Tickets to tour three disused disused tube stations go on sale on Wednesday morning.
On offer are the now familiar tours of the disused station at Aldwych, and repeats of the access tunnels and disused platforms at Charing Cross.
However, very rarely open to the public, will be the famous Down Street station.
Down Street
Visitors to the Railway Executive Committee’s bomb-proof bunker will be able to see where the nation’s railways were coordinated and Prime Minister Winston Churchill took refuge in secret at the height of the Blitz. Located in Mayfair between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park stations, Down Street had a short life as a working station from 1907 to 1932.
I visited the station recently.
Charing Cross
Visit the disused Jubilee line platforms closed to the public in 1999.
However, you also then divert through a door in a passageway to walk through hidden service tunnels, and walk underneath Trafalgar Square towards the fourth plinth, and see the station from a different angle from the bottom of a ventilation shaft.
Aldwych
Familiar to regular subterranean visitors, this is the former Strand station and was the terminus of the little used shuttle line to Holborn.
Tour tickets
Tickets can be booked from here at 10am on Wednesday morning.
Good luck getting a ticket tomorrow!
From the booking website:
“Tickets will go on sale via the priority booking system on Monday 21st (for LTM friends) and Tuesday 22 September (for E-newsletter subscribers and corporate supporters). Remaining tickets will be open for general sale to the public at 10am on Wednesday 23rd September 2015”
Ticket prices for Down Street tours are £78.15!!
Has anyone actually managed to get any tickets? The website has slowed to a crawl and there’s no “Buy Tickets” link anywhere…
My “priority” code from the Newsletter doesn’t work – but £78.15 each, a really odd amount to use.
I spoke to someone on the phone. They are having technical problems and tickets will be available later today.
£78.15 = £75.00 + £3.15 booking fee
Thank you, have never got to the point where I can see an figure.
£78.50 is a disgrace !
I was interested in this for a long while, so I put together this project to map all the stations and their locations against modern tube lines, might be interesting!
http://joe8bit.com/project/abandoned-tube-stations/
AIUI, “Aldwych” was always, err… Aldwych.
“Strand” was the Northern line component of what is now called “Charing Cross”, the Bakerloo component being “Trafalgar Square”.
I think …..
You think wrongly.
Aldwych was called Strand from its opening in 1907 until 1915, when it was renamed. At the same time, the Charing Cross station on what was to become the Northern line was renamed Strand. The naming and renaming of the stations in this area is rather convoluted…
You haven’t mentioned Trafalgar Square and Embankment’s involvement in the convolution. I think the name Shepherds Bush has historically been even more mobile though.
Seems Down Street is already sold out?
As soon as I saw the prices I fell off my chair! Same as with the orginal steam (150 years) tours. They, too were overpriced.
Why so ridiculously expensive? Hardly encourages interest in these things. For these prices I’d expect a 3 course meal too!
Only mugs will pay these prices, more money than sense.
I think the whole point of the high price is to discourage people. However, given that there is probably only limited availability and the willingness of ‘obsessives’ to see things like this, the organisers are onto a nice little money maker.
See Geoff Marshall’s definitve video about the history of the naming of Strand, Trafalgar Sq., Aldwych, Embankment, Charing Cross.
http://londonist.com/2015/01/why-is-the-bakerloo-line-at-charing-cross-so-far-away