'Hidden London'

Friday 20 October

I had been aware for a while of the ‘Hidden London’ tours run by the London Transport Museum, as part of general interest in disused stuff, as per this walk with Ray in 2019 spotting former tube stations. Ruth offered to treat me to one as this year’s birthday gift, so I had a bit of a peruse and picked ‘Euston: the Lost Tunnels’. The earliest date we could get was in October, so we booked it in.

We were asked to meet at the south entrance of Euston Square station, on the corner of Euston Road and Gower Street and to be carrying photo ID, wearing sensible shoes and not carrying any enormous and oddly-shapen items of luggage. About 15-20 of us mustered for the tour, led by an exuberantly camp young man with two colleagues there for backup and to stop us wandering off and falling over things. We all showed our ID and said where we’d come from and were issued with lanyards – I was a bit disappointed with this as I’d been hoping for hi-vis vests as per pictures online. Maybe they’d lost too many through people making off with them afterwards.

Me making the best of my lanyard

People in 'Hidden London' hi-vis vests
Courtesy of BusAndTrainUser

We were initially led down into a room within Euston Square station for a bit of PowerPoint and an inspection of our shoes, which were duly pronounced extremely sensible. Then we were led through the subway under Euston Road and up North Gower Street. Our first stop was the Leslie Green dark-red-tiled building on the corner of Melton Street and Drummond Street. I don’t think I’d ever clocked this before, but in any case it’s now fenced off and scheduled for demolition as part of the HS2 debacle project. The building has been closed since 1914 but was formerly the entrance building for the Euston underground station – in fact one of two, as there used to be another, strikingly ornate and long since demolished, over the other side of Euston mainline station. The presence of two buildings was explained by the presence of two rival train companies operating at the time; all is explained on Wikipedia.

Former Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway station building at Euston

After that we walked into Euston station and down to the Northern Line platforms. We were taken first to be shown what's now the extra-wide platform resulting from filling in of redundant Northern Line trackbed when reconstruction took place in the 1960s to incorporate the new Victoria Line. Prior to this, there had been an island platform here in between the two tracks of the Northern Line City branch. Island platforms are evidently a dying breed - there are currently only two remaining on the tube network (at Clapham North and Clapham Common) and I gathered from our tour guides that both these are due to be got rid of. They're evidently regarded as dangerous when crowded, which I can kind of see.

Our tour proceeding along the platform

The really wide platform

There used to be two separate sets of underground platforms at Euston for the two separate train companies (the City & South London Railway and the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway) that both used to run Underground services here. The island platform was on the C&SLR section. It’s now the Northern Line Bank branch southbound platform. Platform 6, I think (we were given the platform number before descending in case we got lost).

After this we were led down to the end of the same platform and, excitingly, through a locked door and up a flight of steps. This fantastic page has a photo from 1979 showing a grilled gate, but this has evidently been replaced with something a bit more opaque. The steps lead up to what was the connecting passageway between the two rival companies' platforms. The connecting passageway closed in 1962 as part of work on the new Victoria Line, and a big draw of the tour are the vintage advertising posters dating from when the tunnels were closed. The posters are all dirty and tatty to varying degrees, but as they've never been papered over they're still readable enough to be interesting.

Another draw of the tour is this darling little deep level ticket office, apparently the only one of its kind on the whole underground network. If you wanted to use the other train company’s services, you had to buy a different ticket here before proceeding. Curiously, in the 2009 photos at this link, the ticket office window looks blocked up, whereas it was open at the time we saw it, allowing us to pose for a photo if we wished, as several of us did.

Other stuff we saw: this former lift shaft, now a ventilation shaft:

Some tunnel views:

A former door - I forget where they said it led to

We got to look down on the Victoria Line platforms. We were warned not to drop our phones or they'd risk being carried off to Brixton or to Walthamstow Central:

Looking down on a Victoria Line train

The whole thing was fascinating. These tours seem a real winning idea for the LTM – our tickets cost us £44 each and clearly there’s no shortage of vaguely geeky types wanting to be allowed into dusty old tunnels for an hour. The tunnels are hot and dimly lit in parts. I found a number of blog posts by people (e.g. here and here) who’ve done this tour, plus an episode of Yesterday’s ‘Secrets of the Underground’ covers roughly the same ground. Also this page has some interesting photos.

Emerging back onto the platform

The PowerPoint at the start of the tour showed us some of the architecture of Euston overground station before the wholesale 1960s rebuild. Unlike, seemingly, most people, I don't actually hate the 60s building, though the concourse has often been unappealingly crowded when I've taken trains to Milton Keynes from it and it feels more hemmed-in than e.g. Paddington's concourse does. I quite like the ceiling effect though. I asked Dad last weekend if he remembered seeing the Doric Arch at Euston. He did. Given that almost all the comment you see online is along the lines of how criminal it was to demolish it and how there’s nothing nice been built since (which for some is then a short step to It Was All Much Better Back Then), Dad voiced some amusingly unexpected comments on it. I think the gist was: “Ridiculous thing. It was massive and in the middle of the bloody road.” Followed by something about how the Victorians did a lot of this extravagant show off stuff.

After the tour finished, I had been intending to drag Ruth over to the newish branch of Kimchee behind Kings Cross, but we were waylaid by a darling little row of places on Chalton Street, including Cheezelo, a cheese-themed deli, where we ended up having lunch. For such a little place it had an impressively extensive wine list, though we didn't indulge at lunchtime.

Cheezelo, our lunch spot