South Kentish Town disused station; London Underground : 1997 : spiral stairway shaft
A series of images taken from a presentation I used to give on London Underground's Disused or non-operational stations when I was one of the curators at the London Transport Museum in the 1990s. Part of the day job was inspecting disused stations to see what was still there and the sites ranged from places abandoned nearly a centuty earlier, such as King William Street station that closed in 1900, up to stations such as Aldwych that had just closed.
There was only one 'easy' way to visit the site of South Kentish Town station that had opened as part of the Northern line (Charing Cros, Euston & Hampstead Railway) in 1907 and that closed in 1924 and that was by hopping off a service train. This is the scene in May 1996 when we travelled up, by arrnagement, in the cab of a now long gone 1959-tube stock train and the train operator stopped in the tunnel alongside the long removed platform. You had to be carefully hopping out of the front cab door so as not to step on the negative current conductor rail directly below you or the postive 'juice' rail to the side nor the running rails! Anyhow, here we are about to be left to exploring, the driver making sure we are 'all clear' before be proceeds north towards Kentish Town station. He may have told the guard the reason for the unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere but there may have been some curious passengers looking out of the front cars wondering what was going on!
The ghostly presence of one of the party appears here but the main interest is that the steel spiral staircase, a feature of all the 'Leslie Green'/Yerkes stations of the UERL in 1906/07 and still found in lift operated stations, has been stripped out as redundant. However, the wall tiles have remained as a short of clue as to the shaft's original purpose.
South Kentish Town disused station; London Underground : 1997 : spiral stairway shaft
A series of images taken from a presentation I used to give on London Underground's Disused or non-operational stations when I was one of the curators at the London Transport Museum in the 1990s. Part of the day job was inspecting disused stations to see what was still there and the sites ranged from places abandoned nearly a centuty earlier, such as King William Street station that closed in 1900, up to stations such as Aldwych that had just closed.
There was only one 'easy' way to visit the site of South Kentish Town station that had opened as part of the Northern line (Charing Cros, Euston & Hampstead Railway) in 1907 and that closed in 1924 and that was by hopping off a service train. This is the scene in May 1996 when we travelled up, by arrnagement, in the cab of a now long gone 1959-tube stock train and the train operator stopped in the tunnel alongside the long removed platform. You had to be carefully hopping out of the front cab door so as not to step on the negative current conductor rail directly below you or the postive 'juice' rail to the side nor the running rails! Anyhow, here we are about to be left to exploring, the driver making sure we are 'all clear' before be proceeds north towards Kentish Town station. He may have told the guard the reason for the unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere but there may have been some curious passengers looking out of the front cars wondering what was going on!
The ghostly presence of one of the party appears here but the main interest is that the steel spiral staircase, a feature of all the 'Leslie Green'/Yerkes stations of the UERL in 1906/07 and still found in lift operated stations, has been stripped out as redundant. However, the wall tiles have remained as a short of clue as to the shaft's original purpose.