Exploring Aldwych - The Secret Station

As part of the London Transport Museum’s ‘Secret London’ series, this weekend saw a rare opening of London’s disused Aldwych station to the general public – on Saturday morning I descended into the depths below the Strand to explore it…

First opened in 1907 as the southern terminus of one of the early tube lines, Strand Station (as it was then known) was quickly overtaken by events as the central section of the Great Northern Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (now the Piccadilly line) was developed around it. Within a year it was relegated to a spur with only a shuttle service on one platform connecting it to Holborn Station a short distance away.

Aldwych is a typical example of Leslie Green’s turn of the century station designs – the exterior is finished in attractive glazed tiles, which continue into the interior with a white and green colour scheme. The ticket hall still has its original tiny ticket windows, and on the opposite wall there’s a reminder of the world before mobile phones – a long bank of telephone booths!

Down at platform level the station uses the unique combination of green lozenges and diamonds to decorate the walls. Green used these as an identifying device, with each station along the line having a different colour and pattern combination – under the handful of incandescent lightbulbs that would have lit the platform in the station’s early days it was thought that these geometric patterns would help regular travellers to identify their destination. The introduction of the first incarnation of the familiar roundel with the station name across the centre soon came along to render this system obsolete, but nevertheless it is a rather attractive feature.

The spare platform at Aldwych has seen many uses over its lifetime – during the First World War it was used to store treasures from the National Gallery, and during the Second the British Museum deposited the Elgin Marbles in its dry, dusty depths. From the 1950s onwards it was used as a testbed for upcoming station designs and features – new lighting schemes, tiling patterns and trackside equipment were all tried out here before being deployed across the network.

On our visit, getting down to the platforms at Aldwych turned out to be a bit of a chore – visitors have to use the emergency spiral staircase. Although Aldwych is replete with lifts (in fact it has an unusual three lift shafts) because of the small numbers of people using the station only one was ever in operation and only two shafts were fitted out, and neither of the existing lifts are still in operation today. This fact is actually the cause of the eventual closure of the station in 1994 – Aldwych’s original lifts were in use right up until the 1990s, but by this point replacements were long overdue. The high cost of carrying out this work set against the low hundreds of fares that the station could expect each day was seen as poor value, so that was the end for Aldwych which saw its doors unceremoniously shuttered on 1 September of that year.

Today Aldwych is popular for location shoots – it can be seen masquerading as various stations across the network in a vast number of movies and TV dramas. The intact platform is also used for training London Underground staff in safety procedures – on our visit there was a train in the platform so that various rescue techniques could be taught in the confined spaces underneath it.

Visits to Aldwych usually take place twice a year but are heavily oversubscribed – keep an eye on the London Transport Museum’s Facebook page and Twitter feed for hints on when it might be open again.