Posted Wednesday 9 January 2013
Kingston University architecture expert Dr David Lawrence is the source of such pearls of information. He can also talk knowledgeably about ghost stations, others that have featured in James Bond films and the lost tribe of cannibal Underground workers.
The London Underground has just celebrated its 150th birthday - the anniversary of the first tube journey from Farringdon to Paddington on the Metropolitan Line. "The line's owners planned to extend it out into Kent and ultimately, through a channel tunnel, to Paris," Dr Lawrence explained.
As well as envisaging a Channel Tunnel, more than a century before it became reality, the Underground's planners, in the 1930s, were keen to establish an airport to the east of London. "The Underground liked the idea of having its own airport and wanted to build one at a station at Fairlop, in Essex," Dr Lawrence said. "But the scheme was abandoned at the outbreak of World War II."
"The Morlocks did the work - they made society function," Dr Lawrence said. "The notion of underground culture, meaning a counter-culture of underground art and music, stems from this. On the surface you had the bright, shiny, well-functioning city - underground you had its sinister mirror image."
The Kingston University architectural historian has also studied the Underground's role on television and film. "In the 1950s you had Quatermass and the Pit, which saw giant locust-like aliens breeding in the tube, for example, and then, in the 1970s, there was a film called Death Line (Raw Meat), in which a lost tribe of former Underground workers preyed on passengers."
Several disused 'ghost' stations have been used in film and television. "Licensing these spaces for filming is big business for London Transport," Dr Lawrence remarked. "One of the most interesting ghost stations is Bull and Bush under Hampstead Common on the Northern Line. It's not disused - it was never used."
Or flown, in the case of a group of pigeons who have been observed regularly travelling between Hammersmith and Ladbroke Grove and between Baker Street and Euston Square or Great Portland Street. "They take advantage of the fast food that's left on the trains and seem to choose these stations as they are quite near the surface," Dr Lawrence explained.
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