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?