The London Underground is awash with disused stations. Over three dozen of them - that's more closed stations than, say, Rio de Janeiro's entire underground network.



A kind of creepy mythology hovers around these abandoned alveoli. If the Tube is London's artery, then the closed stations are unseen clots just waiting to be dislodged.

Stories abound of subterranean cannibals, ghosts, and tens of thousands of buried bones disturbed. The imagination conjures up haunting stories and soot-blackened terrors - Quatermass, Neverwhere, the Cross Bones Graveyard...

The network is 150 years old; in 1863, steam engines navigated the tunnel from Paddington to Farringdon. Its darker corners are oozing with congealed time.

Since the Home Office set the UK terrorist threat level to Severe, it has become nigh on impossible to explore these fossilized specimens of forsaken subterranea without seriously upsetting some fairly heavily armed perpetrators of the Crisis.

But I work for Transport for London, and I managed to befriend the Head of the London Underground Film Office. After some finagling, she agreed to show my wife and I around an abandoned station.

Very. Cool.



Aldwych tube station, formerly known as Strand, was built in 1907 as an offshoot of the Piccadilly Line. Because the branch is entirely self-contained, and was always closed at weekends, it has long been a popular location for film and television companies wanting to film on the Underground.

We were shown the defunct lift (elevator) shafts that spelled the station’s doom when their repair bill was deemed uneconomical, and then we descended the winding spiral staircase.

Aldwych’s remaining platform is used to test mock-up designs for new signage, tilework and advertising systems. The walls feature replicas of posters from decades gone by. The trackwork and infrastructure remains in good condition, and a train of ex-Northern Line 1972 tube stock is permanently stabled on the branch, which can be driven up and down the branch for filming and to keep the trackwork in good repair.



We walked through the train used in V for Vendetta; we peered into the tunnel used for The Prodigy’s Firestarter music video; and we imagined the wave of water through the corridor as depicted in Atonement (where Aldwych stood in for Balham station). That water, we were told, was CGI; film crews are expected to leave the station as they found it. Which isn’t always easy – goodness knows how the film crew for Creep cleared up after releasing hundreds of real rats into the empty lift shafts!

See photos for more.