Hidden London: Down Street

The tour of Down Street Station began at the Atheneum Hotel on Piccadilly. Overlooking the north side of Green Park, it is located midway between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park Underground stations, being about a five minute walk from either.

Down Street itself runs north from Piccadilly, with the Atheneum on its southeast corner. Opposite the side entrance to the hotel is the ox-blood-tiled facade of what used to be Down Street Station.

The entrance hall to the station has now been replaced by the Mayfair Mini Mart, and the entrance to Down Street Mews to the right of the mini mart. Only the left hand entry way is still used by London Transport as the disused station serves as an emergency exit from the Piccadilly Line.

Down Street Station didn't have much of a chance at life. Its Leslie Green-designed entrance was built in a side street rather than on Piccadilly in an area where the inhabitants were unlikely to use the Underground as they would have considered it beneath them (both literally and figuratively).

The upgrading of Hyde Park Corner and Green Park also saw their entrances being moved closer together, further negating the need for Down Street. In 1932 it closed, never to reopen as a working station.

The station platforms are accessed via a spiral staircase encircling a now-defunct lift shaft. The lift only held two people at most and was installed after the station was closed as a result of its war-time use. The original passenger lifts no longer exist.

Although much of the fabric of the station dates back to the Second World War, or earlier, the stairs are much newer, having been replaced in response to the King's Cross Fire of 1987.

In 1939 the station came back into use when it was decided that the main telephone exchange for the Railway Executive Committee should be relocated to a more secure location. Down Street became the secure wartime headquarters of the REC in response.

The committee room

The markings on the floor show where the table in the previous picture stood.

The station was outfitted with meeting rooms, offices, dining facilities, washrooms, lavatories, dormitories and the aforementioned telephone exchange.

The evidence of these facilities still remains in the station with the partition walls and some remnants of the fittings - although sometimes this is no more than a mark on the wall.

The telephone exchange in service. The trunking in the centre of the picture connected the main exchange board with the operators' desk. 

Remains of the main exchange board.

Remains of the trunking

Staff were expected to live and sleep in Down Street to avoid attracting attention to the site, although there were also some recreational facilities and executive flats above ground.

As the Piccadilly Line still ran through the station, it was possible for the railway executives to travel to and from their secret headquarters by train. They would signal the driver to stop with a red signal at the end of a truncated platform, and would board in secret via the driver's cab, leaving the train's passengers none the wiser.

The lights of Down Street can still be seen by passengers on the Piccadilly Line.

 As well as housing the REC, Down Street also acted as a temporary home for Winston Churchill while strengthening work was undertaken on the Cabinet War Rooms. Churchill slept in the office of Gerald Cole Deacon, the Railways Companies' Association Secretary.

After his time staying at Down Street, Churchill requested that quarters be built at the station for his own personal use. Construction was completed in 1941, but it does not appear that Churchill ever returned to stay at Down Street.

The steps on the right-side of the picture had been removed to allow pipes to run along the corridor as part of the work adapting the station for Churchill's use.

A cubby hole created within the walls, possibly to house a secure telephone line for Churchill.

Corridor providing ventilation to the tunnels

Disused passenger lift shaft, now used as a ventilation shaft

Tiles next to the disused lift shaft

Throughout the war, the management of the railways was coordinated from the offices at Down Street. After the REC left the site at the end of 1947, the station returned to its pre-war use, providing ventilation to the Piccadilly Line, which it still does to this day.

Clapham South Deep-Level Shelter

My second Hidden London Tour (I wrote about the first here) was to Clapham Deep-Level Shelter.

The tour met outside Clapham South Station. Across the road from the entrance to the station at the southeast corner of Clapham Common is a pillbox structure that served a one of the entrances to the shelter.

The entrance the tour used is slightly further south of the station on Ballham Hill. From the outside, it's undetectable as it's been integrated with the surrounding buildings.

There are 180 steps down to the shelter (as we were told repeatedly). The journey down was fairly easy, but I can't say I was looking forward to the return to the surface.

The bottom of the stairs led out into a corridor, which was not all that dissimilar to some of the passageways between platforms in Underground Stations, although the signs on the walls gave an obvious indication of its World War II use.

From the slightly underwhelming entrance corridor, the tour moved on to the shelters themselves. These were all named after historical Admirals.

The shelters began construction in 1940 in response to the Blitz, although were only completed after it had finished. They were available though when the V1 attacks on London began in 1944.

At the time, the shelters were constructed with the intention of using them as the starting point of an express line that would run beneath the existing Northern and Central Lines. Shelters were completed at Chancery Lane (Central Line) and at Belsize Park, Camden Town, Goodge Street, Stockwell, Clapham North and Clapham South (Northern Line). A proposed shelter at St Paul's was not built due to worries about undermining the Cathedral, and a shelter at Oval Station was not completed due to construction difficulties.

Rather than being built to accommodate Underground Trains, the shelters are actually full-scale railway tunnels. Two parallel tunnels were constructed - one for southbound trains, the other for northbound trains.

The tunnels were then divided into a top and bottom half and sectioned off to create the shelters. 

The capacity of the shelters was originally planned to accommodate 10,000 people at each location, although this would have been a bit of a squeeze. It was finally decided to reduce this number to 8,000. However, the shelters never reached full occupancy.

Access to the shelters was granted by ticket. For people bombed out of their homes, semi-permanent residency was granted. Those people would be able to store their own bedding in the shelters; everyone else would have to bring their own.

Places in the shelter were allocated according to a numbering system that can be seen on the bunks.

Air vent.

After the war, the shelter at Clapham South was used for a number of other purposes. In 1948 it was used to temporarily accommodate Jamaican  immigrants who had travelled to the UK on Empire Windrush.

Three years later in 1951, the shelter became the Festival Hotel for the Festival of Britain.

The shelter's constant temperature also made it suitable for archival storage, a purpose that it served for several years.

On the way back up to the street level, one of the guides pointed out a feature of the staircase that had not been so obvious on the way down. The shelter uses a double-spiral staircase with one of the staircases going to the top level of the tunnels, with the other going down to the bottom level.

Double-spiral staircase. While it might not be immediately obvious, the landing on the opposite side belongs to the other staircase.

And yes, the 160-step climb wasn't fun. I managed to be first to the top, but I couldn't talk for five minutes afterwards.