Chalk Farm Underground Station

Chalk Farm Underground Station in London is a red glazed terracotta station opened on June 22, 1907, featuring the shallowest lift shafts in the entire Underground network at just 21 feet. Designed by architect Leslie Green, who died at age 33 after creating 50 tube stations, it sits near World War Two deep-level air-raid shelters built 100 feet underground to hold 8,000 people.

London Β· from the walk β€œConcrete, Catacombs & Control” Β· audio ~3 min Β· Generated

Chalk Farm Underground Station

Chalk Farm Underground Station, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8AN

How deep are the lift shafts at Chalk Farm Underground Station?

Look at this building. Really look at it. That blood-red facade, those arched windows staring at you like hollow eyes... This station opened on the twenty-second of June, nineteen oh seven, and it was designed to be Beautiful. But the man who created it? He was dead by thirty-three.......... His name was Leslie Green. In nineteen oh three, he was appointed architect for the Underground Electric Railways Company and commissioned to design Fifty new stations across three tube lines. Fifty! He was only twenty-nine when he was given the task. By nineteen oh five, his health started to suffer as the stress of this enormous project took its toll. He contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and died at a sanatorium in Mundesley-on-Sea, Norfolk. The stations he designed... outlived him by over a century. The man who painted London red was consumed by the machine he helped build.......... And it gets darker. Look down. Beneath your feet, the Northern line tunnels run eerily shallow here. Chalk Farm has the Shallowest lift shafts of any Underground station... just twenty-one feet. But one stop south, at Belsize Park, and the next at Camden Town... during World War Two, deep-level air-raid shelters were excavated beneath those stations, started in nineteen forty during the Blitz. Each shelter consisted of a pair of parallel tunnels, sixteen feet six inches in diameter and twelve hundred feet long, designed to hold up to eight thousand people.......... Here is the truly dystopian part. It was Planned that after the war, these shelters would be converted into new express tube lines. A high-speed underground railway, hidden beneath the regular one. A shadow network... that was never built. The tunnels of the Camden Town shelter sit about sixteen metres Below the Northern line, and there was once direct access to the station... but it has been bricked up.......... So what happens to forgotten tunnels beneath a city? The Goodge Street shelter was used by General Eisenhower. The Chancery Lane shelter was converted into the Kingsway telephone exchange, a Cold War communications bunker. And the one at Belsize Park? A company called Abbott Archive Storage now keeps its records in the shelter tunnels. Boxes of documents, stacked on the original wartime bunk beds... one hundred feet underground.......... Right now, as you stand here at this quiet street junction, there is an entire Hidden city beneath London. Bricked-up doorways, sealed staircases, tunnels where eight thousand people once slept on triple-tiered bunks while bombs fell overhead. And this ox-blood station, this beautiful tomb of glazed terracotta... is just the surface. The entrance to a world that most Londoners walk over every single day... without ever knowing it's there.

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