Sep 1, 2010 The Evening Standard may have leaked this a day or two early as the LT Museum booking office hasn’t had the full details confirmed yet – but there will be guided tours of the disused Aldwych tube station later this month running from 24th-26th September.
Absolutely no more information is known yet, so don’t bombard the LT Museum for details. As soon as the details are finalised, they will put it on their website, and my auto-tracking systems will alert me to update this blog post.
Nonetheless, the chance to get down into the bowels of this iconic station is one not to be missed – even though I have actually been down there once before.
More photos to wet your appetite.
I wonder if they read my previous blog post about tours of the disused station and will include the tunnels as well *grins*.
The ticket office floor of the station was opened to the public recently, for the Transforming the Tube exhibition.
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aldwych, london underground, subteranean
Jul 2, 2010 There you are, a quiet little tube station slumbering quietly on the corner of a road, little used save for tube staff on training or the occasional disturbance by people wearing interesting clothing and saying luvvie a lot – then all of a sudden, a load of large signs are lined up around your walls, a few video screens start playing something and a couple of scale models of other tube stations appear.
The side doors open and suddenly the general public are back and wandering around the place.
What’s going on you wonder.
Aldwych, a tube station that was closed in 1994 due to a lack of justification for modernisation was now itself, slightly ironically being used to trumpet the glories of the ongoing modernisation programme as part of an exhibition called “Transforming the Tube“.
This is a welcome part of the resurgent desire by the tube management to explain why the weekly email of tube disruptions can often be summarised as “don’t bother trying to go out”. A clutch of bloggers were invited to a meeting at TfL just over a year ago, and while we can hardly take the credit for the idea of using a disused tube station for an exhibition – I do distinctly recall a discussion about the possibility of public exhibitions.
You may thank us later.
The exhibition is basically a lot of large boards with large font text explaining a lot of what is going on right now, and in another section of the station, an indication of just how old some of the working parts of the railway are.
Click on the image for a larger version
In addition to the above time-map, there was also a slightly scary display board about how some of the signalling actually works.
The Programme Machine is an electromechanical device which contains a roll of plastic in which holes have been punched that encode timetable information. As the holes for a particular train come into position, feels pass through them, closing all the necessary contacts to set the route for that train.
Yes, they really do still use a plastic sheet with holes in it to control the signalling on some lines! Your train home is being controlled by a glorified Fisher Price record player.
The exhibition frankly could have been set up anywhere, and indeed, I hope it does go on some sort of travelling show as it is actually quite interesting. However, the genius has to be putting it inside Aldwych tube station as that is bound to pull in even those who are only vaguely interested – just to have a look around.
Model of the future Tottenham Court Rd Station
For those who go to be educated – you will learn what has been going on for the past decade during all the tube closures – and what to look forward to over the next decade. As a long suffering Jubilee Line passenger, I am looking forward to the oft-delayed completion and a one-third increase in capacity on the line.
Scanned from the free brochure handed out
Sadly you don’t get to see too much of the building, but you do get to walk through the iconic 1907 lifts that are now locked in place at the ticket hall level, and apparently sometimes the staff let you walk through the joining corridor that links two lifts in case of emergency.
However, you do get to see something quite rare, and you wont even notice how rare it is unless I explain it to you.
As you go in, via the side street entrance, there is an Entrance and an Exit – the idea being that the lifts had two doors, one letting people in, and a dedicated exit to let people out. However, the exit side was only used for a very short period of time before being abandoned and everyone used the same door.
So, as you go through the lift and into the Exit corridor to see more of the exhibition, you are now standing a very rarely seen part of the tube network. It just wont have that dank abandoned aesthetic you were hoping for.
Overall, it is a good worthy exhibition, and although 90% of the material is replicated in the take-away brochure, it is worth visiting, even if only to get to peer inside a disused tube station.
Incidentally, that brochure has a note on the back that it is printed on 100% recycled stock. In train-language, stock is the name given to the tube trains, so my brochure is made from the pulverised remnants of an old tube train?
You have until next Friday to make a visit yourself, and the opening times are:
Other people to have visited:
My previous Blog Post about the Aldwych Station
Jun 24, 2010 Of the closed tube stations that litter the London Underground, two top the list of stations that people want to visit. One is Down Street, near Hyde Park as it was used as a WW2 command centre, and the other is the iconic Aldwych/Strand station, which is largely unmodernised.
Next week, you can get to visit part of one of them.
As a suitable location for an exhibition on modernising the tube network, London Underground is staging an exhibition, Transforming the Tube in the ticket hall of the Aldwich station.
The exhibition runs from Monday 28 June to Friday 9 July and the opening times are:
More details about the exhibition on the TfL website.
I think the chances of being allowed down into the lower platforms is about ZERO, sadly, but it is still a chance to peer inside a building that had been largely closed to the public since 1994.
The entrance is on Surrey Street, which oddly is much larger than the “official” main entrance on Aldwych.
I don’t know how much of the ticket hall will be used, but if you have a chance to get up the other side of the doorway for the main entrance, have a look at the floor. There used to be a newsagents stand there, and the floor is very noticeably worn away by the number of people who stopped there to buy a paper.
I have had the pleasure of a visit to the station before – and you can see my photos of the depths of the building on my usual flickr website.
Also – if the gate is unlocked, why not have a look at a so-called Roman Bath House that is just down the same side street?
Opening it to the public?
The difficulty with opening the lower levels to the public is that the only way up/down to the lower levels is via a single spiral staircase, and that restricts the ability to get groups in and out of the building in numbers that make a tour economically viable.
However, here is an idea that gets around that problem.
Open up the building and let people stream into the building and wander around freely – then go down the staircase to the lower levels and along the corridors to the platform(s). Here, rather than then trying to go back up the same staircase, let them walk along the disused tunnel to the equally disused platform at Holborn – and then leave that station via the normal public exit.
By controlling the numbers of people in each “section”, you can let people just wander around freely without the need for guided tours – so that cuts down on the number of staff needed to run tours, although you still need crowd control stewards. Display boards and handouts can manage the information giving side of things.
I think the double-whammy of two disused stations plus walking along a tube tunnel would be quite awesome. You just have to look at the excitement when the East London Line tunnel was opened for a weekend to realise how much interest there is in this sort of thing.
One for the London Transport Museum?
Oct 30, 2009 Considering the dark dark corners, strange noises and abandoned tunnels that litter the soil under London, it is possibly no surprise that stories of hauntings have emerged over the years.
On Wednesday, a couple of authors who have recently written a book on the subject gave a talk on the subject and I wandered along to the Shoe Lane Library to have a listen.
Ghosts are, despite their ethereal nature, quite a contentious topic and not unlike Marmite, they evoke very strong emotions in many people. Indeed, the authors had sometimes faced problems researching the book as people were worried about describing their experiences lest they be mocked in the staff-room.
My personal take on them is that unless you presume lots of people are lying, then something odd is going on – and I would love to understand the science behind the phenomena.
Interestingly, a survey from a couple of years ago by fairly well respected pollsters, Gallup found that belief in ghosts is higher now than at any time in the past 50 or so years.
Anyhow, the talk itself was a quick run though various hauntings and I’ll briefly summarise a few of them below:
They started off with a fairly notorious sermon by the Rev. John Cumming, who was not at all keen on the subterranean railways.
“…the forthcoming end of the world will be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into infernal regions and thereby disturbing the Devil.’”
Certainly there were the odd complaints of this nature about the deep tunnels, but the Victorians were digging deeper coal mines at the time without bumping into Hades or its ilk, so their pronouncements of doom were generally ignored.
One more famous incidents occurs at Aldgate Station, where allegedly there is a log book for ghost sightings. Sadly, getting a glimpse of this log-book proves as elusive as the spectres they detail.
At the station, it was reported that a worker was knocked unconscious after accidentally touching a live power rail and as another worker went to assist him, the ghost of a lady was seen stroking the unconscious man’s hair. Some stories claim the lady saved the man’s life, but it seems more that she simply comforted him while help arrived.
Another station, with a similar name is the now disused Aldwych Station, which was built on the site of a theatre, and the ghost of an actress has occasionally been seen in the station.
Amusingly, a TV show did a series of investigations into hauntings, and the physic reported seeing in Aldwych the event that had (allegedly) occurred in Aldgate. I suspect someone was doing a bit of reading beforehand and mixed up their stations!
Bank Station is also noted as a site of hauntings, and as the ticket hall is actually the former burial grounds of St Mary Woolnoth Church, many researchers cite that as the possible cause.
The most noted of the Bank hauntings though is nothing to do with the old burial ground – being the ghost of Sarah Whitehead. Her brother, who worked at the nearby Bank of England was hung for fraud and she spent the next decade or so visiting the Bank each day to ask for her brother until she in turn eventually died.
Neither were buried in the former graveyard.
Over at Bethnal Green is one of the more sombre hauntings. The station entrance was the location for one of the most serious civilian losses of life during WW2 when a panicked crowd tried to seek shelter during an air raid, and 173 people died in a crush by the stairway entrance. What made it more tragic was that the air-raid sirens were a false alarm, and the panic caused by a loud booming sound, thought to be a bomb, was actually a new anti-aircraft gun that had just been set up in nearby Victoria Park.
Since then, there have been repeated reports of unsettling sounds and people feeling uncomfortable in the station.
For reasons that are not fully understood, there is a known tendency for low-frequency sounds to make people feel uncomfortable, and the tube tunnels are certainly replete with plenty of machines that cause similar effects.
However, when a worker reports the clear sounds of women and children screaming in the booking hall, and that it went on for a period of at least 10 minutes, you have to wonder what could possibly cause that effect.
To lighten the mood, back down the Central Line to the old British Museum station – which is a disused station between Holborn and TCR – where the ghost of a mummy was reported to have been seen. The reports of this haunting are, to put it mildly, dubious and can be discarded as urban myth.
Incidentally, you can still see what is left of the station as you pass though it on the Central Line. Regardless of which direction you approach it, peer out of the right-side windows and although the platforms have been removed, you can make out the empty remains of the station structure.
One of the more unsettling ghostly experiences is had by staff at Elephant & Castle station where the Bakerloo Trains end their travels and prepare to return northbound. Late at night, a lady is sometimes seen getting onto an empty train which is to be returned to the depot, and when staff go to remove her, the carriage is empty again.
Incidentally, and a sign possibly of how our imaginations are important in ghost sightings – when it comes to ghostly trains, people rarely report the sound or sight of diesel engines. It’s always a steam train that is heard. You’d have thought some diesels would have got in on the act by now, but it seems not. Or maybe we humans cannot imagine a “modern ghost” and expect ghostly trains to be only from the steam era?
Back up to the Central Line – which seems to be overly generous with its hauntings – and we get to the up escalator at Marble Arch station. Here, several people have reported leaving a late train to ascend the escalator and feeling that someone is standing on the step right behind them, and leaning uncomfortably close towards them. Anyone turning around will find the escalator is empty. One lady reported that out of the corner of her eye she noticed him wearing a hat and smart black overcoat – and annoyed by his closeness when she also turned to confront him, the escalator was empty. She now wont use that station unless with friends.
The Screaming Spectre of Farringdon is quite famous and thought to be Anne Naylor, a girl adopted by hat maker, Sarah Metyard and cruelly treated until eventually she was murdered. Metyard’s attempted to disposed of the body into the sewer at Chick Lane, but parts of the body were discovered.
Eventually identified as the murderer, after her daughter turned her in, she was convicted at the Old Bailey in 1768 and sentenced to death. Her body, as was the norm at the time for murderers was handed to the Surgeons’ Hall to be dissected for students to study then put on public display.
The ghost was thought to haunt the region of the sewer for some years, but is now heard quite distinctively at Farringdon Station. That she moved to the station is a bit odd, as the sewer in Chick Lane lead down to the River Fleet, and while the road no longer exists, it was on the site of the now derelict Smithfield meat market buildings – a good hundred yards away from the station.
Finally – one I was quite interested in.
The Kennington Loop is a bit of track that enables trains on the Northern Line to turn around at Kennington. Passengers are never allowed on trains going round the loop, and drivers are said to quite dislike the tunnel.
Not only is it very noisy as the tight curve makes the wheels squeal on the tracks, but sometimes trains are held at the end of the loop waiting for space at the platform. Here, in the silence, drivers have reported hearing people talking in the carriage behind them and the sounds of doors slamming as if someone is walking through the train, even though they had checked to make sure it was empty before starting round the loop.
I’ve have the pleasure of taking the Kennington Loop, and in a 1938 tube train, but sadly we didn’t stop at the spot to listen for the sounds of passengers long lost to history seeking to commune with us.
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That’s a quick run though of some of the ghosts mentioned at the talk, and I have dug a bit deeper into the Farringdon Ghost story to find the location of the streets involved. The book they have written is Haunted London Underground.
Sep 5, 2008 Earlier this year, I along with a group had a rather rare tour of the disused Aldwych tube station. We were actually supposed to go somewhere else as part of a special deal arranged with the Friends of the Transport Museum, but a long story and a lot of problems resulted in our going to the iconic Aldwych station instead.
Of all the disused stations on the London Underground, this is one of the more famous – partly for its construction and its rather odd position on the tube network infrastructure.
I wont go into huge amounts of detail about the history of the station as there are plenty of online sources available, and I am reliably informed that a new book on the station is due for publication before the end of this year – doubtless to be sold in the book store inside the Transport Museum.
As a courtesy, we were asked not to put the photos into the public domain as it only leads to people bugging the museum for permission to visit it themselves – but today I became aware that they are actually auctioning off a tour for the general public to raise funds for the museum, so they can’t really complain now 
Also, I thought I would put up a few photos as teasers of what is down there and you might be tempted to bid for the tour yourself. If you want to bid on the auction to go inside yourself – then it is being run on the ebay website.
The full photo set of the photos which came out (damn the blur and useless flash!) are now available to the public on my usual Flickr account.
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