Aldwych Station
Situated on the Strand is the disused Aldwych station.
The line from Aldwych to Holborn was first suggested in the late 1890's.
The plans were then incorporated into the 1899 Great Northern and Strand Railway (GNSR) Act of Parliament; which would run from Wood Green to Stanhope Street on the north side of Aldwych, an area that was under development. Funds for the new line were hard to find until eventually the project was taken over by an American sponsor, Charles Tyson Yerkes, who was already financing other underground railway projects in London, one of which was the Brompton and Piccadilly Circus Railway. Yerkes decided that to make both schemes financially viable they should be incorporated into one line, which resulted in a further Act of Parliament in 1902 to extend the line from Piccadilly Circus to join with the GNSR at Holborn. Alexander Ross & Co began work on the line in 1902, with most of the tunnelling completed by 1904.
Aldwych station stands on the site of what was the Royal Strand Theatre (exactly occupying its footprint).
Some people have said that the station is haunted by the ghost of an actress; indeed some line engineers claim to have been frightened by a ghostly figure down at track level at night...
The platforms at the station were only 250' long, 100 feet shorter than most other platforms on the main line and they were only tiled along part of their length as the company only intended running short trains. The branch opened on 30th November 1907, with the Aldwych station initially being opened as Strand.
Traffic was light from the opening day; bus and tram services in the area were good, both Temple and Holborn Stations were close enough to walk and the office development in the area did not progress as quickly as expected. On March 3rd 1908 an all day service was provided by a single car in the westbound tunnel only and a few months later the late night theatre train was withdrawn.
The line still failed to attract passengers and after 1912 the service ran from the eastern platform at Holborn to the Western Platform at Strand with a spare train being kept on the other line. In 1915 the station was renamed Aldwych and at the same time Charing Cross on the Hampstead Line was re-named Strand. Two years later the Sunday service was withdrawn and the eastern line was abandoned altogether and the track was lifted.
During the First World War the disused platform at Aldwych was used to store art treasures from the National Gallery. Between the wars, the single car service was maintained.
As the international situation deteriorated during the build up to the Second World War London's museums looked to safeguarding their treasures and as in WW1 tube tunnels figured in the authorities’ plans. On 30th June 1938 London Transport granted the government a licence for 'emergency storage of articles' at Dover Street for the London Museum (Lancaster House). It agreed to provide the same facilities at Brompton Road for the Victoria & Albert Museum but this consideration was overruled by interests of national security. In the same month, representatives of the British Museum, the Public Record Office and Office of Works made a joint inspection of the Aldwych branch, which led to an agreement that the museum and PRO would have joint custody of the tunnel for the duration of any coming war. The passenger service was suspended from 21st September 1940 to allow the station to be put to war time uses. Only a small proportion of the museums artifacts were destined for tube stations and others were dispersed to locations much further away in Wales and Northamptonshire. Nonetheless on 2nd September the famous Elgin Marbles (or Parthenon Sculptures), weighing 100 tons, were transported in crates by low-loader lorry to the London Transport depot at Lillie Bridge, Kensington, and then transferred to railway wagons for their final journey to Aldwych. Later part of the British Museum library and various oriental antiquities joined these treasures and the public war memorial to the Machine Gun Corps was also housed in Aldwych station for safekeeping.
As time passed doubts arose over the safety and suitability of tube tunnels for storage and in January 1941 Sir John Forsdyke of the British Museum informed the Office of Works that the tubes were not to be regarded as safe enough to house irreplaceable objects and serious damage might occur if they received direct hits from bombs weighing 1,OOOlb or more. Following a visit on 20th September 1940 by Lord Ashfield, chairman of London Transport and Sir John Anderson, Minister of Home Security, part of the tunnel was handed over two days later to the local authority (Westminster City Council) for use as a public air raid shelter to relieve overcrowding at Holborn station. Spaces were provided in the station area and along 320 yards of running tunnel towards Holborn for 2,500 people until the shelter closed in May 1945.
Over the years, Aldwych has often felt the shadow of an overhanging axe due to low patronage and for many years had been run as a peak-hours only service. In 1994, the straw that broke the camel's back was the need to replace the old (original) lifts. Although still in good working order, the lift machinery contained exposed moving parts and high voltage components, the equipment was therefore deemed no longer safe to maintain. Since the refurbishment was estimated to cost between £3 million and £5 million, the number of people who used the station daily (about 600) couldn't justify the cost of the conversion so the line was closed. The last train carrying the general public left Aldwych on the evening of the 30th September 1994, just less than 87 years after being first opened to the public. Today, the station is being maintained by London Underground mainly as a museum piece, film set and the ticket hall is frequently rented out for art exhibitions, book launches and other private parties. The underground section will slowly deteriorate over time since little maintenance is now performed (apart from redecoration for filming!), however if you go to the surface entrance, you can peer through the gates and see that the ticket area has been restored almost to the same condition as when it was built.
Aldwych is almost certainly the most "used" of the disused stations on the London Underground today, not by passengers, but by film and television companies. The fact that it's on a branch line still connected to the main network and that it's now deserted, yet at the same time being in reasonably good condition down at platform level makes the station an ideal filming location. Films and TV programmes that have used it as a location include Paramount's Patriot Games, the All Saints film Honest, the BBC production of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and pop groups for their videos such as Prodigy's FireStarter and Everlast's Black Jesus.
The station is especially interesting since there are three distinct types of passageway and platform that exist beneath the ground. There are sections of the station that were in daily use up until its ultimate closure in 1994. There are also sections that fell into disuse by 1917 and remain largely untouched since then and there are other parts which were never even completed and have a rather rough look about them since they were never decorated.
London Transport Museum occasionally arrange tours of Aldwych.
