Village Underground — Tube Carriages on a Rooftop

Village Underground in Shoreditch, London, is a creative studio space built in 2006 inside four disused Jubilee Line train carriages mounted on an abandoned railway viaduct. Founder Auro Foxcroft purchased the carriages from London Underground for £100 before craning them five storeys high. The site features an ever-changing street art wall that includes Steve Espo Powers' mural "Let's Adore and Endure Each Other," painted in 2010.

London · from the walk “Walls That Talk: Shoreditch Street Art & Urban Creativity” · Generated

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Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, London EC2A 3PQ

How much did the disused tube carriages at Village Underground in London cost?

Look up... higher. Do you see them? Four old Jubilee Line carriages, sitting on a rooftop like some kind of surreal dream. How on Earth did they get up there?

This is Village Underground, and it started life in two thousand six with one simple aim... building affordable studios for creative people. The mastermind behind it was a furniture designer named Auro Foxcroft. The spark ignited while he was sitting on a train in the Swiss mountains, observing that without the seating, a carriage would make an expansive, airy workspace.

Back in London, Auro negotiated four disused train carriages from London Underground for the staggering sum of... one hundred pounds. That's right. One hundred quid for four tube trains. The catch? He had to move them himself. Imagine — full-size tube carriages, hauled through the streets of Shoreditch on lorries in the middle of the night, then Craned up onto this rooftop.

Now, the rooftop they sit on isn't just any surface. This viaduct used to lead to the former Broad Street Station, which sat next to Liverpool Street until it closed in June nineteen eighty-six. At its peak, Broad Street was the Third busiest station in London. At the start of the twentieth century, more than one train per minute arrived or departed during rush hour. Now... silence. Just artists working inside tube carriages that will never move again.

And here's a detail the people working up there love to hate. They have a habit of repeatedly banging their heads on the old hand grips that passengers once used to avoid falling over. Auro kept certain features working, like the punch button that opens and closes the train doors. So yes... you can still hear that familiar hiss of doors sliding open, five storeys above Shoreditch.

Now look below the carriages. That Massive wall is one of the most prestigious canvases in London's street art world. It's one of the best and biggest walls in Shoreditch... every few months, different street artists from different parts of the world come here and paint it, one after the other. The roster reads like a hall of fame — artists like Stik, Thierry Noar, Martin Ron, and Phlegm have all left their mark here.

And that phrase you might spot painted on the Great Eastern Street side — "Let's Adore and Endure Each Other" — that's by Steve Espo Powers. It was part of his Love Letter To You project, which originally comprised over fifty large typographical murals along the elevated train line in Philadelphia and has since spread to other cities including London. It's endured on this wall since twenty ten... outlasting nearly everything else around it.

Auro originally tried to jet-wash the carriages clean, but local graffiti artists would always creep back in the middle of the night, delighting over a clean canvas. So he surrendered... and embraced the idea of a perpetually changing façade. That decision captures everything about this place. In Shoreditch, the art is Never finished. It just... keeps becoming something new.

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