The ghost stations of the London Underground
Weaving alongside the ‘living’ London Underground is a ghostly parallel network of abandoned stations, former wartime hideouts and astonishing subterranean architecture. Emma Hughes steps back in time.
It's a bright, crisp morning in central London and the Underground station is filling up with people rushing in from the Strand clutching takeaway coffees. It is a familiar scene, but look more closely and you’d spot some clues that none of us is on our way to the office. There’s a distinct absence of anything digital and among the posters pasted to the walls is one exhorting travellers to ‘Look Out In The Blackout’. Where — and, indeed, when — are we?
Aldwych station opened in 1907 (as Strand) on the site of an old theatre, part of what was then the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton railway — now the Piccadilly line. It was envisaged as the track’s southern terminus, but construction work above ground meant that it ended up on its own branch and was never well used: the first and second shuttle services that departed for Holborn were empty and the third carried a single passenger.
Aldwych was the least-used stop on the entire London Underground for many years before its eventual closure.
The service was scaled back and soon it was quicker to walk to Holborn. Aldwych, officially the least-used stop in central London by the 1980s, limped on until 1994, when it was closed and became one of the London Underground’s ‘ghost’ stations. The only way you can see it today is by booking one of the tours organised by the London Transport Museum, which also runs trips on decommissioned Tube trains.
'The Lure Of The Underground' by Alfred Leete in this iconic 1927 poster.
Over the course of a day touring three different ghost stations, I realise that the capital’s apparently orderly transport network is actually like a kitchen drawer piled high with old phone chargers and mystery cables: the past and the present are permanently tangled together. To travel in Aldwych’s wooden lifts, built long before the catastrophic Kings Cross fire of 1987, is to descend through layers of London’s history. When we step out into the carefully preserved subterranean hall, with its ornate ticket windows and botanical dado-rail friezes, 2026 feels a long way away — we have travelled back in time to the early 1900s and ‘Tubemania’, when the rapid expansion of London’s underground railways was driven by private companies.
Several of these employed Leslie Green to design their stations. There are plenty of his projects still in service (including Regent’s Park and Russell Square), but seeing one divorced from the modern grind makes it so much easier to imagine how they once must have looked, the oxblood-tiled fronts gleaming in a city otherwise covered in soot and the half-moon windows illuminated by electric lights.
Each station was given its own colour scheme and unique platform-tiling pattern by Green, who was influenced by both Art Nouveau and the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, believing that utility and beauty could — and should — coexist. There is something particularly poignant about seeing his work frozen in time like this, given that he died of tuberculosis in 1908, aged only 33.
Taking shelter: some 1,500 people slept at Aldwych Underground station every night during the Blitz.
As we troop down the old stairs to the eastern platform, which closed first in 1917, the dust is deadening, but the scene that greets us feels eerily alive — and familiar. As well as being a popular vintage filming location (Charing Cross’s closed-off Jubilee line platform gets the modern bookings), it’s recognisable from Ministry of Information photographs of Londoners camping out during the Blitz, when Aldwych became an air-raid shelter. This, ironically, drew crowds far bigger than anything seen in peacetime: 1,500 people slept here every night.
As well as having its own library, the station hosted performances from ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association (people joked the acronym stood for ‘Every Night Something Awful’). A newsreel of George Formby entertaining shelterers is projected onto the wall and the music makes the back of my neck prickle; I half expect a figure to materialise from the gloom and ask if I’ve got a light. (That’s another thing you notice down here: the smoke stains.)
Some ghost stations, such as Aldwych, stand separately, but others are hidden within still-living stations, as at Green Park. There, an unassuming door near the stairs leading up to Piccadilly opens onto another station entirely — one that no longer officially exists.
Green Park was once two separate stations, Dover Street and Down Street, which were amalgamated and renamed in 1933 to meet passenger demand. The Green-designed surface building was taken out of service (it’s a corner shop today), as were sections of the station itself — which came in handy in 1940.
Down in the depths of the old Dover Street station, now part of Green Park.
Our guide leads us across a hidden walkway over the eastbound Piccadilly platform — dotted with grilles through which you can see trains arriving and departing below — to a space with incongruous cornicing and skirting. This is all that remains of the wartime headquarters of the London Transport Executive Board, which quite literally went to ground after its offices took a hit in the Blitz.
Lord Ashfield, its chairman, had the disused sections of Green Park turned into offices accessed by a covert lift, complete with a typing pool and kitted out with furniture from railway hotels (he had a wallpapered bedroom, too). There was also a canteen not subject to rationing, so lunchtime meetings were always well attended. Other organisations had the same idea: Brompton Road, another Piccadilly line ghost station, was home to the Anti-Aircraft Brigade office.
A tuppeny Tube ticket? That Zone 1 trip will cost you £3 today.
Butting up against all of this is a more recent slice of history, which we reach by cutting across the station’s lunchtime crowds, unlocking a gate and descending a long, echoing flight of concrete steps. It’s suddenly very cold and the reason why looms up ahead of us.
As any Underground regular knows, each line has its own microclimate, with newer, deep-tunnel examples running faster trains requiring more temperature and air-pressure regulation. The Victoria and Jubilee lines are cooled at Green Park by a jaw-dropping ventilation shaft, easily 100ft high and cine-matically armour-plated. It’s extraordinary to think that the people above us in Blue Bull Yard almost certainly have no idea that they’re standing on top of this science-fiction scene.
My last stop of the day is a station I’ve passed through hundreds, if not thousands of times: Piccadilly Circus, which opened in 1906 on the then Baker Street & Waterloo Railway (now the Bakerloo line). In 1922, with some 18 million people passing through its turnstiles annually, it was reconfigured by architect Charles Holden around an ambitious underground ticket hall. The design called for a state-of-the-art flat steel roof able to withstand the weight of the traffic (dubbed ‘The Prop of London’), which was mocked up to scale for testing inside the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre.
Ups and downs: the advent of escalators rendered redundant the lift shafts that carried passengers below ground at Piccadilly station.
The real thing was painstakingly built in sections; Piccadilly’s statue of Eros had to be removed to Victoria Embankment Gardens. Eleven escalators, still fairly new to London — Harrods had the first in 1908 — were installed to do away with the notorious lift queues. Travertine and red scagliola marble and bronze fittings, chosen by the Underground’s managing director Frank Pick, gave the station the look of a modern Roman temple when it reopened in 1928. Future Official War Artist Stephen Bone was commissioned to paint a giant ‘Hub of Empire’ mural above the escalators, featuring a world map with London at the centre. This was removed at some point before the Second World War to make way for advertising; nobody knows where it ended up.
Beneath our feet, in a secret part of the station accessed by a locked gate, the clock stopped in 1928: alongside Piccadilly’s working tunnels are disused ones that never reopened after the renovation. The grime is thick down here, but beneath it Green’s original teal and green tiling is still visible, together with the direction signs Edwardian passengers would have followed. We retrace their footsteps to the shafts that once housed the lifts made redundant by the escalators. The voids feel like the backdrop to a deadly battle in a Bond film; it’s hard to believe we’re directly under the Hard Rock Cafe.
As at Aldwych, Piccadilly’s passageways were crammed with people during the early days of the Blitz. The resulting scenes were so squalid that Clementine Churchill pressured the government to kit them out with bunks and proper sanitary facilities. ‘Refreshment Specials’, trains dispensing off-ration treats, were also laid on, manned by staff from Lyons Corner Houses. Standing in the now dark and deserted corridor, I can almost hear the excited children queueing up for rock cakes and their weary parents trying to keep them in check. Lives began and ended down here and, although not everyone believes in ghosts, I imagine most people who have taken one of these tours will have felt haunted by Londoners past.
Back upstairs in the ticket hall, our guide points out something I’ve never spotted before: set into the station’s inner wall is a map, which tells the time around the world thanks to an ingenious scrolling band moving at exactly the same speed as the Earth’s rotation. Like so much we’ve seen today, it’s a relic from another time — but, if you stand close enough, you can still hear it ticking.
The artworks saved by the Tube
London Underground stations didn’t only shelter people during the Second World War. China from Buckingham Palace, ceramics from the British Museum and the Elgin Marbles (lowered down with ordinary ropes and pulleys) were hidden in Aldwych and Tate stowed its treasures beneath what is now Green Park, before they were moved to Piccadilly Circus as part of a 150-crate consignment also containing priceless pieces from London Museum.
Piccadilly Circus became known as Aladdin's Cave while storing art treasures from the Tate gallery and the London Museum at the outbreak of the Second World War.
Everything was transported in secret in March 1941, under the noses of those taking cover from the Blitz, thanks to special screens and a train with covered windows dreamt up by art historian Margot Eates.
Real ghosts on the London Underground
Do ‘ghost’ stations have ghosts of their own? The British Museum station, which closed in 1933, is rumoured once to have been linked to the institution by a secret tunnel that allowed the spirit of Amun Ra — an Egyptian mummy whose coffin was brought from Egypt to England, provoking mysterious deaths — to wander around screaming.
Sometimes trains themselves are the focus of spine-chilling stories: the passenger-free ‘Kennington Loop’, on which there was reportedly a death many years ago, has long been whispered about thanks to tales of doors slamming on empty trains and drivers experiencing uncanny sensations.
Could there be a logical explanation? Some scientists believe a phenomenon known as ‘infrasound’, whereby sounds beneath the threshold of human hearing provoke a physiological response, is to blame. In 2005, a researcher from Coventry University used a special low-frequency microphone to monitor the Kennington Loop and found strikingly high infrasound levels.
To find out more and book tours, visit the London Transport Museum website.
This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
