Wartime history, secret tunnels and a luxury underground bedroom – how better to celebrate 10 years of the Hidden London tours from the London Transport Museum than a brand new addition (the subject of this Hidden London tours review) and the news that the whole collection is now suitable for age 10+.
review visit*
Previously all the tours were only for age 14 and above, but with a few tweaks made to the content, they’re perfect for kids who love history, including wartime secrets, with a side of adventure. Frankly, I felt a very childlike sense of excitement at more than a few points as we were exploring.
Intrigued? My Hidden London tour review includes a sneak peek at the latest route, Dover Street: Alight here for Green Park, taking you on a journey through what is now one of London’s busiest and most vital tube stations back through wartime history to its earliest days in 1906, when it was known as Dover Street.
My own journey started on two of the newest lines on the Tfl network – the Elizabeth Line and the Jubilee line – emerging into Green Park itself to join the tour. But within minutes, we were whisked back from modern-day London to December 15, 1906, when Dover Street was one of a string of new stations opened in the capital.
Part of the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (the origins of today’s Piccadilly Line), Dover Street’s original entrance was – unsurprisingly – on Dover Street itself, just off Piccadilly. But with its location a stone’s throw from the Ritz, Green Park and the shops along Piccadilly, it quickly became a popular stop.
The lifts for the little two platform station quickly struggled to cope with the influx of travellers, and by the 1930s, they were replaced with escalators and a new exit on Piccadilly and across the road in Green Park, along with a new name of Green Park in 1933, which it’s had ever since.
But behind the bustle – Green Park is the 15th busiest station on the London Underground – the last remains of Dover Street are tucked behind an unassuming mesh metal door, which we disappeared through to the astonishment of tourists dashing to catch their train.
Along a dusty corridor, you can still see the handmade cream and blue tiles which decorated the original station – peeking through a gap onto the Piccadilly line station below, you can see the modern versions in the same colours lining the platform.
With pictures of the original red tiled station and its platform on display, Chris, our tour leader (and Director of Content at the London Transport Museum) revealed a few more quirky facts about the station’s early history – including the fact that the building was used as a canteen by the Milk Marketing Board after the new Green Park station was built.
We also discovered that Covent Garden station was one of a string of stops listed for closure for not being busy enough – hard to imagine today! While that survived, several others, including neighbouring Down Street were shut down.
Until the Second World War started that is, and there was a new, essential role for some of these disused stations.
Brompton Road became the anti-aircraft headquarters, South Kensington housed the London Passenger Transport Board’s engineering services and Down Street was transformed into the Railway Executive Committee’s bomb-proof headquarters.
And while Dover Street was originally used to keep artwork from the Tate safe from the bombings of the Blitz, before long it became clear that those running the Underground needed to be safe underground as well.
The suggestion of York Road near King’s Cross was turned down, but Dover Street got the seal of approval. The fact that one director of the board lived just around the corner and the fact that Piccadilly was far more salubrious than King’s Cross at the time is surely just coincidence.
Before long, the handful of converted stations on the Piccadilly Line meant that it was possible to visit a string of essential sites without heading above ground, keeping both people and vital services running smoothly – the railways (both underground and overground) among them.
But this was only the beginning of the peek behind the scenes, as Chris showed us a diagram of how the tube station was transformed to enable this to happen – while standing in the old mess room.
Did you know? It takes between two and five years to research one of the Hidden London tours, using information from the museum’s archives as well as Tfl and the national archives, and carry out the necessary health & safety checks before letting the public behind the scenes.
Wandering through the tunnels, we found ourselves in Lord Ashfield‘s lavish bedroom, tucked away around a corner that once held the passenger lifts – a dead ringer for other stations like Russell Square. You can even still see remnants of the skirting board, designed to disguise the fact he was living in a tube station.
The lift shafts themselves were converted with reinforced concrete slabs and mechanisms to close against gas attacks, to be transformed into conference rooms.
Elsewhere a lavish kitchen for the high-ranking men running wartime operations from down here (and a less lavish kitchen for the other staff), plus a line of bathrooms with some of the plumbing and outlines of toilets still visible, helped make life as comfortable as possible.
It wasn’t only the kitchens which were different depending on who they were designed for; on one wall you can see the remains of paint in the areas occupied by the bosses, and further along the tiles for the more low-ranking staff.
What I’d never realised is that if you look at some of the original tiles, you can occasionally spot maker’s marks from the companies which produced them.
They’re even still visible in some modern tube stations, including Covent Garden, where you can find them at the bottom of the stairs.
It was an astonishing project – and came with an equally astonishing price tag, of around £45,000 in 1941. The last bunker to be built in a tube station, documents in the London Transport Museum archive show the site was still being used in 1945, long after the Blitz had ended.
And it seems likely that the phone exchange, which was enormously complicated to set up at the time, was still in use for months afterwards if not longer. Down Street’s own phone exchange was still up and running for two years after the end of the war.
With a fluttering WiFi signal coming through from the nearby platforms to my mobile, it’s a reminder of how difficult it was to keep phone communications up and running at the time – but how important it was to do so.
Then it was time to leave 1940s London behind and venture elsewhere in the rabbit warren of tunnels – I quickly lost any sense of direction I might have had – disappearing behind an anonymous wooden door elsewhere in Green Park.
Through a grille, the modern-day Victoria Line was arriving onto the platform, but in our hidden tunnel, it was the 1960s, with the underground network struggling to cope with the number of passengers trying to use it. Which meant a new line was needed.
The Victoria Line was designed to link several mainline stations – Victoria, Euston and King’s Cross – as well as connecting up with other lines across the network.
To this day, every station on the Victoria line connects to another underground or rail line except one – Pimlico, as it was added after the original plans for the line were drawn up. Handy pub quiz fact.
Did you know? Each station on the Victoria line has its own individual artwork created in tiles, with some kind of link to the area – Blackhorse Road is a black horse, for example, while Green Park is a more abstract rendition of the trees in the park.
A decade later, in 1979, the Jubilee Line followed the same pattern, connecting up with other lines and stations, and when the extension was added too, helping revitalise some areas thanks to the better transport links.
By this point, over 100 years since the first tube trains started running, designers had worked out a lot more of what you need to keep the network running – a long way from the two platforms and two lifts of the Dover Street station.
Ventilation, for starters. We were standing in one of the ventilation tunnels next to the Victoria Line, created when the Jubilee Line was built – as anyone who’s tried to cross from one line to another at Green Park knows, everything is quite spread out here.
Incidentally, this is one reason the Central line gets so ridiculously hot – not only is it one of the oldest lines, there’s nowhere to easily add ventilation tunnels. Or the giant ventilation shaft we were about to see.
Heading to the front of the southbound Jubilee Line platform, we went through our third secret door of the day, into what looked like a giant curving tunnel and felt like a freezer.
Unlike the other snugly warm tunnels from earlier in our tour, there’s a good reason for this. As we rounded the corner, a giant shaft leads up and up to the world above – although the actual location couldn’t be shared, and once again, I had no real idea where I was, we could see the daylight glimmering high above us.
And 90 minutes after we’d begun, it was time to emerge from our secret doors and rejoin it, after our secret glimpse of the world behind the ordinary everyday London Underground. I’ll never look at a door in a tube station quite the same way again!
Hidden London tours review: Need to know
Tickets from Dover Street: Alight here for Green Park are on sale, priced £45 (£42 for concessions and children). Additional tickets for spring and summer dates due to be released in February and later this year.
Hidden London by London Transport Museum now offers 12 tours of various sites across London, visiting disused stations, forgotten platforms and a deep-level shelter at Clapham South.
The Clapham South tour is one of the most family-friendly, including reconstructions to show how it looked in the 1940s and later housing Caribbean immgrants arriving on the Empire Windrush, while the Charing Cross Hidden London tour has featured in Bond and Paddington, letting you stand under Trafalgar Square, walk down disused escalators and wander along abandoned platforms.
Tours run year-round, from Wednesday to Sunday, with three locations open each week. All tours are now open to children aged 10+ (anyone aged 10-16 must be accompanied by an adult) and all participants need ID, or proof of age for children, including Zip card.
You also get half-price one-day entry to London Transport Museum (within a month of your tour date). No need to pre-book, but bring proof of your tour ticket.
Profits help fund London Transport Museum’s charitable activities as an education and heritage charity.
There’s more information about what to bring and wear on the tour website, but you’ll need closed toe shoes and expect it to be dusty. There isn’t any step-free access and there aren’t toilets along the way.
Disclosure: My tour was free for the purposes of review thanks to Hidden London at the London Transport Museum – all opinions are my own
Images copyright MummyTravels
