Green Park tube station is famous for the long tunnels between its platforms, but hidden behind small anonymous doors is an even larger tube station with a deep history that’s only recently been discovered.
From this week, the London Transport Museum has added the station to the itinerary of their Hidden London tours, which take people behind the scenes of London’s tube stations.
It’s arguably two stations with two very different histories.
The original Dover Street station was open for just a couple of decades before it closed, and when Dover Street’s vertical lifts were replaced with sloping escalators, they had to move the station entrance to Green Park. Then there’s the recently discovered WWII history and the later addition of the Victoria and Jubilee lines.
Dover Street station opened in 1906, just around the corner from Green Park station today, but it was too small for the crowds it quickly attracted. Therefore, just a few years after it opened, a replacement station was built nearby, which opened in 1933 as Green Park.
At the same time, the original station building, the lifts and the redundant below-ground passages were closed off, but the old station entrance was retained and leased to the Milk Marketing Board for one of their cafes – a decision they might regret later.
In the early days of WWII, the disused tunnels from the old lifts to the platforms were used to store artwork from the museums. However, a bomb hit London Transport’s head office in 1940, causing the company to go underground.
Nearby Down Street station was occupied by the Railway Executive Committee, so the artwork was evicted from Green Park and London Transport moved in.
The tours will tell the story of how the old corridors were converted into offices, and you get to stand in Lord Ashcroft’s luxuriously appointed underground bedroom — although it’s less luxurious today. A lot of the tour will show the marks left by the wartime occupants, and a copy of the document, only recently discovered after it had been mislabeled, finally explained to the tour leaders how the rooms were laid out and who used them.
Including that bedroom.
During the conversion work, they also needed to evict the cafe from the old station entrance — and that was to cost them £2,000 in compensation. Considering that the whole tunnel conversion work cost £45,000 — that was a hefty amount to pay the cafe owners in a time of war.
After the war, one of the lift shafts, which had been turned into meeting rooms, was filled with a huge ventilation fan, and the old passenger tunnels slowly filled up with the electronics of a modern railway.
If that were all you see, it would be an impressive piece of hidden underground history.
However, a lengthy walk through the public tunnels takes you to a very different door and into a very different hidden space – to see the huge tunnels dug when the Victoria and later the Jubilee line tunnels passed through Green Park.
By now, they knew the value of decent ventilation for removing heat from the tunnels, and these ventilation tunnels also offer the obvious thing of peering down through the ventilation grills into the unsuspecting public on the platforms below.
However, it’s also here that you get to stand in one of the coldest parts of the London Underground. A separate shaft that rises to the surface is almost bone-chillingly cold and feeds that cold air into the Jubilee line platforms.
The tour lasts around 90 minutes, and split between two very different worlds — of war and post-war — offers an unusual mix of environments to explore.
Tickets to visit Green Park on the Hidden London tours are on sale from here for tours up to the end of March. Tours for later in the year will go on sale at the end of February.
Prices
They’ve also lowered the age limit on all tours from 13+ to 10+ so more children can visit the tunnels.