An enlarged ticket hall has opened at Victoria tube station today, nearly doubling the size of the current ticket hall space.
In addition, a new entrance has opened facing towards Wilton Road, which replaces a previous entrance that used to sit nearby on the concourse outside the mainline station.
(c) TfL
The enlarged ticket hall space sits directly underneath the old plaza space, which is to be restored to public use, and construction saw the entire top removed and the new space dug out beneath. A new bank of escalators will open later, giving more access down to the Victoria line platforms.
(c) TfL
The £700m modernisation project will be completed in summer 2018 when step-free access to the south ticket hall and the Circle and District lines is installed, and all of the new passageways linking the station together are finished.
The easiest and quickest way to show the scale of the works is a couple of before/after images of the layout.
(c) TfL
(c) TfL
There is also the new northern ticket hall with direct link down to the Victoria line, and additional tunnels linking with the rest of the station. It’s estimated that for people using that entrance, it saves an average of 7 minutes in not having to cross several road junctions to get to the main station entrance.
As part of plans to modernise the Victoria line, TfL completed a multi-million pound signalling upgrade last year. Since May 2017, Victoria line customers have seen a train arriving at platforms every 100 seconds during the busiest times – making the line one of the most intensive metro services anywhere in the world and increasing its capacity by an extra 3,000 customers an hour.
The increased ability for trains to deliver passengers to stations is why stations need upgrading, so that they can absorb the huge influx of arrivals and get them off the platforms before the next train arrives. Expanding tube station capacity is now often required in line with tube capacity upgrades.
I was at Victoria Station this afternoon and was fortunate enough to get to see and use the new entrance and extension to the southern ticket hall.
I also noticed that a set of stairs from the mainline station to the old part of the ticket hall were being closed for upgrade with May given as completion date .
I recently used the new north ticket hall and walked around the subways which connect to the old Victoria Line to District and Circle lines and the subways are looking pretty impressive and with the bonus that the distances are not as great as those at Green Park and Kings Cross both of which could have benefitted from travelators like Waterloo has .
I look forward to seeing this and future improvements. I hope the queues down to tube from rail stn will improve – they’re a nightmare. 15 mins wait is out of order. And getting escalators up and down from tube to rail stn is desperately needed.
The queue has diminished since the new north ticket hall entrance opened with many more people using it, however until the final three escalators are bought into service there remains only the single escalator down to the Victoria line platforms hence the hold back at surface level.
Why would they open up the ticket hall but not the escalators at the time?
The only outcome I can see is that you have more people waiting underground in the ticket hall, since you increase access but not egress. Maybe they are going to refurbish the existing staircases.
They needed to bring into use the new gate line in order to remove, reconfigure the existing gate line, all existing stairs get a make over, with the opening of the new Wilton road stairs the Kent stairs can be closed for refurbishment.
As I understand it, there are no plans to install escalators from the mainline station into the tube ticket hall, it’s such a wasted opportunity.
There will be a lift for accessibility reasons – but look at Heathrow where there is a similar short set of steps, and an escalator — you always have a queue for the escalator and a hardly used staircase.
Space allocation I believe, plus lifts are the safest way of getting heavy luggage, push chairs & mobility users to the ticket hall.
I noticed tonight some of the new ticket barriers were in use for passengers exiting the Victoria Line thus separating out flows of passengers and thus reducing the tide of passengers from Victoria Line to Mainline which made it difficult for passengers needing to cross this flow to access Circle and District Linex .
The new escalators in South ticket hall finally opened on Friday 24th August together with new stairs to the westbound Circle and District Line platform. A lift next to these escalators became visible but is not yet in service.
The lifts from mainline station to South Ticket hall were in use on Friday together with lift access to westbound Circle and District lines and Victoria line . Hoardings are still in place for eastbound platform.