyway, I digress. Back to Scafell Pike we go. I have climbed Scafell Pike twice, and both times the weather was what can only be described in my mother's words, as pants.

The deceiving thing about Scafell Pike is that you can't actually see it's summit at all while you're hiking it, and more often than not the ascent to the summit is hidden in a plume of misty, rainy cloudiness.

Behold the plume of misty, rainy cloudiness. This was when I climbed it back in June.

The first time I climbed it was as part of the Three Peaks challenge back in 2015. It was 4am when our team of 8 arrived by minubus, having driven 6 hours straight from Ben Nevis. Dawn was breaking slowly behind a silhouette of mountain ridges. Tiny lights moved in a line up from the base of the mountain to the summit - fellow Three Peakers who'd hiked through the night - like a line of iridescent ants. As we parked up in the minibus, there was a definite lull in energy. None of us had really slept, or eaten.

Now I know what you're thinking - how can you just forget to eat enough?

Well, very easily, I can assure you (and this is coming from a girl whose days are planned entirely around food).

Like any would-be hiker, we'd raided Tesco the day before for supplies, and I felt like I'd walked out carrying half of the shop under my arms as I panic bought everything. Will I need Pom Bears on a mountain? Yes, yes I will.

But after finishing our climb of Ben Nevis at 11pm, soaking wet from the rain, and with only 5 minutes to grab clean clothes from our bags before we had to start driving to the Lake District (all squashed together in the back of the minibus, like a textiled game of Tetris), we were more concerned with getting dry, warm, and finding a comfortable enough position to sleep in a bit of than we were with eating more than half a sandwich. I think it took me a good hour in the minubus before I stopped shivering from the cold, let alone fall asleep.

Despite the severe lack of energy, I must admit that Scafell was, surprisingly, rather enjoyable to climb. I'd never seen any scenery like it before; it was like being in a Sci-fi film, where a space ship has landed on barren wasteland and is trying to discover what life forms are there. The last half an hour to the top is just mounds and mounds of crushed boulders. The low mist clings to the rocks, seeming to absorb all sound and create an eerie stillness.

Very other-worldly

Me being me (i.e incredibly inquisitive), I decided to Google why there are so many broken bits of boulder on the mountain when I was back home, and oh my. Turns out that the mounds and mounds of rocks that make up Scafell Pike are the remnants of a volcanic eruption around 400 million years ago. So I can say that not only have I climbed a mountain, I've climbed a volcano!!! (Well, kind of).

Scafell Pike and the surrounding mountains are together called the Sca Fells - not to be confused with the neighbouring mountain Sca Fell, which at 964m makes it the second highest mountain in Britain. It's all a bit ridiculous, if you ask me. Everything sounds the same! That's like having Mount Snowdon, and then next to it one called Snow Don, all part of the Snow Dons! Who names these mountains anyway?

I'll let the namer off the hook though. Apparently Scafell Pike was never meant to be called Scafell Pike - there was a mistake once upon a time on an Ordnance Survey map, and 'The Pikes of Sca Fells' (describing all of the mountains) became 'Scafell Pike'  (the tallest mountain) and no one ever corrected it, and so here we are, with lots of mountains with the same (ish) names.

The Sca fells - made up of lots of Scafells and lots of Crags. 

The second time I climbed the mountain I was with a man from the army. Neither of us had a map, or a compass, or anything that would be remotely useful like a GPS tracker or a torch (which is to be expected from me - I mean, I once drove to London for work and forgot to take any clothes other than my netball kit. But him? He had no excuse for not being prepared ). 

From about halfway up, there's no longer a stone-slabbed path to follow, but rather, you have to follow 'cairns' - large man-made piles of stones which act as a guide towards the summit. Easy to spot on a clear day, but nigh-on impossible in the rainy, spitty, plume of clouds.

A photo I found on the internet of a cairn on Scafell Pike and a man who looks like he was far more prepared than I was.

So it was about 3.30pm by now. The wind picked up, and it started to rain. We could now only see 1 metre in front of us due to the thick fog. The rain got heavier, and heavier, and heavier, the wind whipping it in waves into my face, trickling through my coat and down my back, and I was cold. I was soaked through from head to toe, shivering, and all I could think of was how utterly glorious a cup of tea would be right about now.

And then we realised we hadn't seen a cairn in quite a while. How long had it been - maybe twenty minutes or so? Or was it thirty? I started to panic a bit, because you're meant to see them every few minutes. I looked all around, but there was thick fog in every direction. We weren't sure which direction the summit was in, or which direction we'd just come from. Squinting in the rain, everything looked the same.

The safety bit:
There are on average 500 incidents up these mountains per year where search and rescue need to get involved, and now that I've been in that position, it's easy to see why. Lesson of the day - find a better army man take all the proper kit next time.

Fortunately though, we found the cairns. Of course we did, or I wouldn't be writing this post. We turned around and dragged our feet back the way we think we'd been walking. It probably took about another half an hour of walking in circles, a bit of swearing, scrambling back up rocks, more desperate thoughts about tea, and retracing our steps for what felt like an eternity, when we finally saw a cairn appearing in the foggy distance. Never has a pile of rocks looked so beautiful in my entire life. Cairns meant we were back on the path, which meant I was ONE STEP CLOSER TO TEA!

Summit selfie! A... summelfie? Smelfie? 

We found the summit after our hour-long detour, and honestly, there's not much up there. I'm sure it's incredible when there's a view, but as I said, both times I've climbed it I've never seen said view. There's a big cairn in the centre which has a plaque on it, which says that summit was gifted to the National Trust in 1919 by Lord Leconfield in memory of the men who died in the Great War. A very touching memory, but firstly, how on earth do you own a mountain, and secondly, if you're going to gift it, why only gift the summit? What about the rest of it?!

'This summit of Scafell was given to the nation subject to any commoners rights placed in custody of the National Trust by Charles Henry, Baron Leconfield 1919'

Apparently back in 2015 there was great uproar when a hiker discovered some graffiti on the above cairn at the sumit And not just the standard 'Jenni woz ere' in black marker, I'm talking a full blown inscription of verses from the Emerald Tablets of Thoth - an ancient Arabic piece of work written been the 6th and 8th century AD. The graffiti-er (who actually wrote his name at the bottom, wanting credit for his work), must have taken the actual book up with him to write it out, verse by verse. And oh my, the backlash he got...

"Literary vandal defaces the summit of Scafell Pike with poetry in permanent black ink"

"Walkers demand the culprit is caught."

Hey, while I'm not condoning graffiti, if he's taken the time to write out an ancient piece of work that people wouldn't have read otherwise, then leave him be. At least if it's foggy it gives you something to actually see while you're up there.

Graffiti isn't the strangest thing to be found at the top of the mountain, though; an octopus was found at the summit in 2013 by a team who climbs the mountain regularly to litter pick, and no one knows quite how it got there. Perhaps someone left it there as a joke? A drunken bet in the pub the night before?

"Wheyy I bet you can't go to the top with.. uh... an octopus!"

I have an...inkling... this octopus didn't want to end up here. Heh.

If you think that an octopus is the strangest thing to be found in the Lake District, then think again. Back in to early 1900s, a boatman found what was called a 'Tizzie-Whizie', which although it sounds like something you could buy from Fred and George Weasley's joke shop in Diagon Alley, was actually a small animal that was allegedly part hedgehog, part squirrel and part bee.

A Tizzie-Whizie. Where are they and how can I get it to be my friend?

The one above was captured in 1906 and was apparently rushed to local photographer Louis Herbert's photographic studio in Bowness-on-Windemere. He 'calmed it down with some warm milk and morsels of ginger biscuit and took this immoral portrait of the Tizzie-Whizie before it jumped off his table and flew out of the window to freedom.

My common sense is telling me that this was a hoax, but there were hundreds ,if not thousands of people who believed it at the time - this very photo ended up on thousands and thousands of postcards in the Lake District, and there are still some holiday cottages around Windemere today called Tizzie-Whizie, as a little reminder of this strange (but obscenely cute) mythical creature.

Sorry, got sidetracked again there. Where was I? Oh yes, I was still at the summit. Yes, well it was at the summit I once again realised I hadn't eaten anything for hours and was feeling a bit low on energy (I honestly wish I could do this more in real life). I'd been to the little National Trust hut in the Wasdale car park before we started our hike, just to browse what they were selling (it was here I'd spied the cups of tea that were now the only thing keeping me going), and noticed that they were selling Kendal mint cake.

The town of Kendal is not that far from Scafell Pike, and I'd heard of the famous Kendal mint cake many times before. They sell it in shops like Cotswold Outdoors, and Milletts, and I'd heard that hikers who go up Everest often take it a a snack. So I thought I'd give it a go.

An advert for Kendal mint cake from 1953.

Warning: if you're expecting a cake (like I was), do not buy one.

It's like mixing a tube of toothpaste with granulated sugar and then putting a wrapper on it, but I doubt calling it 'Kendal Colgate sugar bar' would quite sound the same.

I took one minuscule nibble from the corner, and that was enough for me. Bleugh. Back in the bag you go!

Why is this a cake when it's clearly not cake? Was it named by the same person who named Scafell Pike, Sca Fell and the Sca Fells?!?

Though descending a mountain is usually less straining than climbing it, due to the fact you're not having to use as many muscles in your legs, I find it's actually harder - trying to avoid slipping over, for one, and the constant pressure on your kneecaps, step after step.

In my case, the third thing that made it harder was that my shoe fell apart.

This was on my first ascent of Scafell Pike during my Three Peaks Challenge in 2015. There I was, trying my best to hurriedly edge down the path without falling over (seeing as we only had 12 hours left to get to Snowdon and climb it), when suddenly I noticed that I could feel the stones under my left foot far more prominently than I could in my right.

Hmm, I thought. This feels a bit odd. I looked down at my feet, and they looked normal enough.

But lo and behold - when I turned around, I noticed that there, perched upon a step 5 metres behind me, was the sole of my shoe.

It was sitting there, like a badly behaved dog who doesn't want walkies anymore, and was most definitely unattached from the rest of the shoe which was still on the end of my foot.

I picked up the sole and it fell limp in my hand. What do I do with it? I looked around for the rest of my team and noticed most of them a good 100 yards ahead of me - too far to call for them to come back. Luckily, another of my team, a lovely French man called Guillaume (who I'm sure I pronounced his name differently/wrong every time I said it but he was far too polite to ever correct me) was also nearby.

"I zink I 'av some maskeen tape een my backpack," he'd said to me in his beautiful French accent, unclipping his bag from around his chest. I sat down and bound the sole of the shoe back to where it belonged and set off again, stepping very warily and checking every few seconds that the tape was still intact.

Held together with duct tape, though from the looks of it the left sole wasn't far away from detaching either.

With my shoes intact once more, I set off down the mountain again. When descending Scafell Pike, the one thing that makes the view so spectacular is the the lake at the bottom - Wast Water. There's a glistening sheen to it, like a vat of oil has spilt over its surface. This is due to the fact that unlike the other 15 lakes* in the Lake District, it has no oxygen in the water, meaning there's no aquatic life in the lake at all. Nothing. Which if you ask me, is a little bit creepy.

*Actually, when you look at the names of the 16 'lakes' in the lake district, only one of them is a lake - Bassenthwaite Lake. The rest are classed as 'waters' or 'tarns' or 'meres'.

Wast Water. That steep cliff carries on down at that angle all the way to the bottom of the lake.

The creepy bit
In 1976, an air-hostess named Margaret Hogg was killed by her husband, pilot Peter Hogg, for having an affair with a banker. After he killed her, he wrapped her in a carpet and drove overnight from Surrey to Wast Water, before throwing her body into the lake, where it settled at a depth of 34m.

Eight years later in 1984, a search was being conducted for another missing woman, and the body of Margaret was discovered. Because there's no oxygen in the lake, her body was perfectly preserved in a wax-like state, and along with her wedding ring on her hand which had her initials engraved (I mean come on, really Peter? You left her ring on her?), she was easily identified. Peter denied he had killed her, but was later found guilty and imprisoned for four years for manslaughter.

At 80m, it's also the deepest lake in the UK, just shy of the height of Big Ben. The water in Wastwater is supposedly much clearer at a depth of 50m than Lake Windemere is at 10m, making it the perfect place for scuba divers to practice deep water diving. It's also incredibly cold; the depth-to-surface area ratio is much greater than other lakes due to the steep sides, so the sun can't warm up the water - the average temperature is just 4 degrees C (brrrr).  It's also notorious among the diving community for something rather peculiar - gnomes. 

The underwater gnomes of Wast Water with a Christmas tree

For the last 15 years or so, there has been an underwater gnome garden in Wast Water. The gnomes sit at a depth of around 45m, just on the threshold of where certified divers can safely deep dive to. Police have removed the gnome gardens many times, due to the number of deaths of divers who try to find them, but they keep on reappearing. Sometimes with additions like white picket fences, or Christmas trees with tinsel and baubles.

Underwater gnome gardens aren't just popular in Wast Water - it's apparently a 'thing' amongst the diving community worldwide, and you have to be careful about rival divers stealing your gnomes to put in their own underwater gnome gardens, aka gnome gnapping!

Personally I think it's all a bit of fun - it gives the divers something to look at, after all, given that there's nothing to see but mud and a dead air hostess in a carpet.

So there you have it -  now you know a bit more about Britain's highest mountain, and a few bits around it. I do plan on climbing Scafell Pike again one day actually, if only to see the view (and if you're reading this and have seen a view from the top - damn you!), but maybe in a few years' time. I might try and tackle some of the other 314 mountains in the UK first.

The End.

_____________________________________________________________________________



I do actually have another fact about the mountain but I couldn't find anywhere to fit it in, so I'm just going to plonk it here at the end and hope no one notices...

The church of St Olaf, one of the smallest churches in England, dating from around 1550. The beams are said to come from a viking longship. This wasn't the fact by the way, just some interesting info about the picture. 

In the 19th century, the local Church of st Olaf's in Wasdale Head didn't have a licence to bury the dead, and so when a villager died, their body had to be taken by pony and cart over the mountain pass to St Catherine's Church some 6 miles away. One night in the early 19th century, a pony carrying a coffin took fright and ran off with the coffin, and the body was never found. The dead man's mother died a few months later, and the pony pulling the coffin bolted in the exact same place - neither were ever seen again. Rumour has it that the ghost of the pony and coffin gallop past lonely wanderers on Scafell Pike at night...

Definitely the End.

Oh, and I never got my tea by the way. By the time we got back down the mountain it was 5pm, on a Sunday, and the hut selling food and drink was closed and everyone had gone home. Picture the day you found out that Father Christmas wasn't real - that's how it felt that day. I was mortified. Bloody mortified.

Definitely definitely the End.

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Abandoned London Underground - the secrets of Aldwych

It was a rainy Tuesday in January 2016. The year hadn't been going well for me so far, if I'm honest, and this particular day wasn't going well either - it was one of those days where everything was going wrong, and all you want to do is shut yourself in the toilet and stay there until somebody comes to get you.

In fact, that’s exactly what I did.

My Manager Lisa noticed me scurry off, and came to find me. She knew everything that had been going on so she didn't pry. Instead, she got some tissue, helped dab mascara off my face, and offered me two tickets she'd received from the London Transport Museum to visit the abandoned London tube station, Aldwych, later that day. She wasn't much of a history buff so said she wouldn't appreciate them as much as me. I tried saying no and that I didn't want them, I had lots of work to do, yada yada, but the inner history geek in me screamed 'yes please!' long before I could even think of an excuse. And boy oh boy, am I glad that I did....

N.B In most cases, plying me with gifts (either history, prosecco or chocolate related) will most definitely cheer me up, and this case was no exception. Anyone wishing to woo me, do take note.

Myself and my colleague Dajana packed up our things, booked the afternoon off and headed to London.

In truth I'd never heard of Aldwych station before – but in honesty, not many people have. It's been closed to the public since 1994 and even then it was barely used. By the early 90s it only carried 900 people on average per day. In comparison, during weekday rush hour Waterloo tube station transports around 50,000 passengers. That's a lot.

When it opened in 1907, Aldwych was originally called 'The Strand', because it was built on the site of the old theatre, the ‘Royal Strand’. Rumour has it that the ghost of an actress is seen to wander around the empty tube tunnels at night. 

In fact, it was featured on an episode of Most Haunted (link) back when Most Haunted was still a programme that people enjoyed, despite Yvette Fielding screaming more frequently than my nephew Teddy at bath time.

Most Haunted from S1 episode 14 at Aldwych - I don't know what year it was filmed, but by Yvette's hair choice I'm guessing it was a long, long time ago.

But even though Aldwych stayed open all the way up until 1994, the station was hardly used even soon after it opened in 1907. Within 10 years of being built, the Eastern platform was  closed. The station was renamed from ‘The Strand’ to the current name ‘Aldwych’ because the nearby Charing Cross Station was renamed ‘The Strand’ (though they changed the name back to Charing Cross in 1979 – geez. Almost as confusing as keeping up with Cheryl Tweedy / Cole / Versini Fernandez / Payne 's surname).

Being just a small branch line off the main Piccadilly line it only made 450 round trips per day. On Sundays when the theatres were closed it didn’t make sense to keep the station open at all, and Aldwych became one of the few underground stations to close entirely on a Sunday.

But anyway, I digress.  We were running very late for the tour, despite giving ourselves four hours to get to London from Bournemouth (which is usually more than enough). Our train had been delayed due to a faulty level crossing, and so when we arrived at Waterloo Station we had less than 5 minutes to travel across the city to Aldwych to meet our tour guide. I hadn't thought people actually used the phrase 'put your foot on it!' to taxi drivers when they were in a rush other than in overly-cliché films, but I can fully conclude that they do.

The entrance to Aldwych on Surrey Street. I keep thinking it says 'Piccadilly - really?'.

We arrived at Aldwych mildly clammy from running, our coats slung over our arms, searching for the rest of the tour group...but there was no one to be seen. Nothing but a small sign on the large, glazed oxblood frontage of the station . I walked up to it and saw it said 'London Transport Museum: Hidden London'. There was no handle on the door, and no doorbell (I mean, why would there be one on a tube station?) so I did what I thought was best and started knocking very, very loudly.

No answer.

So I began shouting, too.

HELLO, IS ANYONE THERE? WE'RE HERE FOR THE TOUR. LET US IN PLEASE. HELLO? IT'S VERY COLD OUTSIDE. IT IS ALSO RAINING AND WE DO NOT HAVE AN UMBRELLA. THANK YOU.

What if  they had already descended down the 160 steps into the deep tube line and started the tour without us?

Luckily for us, they hadn't. A gentleman with a neatly trimmed beard came to let us in. He looked at me the way a teacher looks at a pupil who walks in 20 minutes late to class and should really explain themselves, but he saw the sodden tickets in my hand and let us through.

We emerged into a beautiful old ticket hall, full of dark wooden panels and that faint, warming musky scent you find in museums, and stood at the back of the 40-strong tour group. They were all listening to the tour guide at the front - a young woman in her late 20s who looked like she knew what she was on about because she was holding a clipboard and a pen.

We'd walked through two lifts with doors on either end in order to reach the group, and it turns out the two large wooden lifts were the two original lifts installed in 1907 and were over 100 years old. They weren't like normal lifts you get in modern buildings, either - they were big enough to fit our whole tour group in with room to spare, and are apparently the only original lifts still intact on the whole of the London Underground (and one of the many reasons the station was awarded a grade 2 listed building status in 2011). Unfortunately, it's also these two historic lifts that led to the eventual closure of the station in 1994. Sod's law, I suppose.

One of the large lifts to transport passengers down to the tracks below

There were originally 3 lift shafts built (with each shaft able to take two of these large lifts),  but only 2 lifts were ever installed, meaning there are 4 ghostly, empty cavernous spaces down at platform level. Not that they’ve never been put to good use, though; the woman with the clipboard told us the music video for ‘Firestarter’ by the Prodigy was filmed in one of them.

 

I think I'd be just as scared to see Prodigy's Keith Flint in the abandoned station as I would if I saw the ghost

The lifts were so old the cost to replace them would have been £3 million, with an additional station refurb cost of £4 million – it just didn’t make sense to keep the station open (despite the fact that modern ticket machines had only been installed a few years earlier in 1989).

The most beautiful part of the station, in my opinion, was the deep emerald green tiles which lined the ticket hall. Every station on the London Underground has its  own unique design of tiles, made specifically for each station, so these very tiles that lined the station would never be seen again, which I thought was particularly sad. Would they notice if I stole a few to put in my bathroom? Surely not. 

Wouldnt' these make the perfect shower splashback?

Aldwych belongs to a small cluster of stations designed by architect Leslie Green, who'd been given the task of designing the 'last' of the tube stations, but to make them look as fancy as possible but costing as little as possible.

I'd been reading up on a blog post titled, 'If it's red, it's green', and it was only about halfway through the blog post I realised what the title was on about. The oxblood-red frontage I'd seen at Aldwych was actually a common design trait of  architect Leslie Green's and features on all of his stations like Oxford Circus, Covent Garden and South Kensington.

The oxblood entrance to Oxford Street station

Apparently each station on the Underground was given a different tile design, not just to be a quirky design feature, but rather that if you were illiterate in the early 1900s when the stations were built, you could tell which station you were at by the design of the tiles. Quite ingenious, really. I wonder if the same logic was applied to Wetherspoons and their carpets? 

It's not just the tiles that caught my eye, though. If you walk around the station, you can see many features from the original station showing its name clearly as ‘Strand’ – the disused eastern platform has the original tiled name still in view, though a lot of it is covered with torn, weathered posters.

The 'A' and 'N' from when Aldwych was still called 'The Strand'.

Well, I say old posters. They're not old at all. Most of the posters at the station are actually props from many of the films and TV programmes that have been shot there, such as V for Vendetta, Atonement, 28 Weeks Later, Die Another Day, The Imitation Game, Sherlock and Mr Selfridge.

Aldwych station used in 'V for Vendetta'. 

A 'Bakerloo Line' sign left from when Mr Selfridge was filmed. I was a huge Mr Selfridge fan so I totally fangirled at this.

It’s still possible to get working tube trains in and out of the station via Holborn without disrupting any services to the main line, meaning that Aldwych is not only great for use on screen, but also in real life. The station is now used as a training facility for Train Operators, the Emergency Services, and also the Underground’s Emergency Response Unit. The station used for ‘Operation Forward Defence’ – the largest terrorist defence scheme ever run on the London Underground in preparation for the 2012 London Olympics.

We descended the 160 steps, were guided past the empty lift shafts and towards the blocked up Eastern platform. It was never officially used, and therefore the walls were just left unfinished – like a house that has the frame and insulation but no plasterwork. On the far wall, near the blocked up tunnel, are a patch of tiles that don’t go with the rest of the design of the station. I wandered over and stared at them for a bit, before staring back at our tour guide.

“Excuse me – yes, yes, over here. Why are these tiles here? They’re not the same as the ones in the other tunnel?”

A few people began nodding their heads and walking towards me. One of our tour guides strolled over with a ‘I was waiting for someone to ask this!’ sort of grin on his face.

“Ahh, yes. Does anyone recognise this particular design from somewhere else on the London Underground?”

In the middle of the group, a few hands slowly rose.

“Is it Piccadilly Circus?”

“Correct! Now you might ask what it’s doing here, at Aldwych. Well seeing as this particular platform was never used, it made sense for it to become as useful as possible. So when new platforms were built, or needed redecorating, what better way to test out the designs than on a real tube station. Employees could then come in and see for themselves what their new station might look like! And then just tile over it when they wanted a new design. Made perfect sense, didn’t it?” Apparently Aldwych's East platform was used to mock up designs for Victoria, Holborn, South Kensington Station, Tottenham Court Station and Bond Street.

Looking down at the actual rail lines, there was something odd about it which I couldn't quite place. As if following us around, the tour guide had appeared behind a small group of us, and began smiling in that same 'ah yes, I'm glad you've noticed this' sort of way.

"I bet you're wondering what's different, eh?" he asked. Well yes,  yes I was.

"Two things to note here," he carried on. "Firstly, the third rail to the side of the main rail has porcelain conductors, which is one of the main reasons this station has it's Grade 2 status."

I looked down and couldn't for the life of me see what he was on about. All I saw was lines going up and down, just like on a normal railway line, but there were several rail enthusiasts around me who were snapping away with their cameras, saying things like "oh I can't believe I get to see real porcelain conductors in situ!" and "Really? Porcelain? I've read about these..."

I am not a rail person. I do not know what a third rail is, and all I was thinking about when they said this mysterious third rail was made of porcelain, was 'But... won't it shatter into tiny pieces?!' 

N.B I am fully aware that my first job at Siemens was in Rail and that all my friends who still work there will probably read this and message me on Facebook in embarrassment saying 'I can't believe you didn't know what a third rail was?!' 

Our tour guide, Arnold (that may not be his name but he looked like an Arnold and it's much easier than writing 'Tour Guide' all the time) pointed out that these tracks were the few you'll see on Underground that don't have suicide pits (or anti-suicide pits, as they should be called). They were installed on the tube in 1926 after a significant rise in suicides ever since a newspaper reported the method in 1896. Perhaps as a way to avoid the terribly written articles found in most newspapers – who knows. In any case, the simple design change meant that the pits apparently halved the amount of successful suicide attempts.

The porcelain conductors (somewhere), the third rail (also somewhere, though which one is the third one, I don't know) and no suicide pit (I can see where that one is - one of out three isn't bad). 

What I found most curious, was that even though this was a disused train station and had been closed for over 20 years, there was lots of the station which was unfinished rather than simply deteriorating. Aldwych was built very late in the construction of the London Underground - almost 20 years later than the Circle Line – so by the time it was built there was already cost cutting in place and fears it would be underused. It reminds me of the time I was promised a bicycle by my parents for my 11^th birthday, and I was so looking forward to it, but when the time came on my birthday they never bought me one because they didn't think I'd use it. Heartbroken, I was. Absolutely heartbroken. 

The unfinshed East platform.

Anyway, as a result, only one set of stairs and passages down to the platforms were ever completed, and only half of the platform was ever tiled.  Aldwych only ever operated a short two-car shuttle train (never give it's chance to shine, was it? I feel for you, Aldwych), so the platform was only tiled up to where the little shuttle train would stop, and the rest of the platform just didn’t have the lights on - so if you were a passenger you couldn’t even tell it was unfinished, because it was just dark! That's British ingenuity for you.

It wasn’t all bad though - the station played a big part in both WW1 and WW2. In 1917 the Luftwaffe started to target London Aldwych suddenly became very useful again. But it wasn’t used for people, at first – it was rented by the National Gallery, whose Director had been worried that the water used to put out fires would damage the artifacts at the gallery. The east platform which hadn’t been used for train services since 1914 was blocked up and used as an emergency store for 300 paintings including works of Turner and Michelangelo.

Aldwych was chosen over other deep tube stations because it had very big lifts, able to take quite large pieces of art and transport them down to the deep tunnels below. Later on in the war, when the raids were at their heaviest, thousands of people took ‘unofficial’ emergency shelter at Aldwych and the other deep tube stations around the city.

I say unofficial because the government never gave permission for people to shelter there, or any of the other deep tube stations actually, but never had the need or the ability to tell people to stop.

After months of heavy bombing during the Blitz of 1940, Londoners flocked to deep tube stations for shelter each night. The government finally changed its mind, stating that Tube Stations would be organised as shelters, but only if didn’t interfere with the transport system.

But being able to use the station for shelter wasn't as good as it sounds. Conditions were extremely primitive -  toilets often being buckets in the corner. But from 1940 onwards conditions started to improve. Aldwych was handed over by the government to Westminster, and was the only London Underground station given over to another authority during the war. Three tiered bunkbeds were built so that over 500 people could stay on each platform every night, and the tracks were boarded over for even more room. Tickets were issued to stop over-crowding, a canteen train was built ( "Anything from the trolley, dears?" Sorry. Harry Potter reference - couldn't resist), a library was created with over 2000 books which circulated between shelters, and there was even a health desk with free medical healthcare.

Morale was still at an all time low, though. Everyone had to be out of the shelters by 7am every morning and weren't allowed in until 7pm in the evenings. Climbing the 160 steps every day, clutching your possessions, not knowing what scene would greet you when you came out of the station, would leave everyone in a constant state of fear. The account of one man was played to us as we were taken to the platform where people sheltered: "You could smell the burning tar, this tremendous smell of burning. It seeped down through the stairwell and was all that we could smell. It was terrifying."

And so the Entertainments National Service Association was set up, it's main goal for providing entertainment and boost morale of the troops and the public. The Volunteers from ENSA performed overseas, at home, and in the shelters, however the plays and the performances weren't always to everyone's tastes. The acronym ENSA earnt the nickname 'Every Night Something Awful'. 

ENSA contained many famous names, the most notable being George Fornby (Arnold assured us he was very famous, but I still had to Google him when I was on the way home, though I must admit I got the surname slightly wrong and was very impressed that he was also a world famous boxer and released a Lean-Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine ). 

George Fornby - famous for the song 'When I'm cleaning windows'

Not George Fornby, and I don't know him personally so can't comment about whether he can clean windows or not

 

During WWII, Buckingham Palace also housed its tea sets at Aldwych (and you can only imagine how much tea the Royal Family drink), the V&A Museum stored items there, and the British Museum changed its mind on where to store the Elgin Marbles (priceless marble sculptures dating back to 447 BC which were originally part of the temple of Parthenon in Athens) and decided to jump on the bandwagon and store them at Aldwych, too. The Marbles were far too heavy for the weight restrictions on the lifts, but they were used anyway. There was a war on, what harm is a bit of rule breaking going to do anyway? Oddly enough, the building that had originally been chosen to house the marbles was bombed shortly after. 

The Elgin Marbles - thank god they were stored at Aldwych, eh?

After our tour ended, we sat in Costa to escape the rain and for a while I did nothing but sit there and sip my vanilla latte. I couldn't quite take in everything I'd seen. The day started horrendously but ended up being simply incredible.

It was eye-opening, and one of those days that I will truly, never, ever forget, and I feel like I now know a little slice more of the great history of London. 

No matter how strong a person you are, there will always be bad days. Putting on a brave face sometimes isn't enough. For me, nothing can make me feel better than immersing myself into a different world. Whether it's writing, or dancing, or exploring somewhere new... I can't express how important it is to know what it is that makes you tick. Or in this case, to have friends who can pick you up when you need it most (Lisa, I'm talking to you here. Thank you for the tickets). 

Now... what can I discover next?

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