Wednesday 17 July 2024
Watch a quick video about the abandoned station here
As our last big adventure in London this trip, we booked tickets for the Hidden London Charing Cross: Access All Areas Tour through the London Transport Museum. We met our group and guides at Charing Cross Station where the Northern and Bakerloo Lines intersect and soon we left the public area through a door hidden in plain sight into what is a generally disused part of the London Underground system. We walked down the escalators in what was the Charing Cross Jubilee Line station from 1979 to 1999. Today it is actually used for a number of purposes such as testing for new technologies such as tactile paving for the visually impaired or emergency lighting before installation throughout the system. It’s sometimes used for turning trains around when there are disruptions in service on the line or for equipment storage for overnight repairs. It’s used for certain training scenarios for police and firefighters but the most glamorous use is for filming movies including the James Bond movie Skyfall, Paddington, and others. Filming the Bond movie involved 450 cast and crew over five months! We saw evidence of the stage set concept as we moved through the station for there were lots of fake posters in leiu of the normal advertising posters. Other London Underground scenes in Paddington were filmed at an active station in which case filming activities were limited to four overnight hours per day to prevent interference with normal operations. We learned ways to identify this Charing Cross Jubilee Station when we see it in films and to be alert for it since it is sometimes filmed as a stand-in for New York City subway scenes. We also got to walk through a tunnel that was dug using 19th Century technology underneath Trafalgar snaking past Nelson’s Column that was used during the construction of the passenger station. It was capped off in the 1970’s to prevent access to The National Gallery. Our guide told us she’d never heard any noises from up in Trafalgar Square before this past Sunday when fans gathered en masse to support England in her bid to capture a win in the Euros 2024 final! We also got an unusual glimpse of the 72 meter high ventilation tunnel and a view from above of a train arriving at an active Charing Cross station. It was an altogether fascinating behind the scenes experience. Now we’re wanting to watch Skyfall, Paddington, Creep, and more. Also we’re anxious to book more Hidden London tours next time we’re here.
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