It was early one autumn evening in 1940, as the Luftwaffe’s bombs fell on London overhead, when Mr G. Cole-Deacon finally got the call. Cole-Deacon, the secretary of the Railway Executive Committee, had half expected it to come. A few hours earlier, whilst sitting in the office of his own design deep beneath the streets of Britain’s capital city, he had received a highly unusual visit from a senior Cabinet minister. Ever since then he’d been waiting for the phone to ring.
Whilst Cole-Deacon’s work was important – the Railway Committee, after all, had been given the heavy duty of running all of Britain’s railways for the duration of the war – it wasn’t exactly glamorous, and thus the unannounced arrival of a well known member of Churchill’s government earlier that day had been rather unusual. After the man had officially introduced himself, Cole-Deacon politely asked how he could help.
“I would like,” the Cabinet member asked, innocently, “to see this underground hive of industry.”
The Committee Secretary happily agreed to give him the tour. As he guided the Cabinet Minister around the offices in which he and his staff worked, he proudly began to explain how he had created one of the most secure wartime offices in London – the Railway Committee’s secret underground control centre in the abandoned Down Street Tube Station on the Piccadilly Line.
The remains of original station signage in the abandoned Down Street station today.
A forgotten station
Cole-Deacon was rightly proud of his subterranean creation. As war had increasingly seemed inevitable in the run up to 1939 it had become clear that Britain’s civilian services were as ill-prepared for the coming conflict as its military. This included the “Big Four” – the railway companies who, between them, were responsible for running practically all of Britain’s railway network. In wartime those railways would be vital, moving men and material to where they were needed throughout the British Isles. Yet they also represented a critical weakness as they, and the men and women who ran them, were highly vulnerable to bombing.
The wartime entrance to Down Street
On 24th September 1938 the Railway Executive Committee (REC) was formed once more. As it had in World War One, on the outbreak of war it would be tasked with taking control of all of Britain’s railways. This single point of command, it was hoped, would help ensure that the railways were able to meet the needs of the nation’s war machine quickly and effectively. It also, however, represented a single point of risk. For reasons of command and communication, it would need to headquarter itself in London. But doing so would render its operations and staff highly vulnerable to bombing. A bomb-proof facility, it was soon decided, was needed.
To begin with the REC thought they had an easy solution – convert the basement of Fielden House, an office block near Westminster Abbey in which the REC was based, into a bomb-proof facility. Very quickly, however, it became clear that this presented a number of problems. Firstly, the existence of the REC – and its location – had hardly been a pre-war secret. This meant that, when war broke out, there was a non-negligible chance that Fielden House would be targeted by the bombers and agents of Hitler’s Reich. Perhaps more crucially though early exploration at the site revealed that there was a considerable risk of flooding, as the basement itself was close both to the high-water mark of the Thames and to a nearby sewer. In the end the REC were forced back to the drawing board, and the REC’s Secretary, G. Cole-Deacon, was the man tasked with finding a suitably solution – and quickly.
Luckily, G Cole-Deacon had an idea. He had, briefly, worked as a consultant for London Underground during the inter-war years and thus had a greater awareness than most of the organisation’s history and facilities. Most crucially, he knew the locations of many of its “ghost stations” – the stations that had either been closed (and often forgotten) by the public at large, or which had simply never been finished. One of those stations was Down Street on the Piccadilly Line, and Cole-Deacon had a sneaking suspicion that it might be exactly what they needed.
The stairs used to access the REC facility at Down Street. The tiles are original, the steps have been replaced at some point.
An unpromising opening
Down Street in 1930, courtesy LTM
Down Street station had first opened to the public in on the 15th March 1907. That date itself didn’t bode well for the station’s future. The rest of the (now) Piccadilly Line had actually opened a couple of months before, but construction of Down Street (a classic red Leslie Green station) had been plagued with problems and delays.
A lot of these came down to its location. Sited in Mayfair, between (now) Green Park and Hyde Park stations it had not been a popular construction project with the largely upper-class residents of the area. Mostly owning their own methods of transport, and sometimes citing the fear that the station would bring disreputable people to the area, they raised objections to various aspects of its construction. The sheer cost of land in the area had also forced the station to be built well away from the main thoroughfare, increasing the length – and cost – of the below ground tunnels which provided access to the station platforms.
The two-person lift added by the REC during the war
From its opening, Down Street was little used. By 1909 a number of services were skipping the station entirely and from 1918 onwards it was completely closed on the Sundays. In the end this lack of passengers would cement its fate. When the legendary Frank Pick embarked on his plan to extend the Piccadilly Line in 1929 he needed to increase line average line speeds to 25mph in order to ensure that service frequencies remained high. With passenger numbers at Down Street still low, and with entrances to both Hyde Park and Green Park stations now closer than they had been at opening (the result of escalator works forcing the relocation of their entrances) it was decided to sacrifice the station. Down Street saw its last paying passengers in 1932.
The Perfect Location
Whilst its general existence had been largely forgotten by the wider public (although the classic red frontage was still perfectly visible on Down Street itself), it was not forgotten by Cole-Deacon. He quickly arranged for himself and Sir Ralph Wedgwood, the REC’s Chairman to pay the old station a visit.
Descending by candle-light, what they found was a dusty, but large station deep underground with an awful lot of potential. After its closure, lengths of the stations platforms and track had been seized in order to allow a new siding to be built, but the rest of the station was largely unused. Multiple large lift shafts and a secondary stepped access to the street still remained, as did the the long, wide tunnels linking the station’s entrances with the running tunnels. A keen yachtsman, and thus aware of just how much could be fitted into limited space with careful thought, Cole-Deacon saw these tunnels not just as the connecting passages they had been but as something the REC needed – rooms and office space.
“I don’t think we’ll find anything better than this.” Sir Ralph Wedgwood said, as his colleague pointed out the possibilities, and within days work was underway.
Wartime stencils remain throughout the station, hinting at rooms long since removed.
The facility
Descending into Down Street today one will find little remaining evidence of its wartime role. The many offices and rooms put in place by Cole-Deacon and his staff are long gone. All that remains are little hints at the site’s past – the odd sign, still on the walls, the outline of the original offices on the floors of tunnels and, in side passages, the remains of toilets and storage once used by those working there.
At the time, however, Down Street was one of the most remarkable (but secret) sites in London. It contained offices, control rooms, typing rooms, conference rooms and even living facilities – kitchens and sufficient sleeping facilities for the 12 senior officials and 22 members of regular staff that worked there, safe from the Luftwaffe’s bombs deep underground.
Old staff facilities like these can be found in the dark off-shoot passages of the station. Time has rarely been kind to them.
All this had been constructed entirely in secret – despite the fact that the station still lay on the working Piccadilly Line. Engineers, working only at night when the Tube was closed, had built walls along the old platform edges to hide what was going on from passengers, leaving only two short platform spaces that could be used by senior staff at the facility if necessary. To do so they operated a secret plunger on the short remaining platforms that would activate a special red signal. Once the incoming train had stopped, the VIP would be allowed to enter the cab on displaying the appropriate high-level pass. The driver would then drop them off at the next station along the line.
A meeting at Down Street, courtesy LTM
The walls and furniture were custom built to Cole-Deacon’s exact specifications in order to maximise usage of every single space. Despite this, they were comfortable and well laid out. The facilities (but not their location) were described by The Times as being comparable to those found on an ocean liner or first class carriage and the description was apt – everything had been put together by the the LMS Railway’s carriage works, although they had not know where the results of their work were to go. Even the small passages linking the offices were given careful thought, being just wide enough to allow the passage of a tea trolley (whether this was by design or chance Cole-Deacon would never admit).
All this Cole-Deacon proudly showed the Cabinet Minister as he toured the facility in 1940. At first, the man seemed unimpressed but gradually, as the scale of what Cole-Deacon and the REC had achieved dawned on him, he had finally confessed to Cole-Deacon the true purpose of his visit.
He had been tasked with finding a safe location for the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill to work during air raids whilst more permanent facilities were constructed elsewhere. As he left, he told Cole-Deacon that during the next big raid he might well be in touch.
Looking back towards the entrance. The raised area is all that remains of the typing pool. Note the tea-cart-sized passageway on the right.
The Special Guest
Winston Churchill made his first visit to the REC Down Street facility at 7pm that same night, arriving at the height of the bombing. Accompanying him were many senior members of the Government. Cole-Deacon and his staff cleared the conference room for their use and, within a few hours, a full War Cabinet meeting was underway at Down Street. Churchill, who practically had to be dragged off of London’s rooftops at times during raids by his staff, was enamoured of the place – which he felt at least gave him an opportunity to work, rather than hide.
Photos of the original lift shaft, reinforced with concrete during the war. The two openings show where the lifts once stopped.
“I used to go there once the firing started,” Churchill would later write in Their Finest Hour, his history of WW2, “to transact my business, and to sleep undisturbed. One felt a natural compunction at having more safety than most other people; but so many pressed me that I let them have their way.”
Over the next forty days, as the Blitz continued overhead, Churchill’s appearance, and that of his staff and key cabinet members, became practically a nightly occurrence. On each occasion the conference room would be put at their disposal, and Cole-Deacon would vacate his own office (and sleeping accommodation) and hand it over to the Prime Minister. On one occasion Cole-Deacon made the mistake of leaving a number of his own railway papers on his desk. He returned the next day to find that the Prime Minister had annotated them all with notes and suggestions in the margins.
Mrs Churchill also soon became a regular guest, not least because she discovered that the secret Piccadilly Line platforms at Down Street gave her, and her staff, a discreet way to get around the network, paying visits to Londoners sheltering on the Tube.
Indeed so much use did they make of the facility that Churchill himself became concerned they might be disrupting the work of the REC. Cole-Deacon assured him this was not the case, but offered to fit out one of the station’s lift shafts as an office and living quarters purely for the Prime Minister’s use. Churchill agreed, although by the time the work was completed the Cabinet War Rooms were officially open and thus the need for temporary arrangements at Down Street had passed.
The outlines of old offices and work spaces in the passage above the Picadilly Line’s running tunnels
A return to obscurity
The work of the REC at Down Street continued for the duration of the war and, despite the availability of facilities elsewhere, Churchill himself would still occasionally appear. Down Street, he admitted, represented an opportunity to escape the Cabinet War Rooms (and later facilities at the Rotunda) and get some work done. By the end of 1946, however, the need for the facility had passed and both the REC and Down Street stood down.
The stairs down to the old platform level, where modern signs to help contractors have been posted.
The last task of Cole-Deacon’s staff was to decommission the offices and, in a relatively short stretch of time, it began to return to its pre-war shabby state – as the pictures throughout this article show. In recent years it his become one of the more well known of London’s “ghost stations” – in part thanks to the public revelations about its wartime history. Nonetheless, it still holds some secrets. Rumours persist that, towards the end of the last century, it (and its sidings) were used by the SAS for training purposes – although it must be pointed out that these are unsubstantiated. Today, opportunities to visit it remain rare.
Away from the service lights, the station swiftly becomes a network of dark, twisting passages to long-forgotten places
Into the future
That may be a situation, however, that is about to change. The station remains wholly owned by TfL who have, in recent years, made increasing noises about finding commercial uses for the sites they control. Graeme Craig, TfL’s Director of Commercial Development, is happy to admit that Down Street is well and truly on the list. TfL will lease out part of the station (the part that is not required to preserve its role as an emergency access point), around 400m2 in size.
The remains of a wartime poster
“These are difficult, complex, spaces.” He admits, as we stand on Down Street’s spiral staircase. “We need to retain the operational use. We don’t want to destroy the history.”
“This station has good topology.” Adds Lewis Kinnier of architects Carmody Groarke, who were brought in by TfL to help explore their options at Down Street. “Often there are two lift shafts but here we have just one lift shaft, a pedestrian staircase and two tunnels.”
“The lift shaft and one tunnel is an opportunity, and then the staircase and the other tunnel can be reserved for operational use.”
Just what that use might be, TfL are keen for others to decide – although they will obviously assist with exploring the logistics. The hope is that a successful partner will make interesting use of the space, although Craig is keen to manage expectations and to stress that this is something of an experiment, and that what works at Down Street might not work elsewhere.
“There’s not one single answer to the disused stations.” He says, frankly. “There’s a lot of discussion in the press and elsewhere about this huge network [of disused stations]. That network simply doesn’t exist.”
“These are at the bottom end of all the commercial spaces that we have and we’re keen to understand how we might make use of them in the round.”
“We’re confident that there is an outcome here [at Down Street].” He continues, “We’re looking for ideas as to how we can bring it forward.”
A narrow passage down the side of the platform tunnel
Whether TfL’s efforts come to anything remains to be seen. Rumours and plans for the use of London’s ghost stations are a persistent part of the London news cycle. Galleries, restaurants and bars are common suggestions. Just as persistent is the lack of any real effort in most of those plans to explain how the very real challenges of access, safety and fit out will be addressed. With TfL now clearly taking an active role in the process, however, it is likely that we will finally see some progress. As long as that progress respects the history and uniqueness of the locations involved as Graeme Craig asserts, that will almost certainly be a positive thing.
And perhaps in a few years, on the seventieth anniversary of its creation, we will be able to raise a glass to Cole-Deacon and his subterranean masterpiece – in the very tunnels in which it once existed.
You can find more photos of Down Street over on both Ian Visits and Londonist. As always, both Abandoned stations and Subterranea Britannica have a wonderful selection of photos and information about the station as well. We highly recommend both.
Thanks for the great article and beautifully atmospheric photographs. For future uses, archival storage would seem the most likely option – a nice constant temperature and humidity levels for storing photographic negatives and film. Or there must be plenty of demand for safe deposit in that part of London.
Great stuff, and a few comments:
– I think the REC was the Railway Executive (not Emergency) Committee;
– and Sir Ralph (not Ralf – a bit too Germanic!) Wedgwood;
– “a discrete way to get around the network”, I think you mean discreet;
– “the enormity of what Cole-Deacon and the REC had achieved”: enormity means “the great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something perceived as bad or morally wrong”, which I don’t think fits;
– did Lewis Kinnear really say that the station had “good typology”? Good topology makes more sense.
Sorry to out-P PoP!
Thanks Mike – appreciated and changes made. Due to the speed of concept -> completion, this didn’t have a chance to be officially PoPed or LBMed, so apologies for the typos etc.
The BBC carried a report about commercial uses for Down Street on its lunchtime TV news programme for London on Tuesday April 28th. As well as Graeme Craig, there was a brief ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-him’ appearance by John Bull himself captioned with his real name and ‘London Reconnections’. John, out of interest, when did the shoot take place?
Fascinating article. I have walked past the old entrance many times but never been underground. Loved the ‘elth ‘n safety’ yellow notice showing a steam train adjacent to a deep tube tunnel.
@RayL. Although this piece has been in the works for a little while, the shoot (and visit where these photos were taken) was yesterday.
I’ve got more photos that didn’t make it to the final article. I’ll upload them to the LR Flickr stream tonight.
I love the new page design – beautiful!
The discrete/discreet slip re. Mrs Churchill is still there. Mind you, visiting individual stations rather than anywhere on a continuous stretch is in a sense discrete.
[I have now discreetly fixed this. PoP]
Fascinating article thanks and nice design with the full screen images. Under the title image the sharing icons links are transposed with facebook linking to twitter and vice versa.
[I believe I have now fixed these two discrete errors. PoP]
The BBC London news item is here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05s2cb0/bbc-london-news-28042015
until 1855 tonight. Begins at 16:00 minutes in.
Or here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05s2cb2/bbc-london-news-28042015
Expires 10.45pm tonight.
Update on above:
The clip is available here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-england-32497975
Still in pedantry mode. Did the malapropistic Lewis Kinnier really say ‘good topology’ (as opposed to ‘good topography’) ?
@PoP – The sharing links at the bottom of the article are ok, the tops ones immediately under the title image are still swapped.
@Fandroid – I suppose tunnels systems at stations have an inherent network connectivity which might perhaps be accurately refered to as a (network) topology, or perhaps those considering the reuse of complex manifold spaces of abandoned stations are concerned with their properties that are preserved under continuous deformations including stretching and bending, but not tearing or gluing – sounds expensive!
Topography is the study of surface shape or features, so does that include tunnels?
I’m sure there are plenty of restaurants, clubs and art galleries looking for an ‘unusual’ venue like this to exploit.
A tunnel ramp for Frankfurt’s Stadtbahn system used to host one of Germany’s most revered techno clubs, the U60311. Despite soundproofing pedestrians on the surface could still hear the stuff being played downstairs and I often saw groups of people dancing next to the vents when I spent the summer there back in the day…
@John U.K.
“The BBC London news item is here until 1855 tonight. Begins at 16:00 minutes in.
Or here Expires 10.45pm tonight.”
I’ve used the “getIplayer” to grab the two shows… I can extract the video later if that would help.
Mark Townend,
Unfortunately, as the Twitter and Facebook links at the top are not part of the article I do not have the ability to change those. I will pass the information on.
In General,
Just three points (as I happened to be down there today):
It is not obvious from the photo but the reason the floor of the typist pool was raised was that the passage is not level at this point but on a slope and it is presumed that it is not easy to type if the typewriter isn’t level. Just beyond the raised area in the picture was one of the gas locks to prevent any possibility of being gassed – such was the worry of a gas attack in the early days of World War II.
The rationale of closing Brompton Road, Down Street and York Way was to reduce journey time on the central section when the Piccadilly got extended beyond Hammersmith and Finsbury Park. By omitting these stops a considerable time saving could be made. It didn’t speed the trains up much between stations. One of the surprising things (as can be seen on the video) is how slowly the trains travel through Down Street.
Very unusually Down Street only had one lift shaft and that may have hindered construction. You can build two lift shafts as fast as one but using only one lift shaft to both extract and supply, it is speculated, may have slowed construction down.
@Mark Townend. Perhaps Mr Kinnier should have steered clear of any word starting with ‘topo…..’ !
Re Pedantic of Purley:
” it is presumed that it is not easy to type if the typewriter isn’t level.”
Indeed – and I speak from experience.
In those days, of course, typewriters were mechanical. So at the end of each line the typist would push the carriage along to the right, ready to start typing at the left-hand end of each line. (This may have been automated / spring operated.)
If that movement is uphill, then the carriage won’t go all the way back to the left – perhaps needing an extra push to get there, so reducing overall typing speed. Or if downhill, the carriage will shoot across, hit the end-stop hard, and (eventually) break through.
This picture may help, for younger readers unfamiliar with the technology: http://www.penguinpetes.com/images/Underwoodfive.jpg
OK, so we lost Brompton Road, Down Street and York Road between South Kensington and Finsbury Park. The service to the suburbs was speeded up, as Pick wanted. It is 300m from Leicester Square to Covent Garden. Why did, and why does, Covent Garden station survive? An escalator could surely replace the station now?
@Ian Sergeant
Maybe because of Covent Garden’s status as a major landmark, it was beneficial for tourism to keep the tube station. Also it has a claim to fame: being the shortest distance between two stations (it and Leicester Square) on the tube.
@Ian Sergeant – and it spreads the load from Leicester Square. You will have noticed that thought is being given, on these grounds and those of coverage generally, to reopening some other long closed stations such as City road.
@kingstonCommuter
Covent Garden was not such a major tourist draw landmark in the 1930s when the other stations closed. Indeed the market didn’t move out until 1974.
But closing it now would probably overload Leicester Square.
Interesting article. I wasn’t aware of the details of the war time events but knew of the use the station was put to. I never did get inside Down St but was aware of its existence plus all the other places but I must stop there or else I’ll have to chop my own fingers off. That’s better than trying to shoot all the LR readership. 😉
I’ve seen ideas come and go about reusing these places and I must say I’m not convinced about leasing out these places for commercial use. I don’t doubt Mr Craig’s sincerity nor his determination but I just find it a tad objectionable that we’re having to consider “scraping the barrel” to find funding to keep the system running. If anything is going to be done I’d much prefer that the LT Museum had tenure and used the space to explain London’s wartime and transport history. Allowing people to see the space broadly as it is (but sensibly cleaned up / preserved) seems much more fitting and I suspect people would pay decent money to see it – as they do at the Museum and the Depot. Obviously we must wait and see if the Museum put in a proposal.
Can I also be a lone voice in not liking the new page layout with the broad photos? Sorry but I find it distracting and out of proportion. The page / article layout has long been very nice on LR but I think this latest change is a retrograde step.
@Graham H – indeed, thought is given to reopening York Road, City Road, etc. but I’ve never seen anything with a BCR close to good enough to implement. Clearly closing the entrance would overload Leicester Square, but I was suggesting an escalator from the Covent Garden entrance to Leicester Square, thus spreading people but closing the Covent Garden station to speed up the service. Or if that isn’t possible in engineering terms, an escalator to a new entrance closer to the old market.
I’m still not clear why Covent Garden survived when the other stations didn’t.
I expect that far more workers were using Covent Garden station for access to the market than the numbers of housemaids and footmen using Down Street.
Also, maybe the low top speed west of Holborn, round the curves between Kingsway and Great Queen Street, meant that there was less to be gained operationally by closing Covent Garden, than the other candidates.
It would also have been handy to keep the station open for various venues and institutions: for the Royal Opera House, Freemasons’ Hall (rebuilt in 1927-32) at the western end of GQS, and a different sort of venue, Bow Street Magistrates Court.
Turn it into a ‘dining experience’. You will soon have the trendies beating a path.
@ Lady Bracknell – I suspect the rats and mice in the Picc Line tunnels and in Green Park would also love a “dining experience” at Down St. :-)) I think it would be a massive task to get acceptable and clean food preparation / storage / disposal facilities into Down St.
I was, of course, jesting WW.
@Ian Sergeant
I think if you were building the Piccadilly line from scratch today, notwithstanding the fact that you’d probably choose a different route, you’d build bigger platforms and two entrances at Leicester Square instead of a separate station at Covent Garden. But as what is there is there, it’s hard to justify changing it as the money could be better spent elsewhere on the network.
@ The Other Paul – the fact that LU has decided to renew the lifts at Covent Garden with faster, more space efficient versions shows they’re not going to be closing it any time soon nor doing anything more substantial. As a result of our daft “up and down” funding regime for tube investment LU lost the chance many years ago to obtain the requisite property for a new entrance at Covent Garden broadly where the Apple Shop now is. The funding was cut and the project was lost. It’s now been overtaken by more pressing issues elsewhere so I think Covent Garden will have to struggle on as best as it can for many more years.
@The other Paul
“I think if you were building the Piccadilly line from scratch today”
Let us not forget that, as built, station entrances some distance apart serving the same platforms were impractical as the original access was by (vertical) lift.
The Piccy was never planned as one line anyway – it was three quite separate projects that Yerkes cobbled together into one: hence the sharp curves and odd junction arrangements at South Kensington and Holborn
I suspect Covent Garden will also have a significant role when (if?) Holborn is re-organised to increase capacity there. Presumably to some extent it relieves pressure there already?
Slightly off topic but I wish the London Transport Museum opened the Strand branch as a heritage line maybe including it in the ticket price. Using the disused platforms at Holborn would make it effectively segregated from the mainline.
@Mark Allen
Sorry, but with no independent emergency exit at Holborn, I can’t see this as a starter. And it could only showcase one train.
Not to mention the need to get the lifts at Aldwych working – and if that was an economic proposition the line would never have closed in the first place.
It’s also likely that when the Picc Line is eventually upgraded that the Aldwych branch will be completely severed from the rest of the network. There will be no real need to keep a clapped out ancient train on that line nor to equip it to somehow stagger on to the main line for regular maintenance. There’ll also be zero justification for putting half a brand new one on it nor equipping it with modern signalling.
On the most recent Dragons’ Den (30th August), there was a bloke pitching for investment (£2 million for 51%!!!) to redevelop Down Street station into a three-tier attraction:
– An tourist orientated immersive experience recreating Londoners’ use of the deep-level tube bomb shelters during WWII. There were no further details, but I presume he planned to use some of the passageways mentioned in the article?
– A corporate events space for hire utilising the old lift shaft space.
– Leasing out the surface level building for commercial use (presumably as a swanky bar or restaurant).
Needless to say, he was turfed out of the den fairly sharpish.
Has anyone on here heard about this plan? He mentioned that he had devoted the last four years of his life (as well as a six-figure sum, including selling his house!), so there must be some record of this somewhere. I’m also puzzled as to why TfL/LU would allow his company to use the subterranean parts of the station site, not least because there is still a working tube line running right past it :S. I would have thought the old Aldwych station would be a much better site for this venture, if he is seriously pursuing it.
Anonymously
I thought this story sounded familiar….there was an article on the subject in the Standard last April:
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/tube-station-down-street-could-become-a-restaurant-or-art-gallery-10209918.html
@ Anonymously – I don’t watch Dragons Den but I find it interesting that someone pitched an idea about using a disused tube station and the Dragons booted it out. It’s interesting because, of course, TfL is trying to persuade people to use “spare” space such as disused stations for commercial enterprises. There is also a person who regularly tries to persuade the Mayor and others to let him and his company exploit disused tube stations. Their efforts have come to nought despite regular rants on Twitter that have been borderline slanderous towards certain individuals.
I’m afraid I am deeply deeply sceptical about the ability to exploit these spaces in any commercially sustainable way. The irony of the “flog it off to someone else” brigade is that TfL itself could probably earn a reasonable sum in actually just allowing people into these spaces to see them as they are (suitably cleaned up and presented). It’s the history that makes these spaces attractive to locals and tourists not turning them into poncy wine bars or “rip off” artistic spaces. Of course TfL isn’t allowed to spend its own money on such ventures in the current funding environment as they have to try to rip the money out of the hands of the private sector instead. Fascinating that those arch privateers, the Dragons, kept tight hold of their cash when it came to a disused tube station idea.
I often wonder wether the Aldwych branch could be developed as part of the LT Museum (a fairly short walk away) in which one could ride a living-breathing 38, or even eventually a Standard Stock unit that I understand is undergoing a gradual restoration. It’s the sort of project that, if sufficiently well construed, and if it captured the imagination of Heritage Lottery Fund and other donors, could be thinkable. This is also in a context that it must be becoming more difficult to work heritage stock on ‘live’ deep tube lines as signalling and operational technologies move on apace.
Or shall I dream on?
@WW: … their cash… It makes a big difference. Such things as pragmatism help as well.
@NickBXN
Well that’s exactly what MailRail is seeking to do not far away, with a trip in ‘heritage’ stock and a closed line allied to a museum. And they now have funding. So not impossible – but, in the case of Aldwych, only realistic with a through rail connection and a Holborn platform which I though was going to be used for Holborn passenger circulation enlargement?
@NickXBN
Any project involving Aldwych first has to address the cost of fixing what closed it in the first place – the lifts. The conflicting demands of segregating heritage line visitors from normal passengers at Holborn on the one hand, with emergency evacuation arrangements on the other, would also be difficult to resolve.
It is already possible to travel on 1938 stock, 1959 stock, and Dreadnought stock in the British Isles, in rather more interesting surroundings than the Aldwych tunnel.
Storage and archiving seems to be the most common recycling option for such sites.
I do wonder if there isn’t also some scope for reusing some of these sites to provide additional IT infrastructure uses, such as data centres, server farms, data backup sites, and the like. The Aldwych branch seems a good candidate as you have not only the station, but also the tunnels up to Holborn.
Sites like Down Street are less suited to such projects, but you never know what future technologies might require.
The Down St chap was proposing 10 16 person tours a day @ £18. I think he’d get the numbers, but £3k daily revenue wouldn’t go far with all his costs.
As the Dragons pointed out, he’d spent all the money on a leased property, costing £80k after a 2 year free period, and it would all to easy for someone better financed to come along and take him over.
Doing the same thing for Aldwych seemed to make much more sense, as while you’d loose the Churchhill cabinet meeting connection, I guess access is much better
Anomnibus
Server Farms etc generate a lot (a lot) of heat and so need lots of space for extractor fans and preferably clean water for heat exchangers. They also use lots of electricity so there are supply issues.
Not sure either of these are available in the Aldwych Tunnels.
Storage of paper records may not be suitable either because the tunnels could be too damp but non perishable items could be stored there I suppose.
@Chris C:
The Underground’s own trains also generate quite a lot of heat, and use lots of electricity, so ventilation and power infrastructure are already in place, though they’d obviously need work to modify them for other uses. Clean water would also be available, though I’m not sure about quantities. (In any case, any repurposing of such a site would require some modifications to the existing infrastructure.)
Not that there aren’t going to be other potential pitfalls to such a repurposing, but ventilation and power supply aren’t on that list.
Sites like Down Street, which have regular services trundling right alongside their (bricked-in) platforms, are likely to have some major dust ingress problems, which may rule them out for most IT infrastructure uses. From the photographs available online for these sites, I suspect water ingress may also be an issue; in some cases, serious enough that infilling the site may be the only logical solution.
That said, I suspect the most likely future of all these disused stations, tunnels and platforms is to appear in recurring ‘filler’ pieces on the evening news, roughly every few years, and typically under a title like “London’s Ghosts” or similar, with some suitably evocative imagery.
@Chris C – I thought the never-used tunnels at Goodge Street were now used for paper archival storage?
Anomnibus,
Clean water would also be available, though I’m not sure about quantities.
As someone who has been down there (Down there geddit?) I saw no evidence of any supply of fresh water.
The photographs you probably saw online were of one very small area that was somewhat damp. On the whole the air was very dry – almost too dry. I would suggest that far from having overall water ingress problems the site was remarkably free from this given that there was no sign of any pumping out of water.
There is also a person who regularly tries to persuade the Mayor and others to let him and his company exploit disused tube stations. Their efforts have come to nought despite regular rants on Twitter that have been borderline slanderous towards certain individuals.
Same chap, I believe.
Having been down there (obviously!) relatively recently, there really isn’t as much space below as one might think. “Pop-up” events (whether for the public or PR agencies) are really all Down Street would be good for.
Places like the Charing Cross tunnels / platforms have a bit more room, but even there you don’t have a lot of options really, nor are they really great spaces for anything other than what they were designed for.
The recent pop-up cinema stuff TfL did there was interesting, for example, but not exactly the world’s most convenient way to watch a film. Again, pop-up events would seem to be the way forward here.
@Anomnibus – server farms really do generate huge amounts of heat, so much so that the latest trend is to situate them in locations near the arctic circle where there is cheap hydroelectricity, fresh water and the low ambient temperature means reduced cooling requirements. There is a high cost to run fibre to these locations but the lower ongoing operating costs are more significant.
The next time you are on the DLR, look out for the cluster of large, grey windowless buildings near to East India station to get an idea of the size of these facilities.
One major issue with many projects is the basic one of plumbing – the tube lines were built after Bazalgette’s sewer system, and generally below it. Not insuperable, but defying gravity is expensive.
@John Bull – isthere that much money in pop-up events?
“It depends.” Is the answer, really.
To use a concrete-ish example, though, the Underground cinema at Charing Cross has 100 seats and is priced £14 for adults, £7 for kids.
Let’s say they do 2 shows a day on weekdays and 3 at weekends, yielding roughly 68 showings a month. That’s 6800 seats total.
Being generous, let’s assume a 90 / 10 split between adults and kids. So that’s £4760 a month revenue from the bairns, £85,680 from adults.
Finally, if the press one I went to is any guide, you’re likely to be able to get cocktails (non-alcoholic probably as this is, after all, a station still and has no licence) and a hotdog – one of those Shoreditch ones with lots of adjectives that seem to add about 3 quid to the price (“organic”, “grain-fed” etc. etc.). So let’s say 80% of people going spend a tenner on a mocktail and a Hoxtonburger. That’s £54,400.
Now lets knock 2% off of that grand total to deal with people who don’t show up, buy stuff, and other hand-wavey bits of income adjustment.
And the end result is about £137,000 a month, before expenses.
BUT…
That’s assuming you’re selling your own burgers and drinks, of course. More likely you license that out to some guy who normally runs a posh burger van on Broadway Market (as he’ll have the mobile kit) and get an up-front fixed fee off of him. That then funds your rent guarantee with TfL and other up front costs, then you just do the drinks yourself.
I reckon that’s more realistic – not least because getting up front capital is generally the real make-or-break problem when trying to do pop up stuff – so let’s re-adjust the concessions money to £5 per-person (for a mocktail) plus the equivalent of 20% off the top on Hoxtonburgers (you won’t get more than that if you want the cash up front) and you’re actually looking at about £32,640 in food and drink revenue as the organizer.
Which gives a grand total, as the organizer of about £116,000 income a month, excluding any sponsorship (which won’t be huge) from which you need to deduct all your costs.
Not sure what they’ll be, but you’ll have film licensing for two or three films (probably from the BFI, you go arty with this stuff or do some Hitchcock) for the month, audio and visual equipment (including an awful lot of wifi-enabled headphones as there’s no sound system down there) and the ingredients and glasses for your mocktails.
You’ll also need ten staff at least, by my reckoning – at least four to get people in, check tickets at the top of the old escalators and then get them down to platform level. Three to usher and manage things down there and then direct people through the platform to the viewing area, a couple of hipsters to run your mocktail stand and someone doing the AV.
And then there’s the small matter of TfL’s rent.
I don’t know enough about cinema costs to know how much the above adds up to, but between all of that and tax I’m going to take a punt that you’ll be making a bit of profit each month, but probably not much.
@JB _ thank you – I have been in a real dragon’s den and wouldn’t invest in that as a business. Where’s the upside?5
@John Bull – there is also Secret Cinema who are charging £75 a ticket and their takings for The Empire Strikes Back reached the UK cinema box office top 10 (with just a single screen!) but their productions are more like theatre than cinema and costs would be accordingly higher.