Scenes from the Underground

Concealed beneath the busy thoroughfares and grand offices of The Strand, in central London, is a former Underground station called Aldwych. Few Londoners know of its existence, let alone its history. From the outside, it appears to be a functioning station like any other. And every day at least one surprised passerby tugs at the locked entrance doors before frowning and staring up at the tiled signage that reads “Piccadilly Rly”. The station has been closed for good since 1994. But, in a sense, it is still very much capable of transporting visitors – just not literally. 

What was once an ill-frequented shuttle service, running one stop to and from Holborn, has for over 70 years doubled as a world-renowned film and music set. Some of the most memorable moments in cinema and pop culture were brought to life within its tunnels. Gary Oldman’s rousing rush hour speech as Churchill in Darkest Hour? That’s Aldwych, masquerading as St James’s on the District Line. The Kinks sing to steely-faced commuters here in the music video of “Do It Again”. And it’s likewise at this station that V, the eponymous antihero of V for Vendetta, reveals to Natalie Portman his train full of explosives. 

One of the factors that singles Aldwych out as an ideal filming location – especially for period dramas – is that it’s magnificently intact. Designed by the pioneering English architect Leslie Green, it is a paradigm of British Art Nouveau, also known as the Modern Style, and has lost nothing of its Edwardian charm: from the oxblood, terracotta façade to the unique cream-and-green tiled interiors and vast wooden lifts, the latter complete with an operator’s controls. Indeed, Aldwych is a veritable time capsule. Its walls are covered in reproduced adverts promoting the products of yesteryear: war bonds, Pressburg ale, and Bovril – a quixotic, and quintessentially English, beef-flavoured paste. Entering the brightly lit ticket hall, one has the distinct sensation that behatted gentlemen and ladies in frocks will appear any minute now and disturb the eerily peaceful silence. 

A spiral staircase leads down, through low arched passageways, to two platforms bathed in a greenish-yellow glow. One must fight the temptation to break into a run. Action-packed films set in London are sure to have an Underground chase scene, and they are often shot in Aldwych: everyone from Harrison Ford to Jason Statham has pursued villains here or hurled themselves onto moving trains. As one proceeds (at a sensible pace, of course) down the concourse, the disused Western tunnel draws the eye, tempering the historic with a touch of the dystopian. Zombies hunted survivors through this same tunnel in 28 Weeks Later, and Benedict Cumberbatch, in the guise of Sherlock Holmes, surveyed its length whilst solving the mystery of the “Empty Hearse”. 

Aldwych station (known as Strand station until 1915), was initially intended to be the terminus of the Great Northern & Strand Railway line running to and from Wood Green, in the very north of London. But due to the extension of, and merger with, an adjacent east-west line, Aldwych went from a terminus to an appendage: trains that would have been stopping here now swung west at Holborn and continued merrily down to Hammersmith via Piccadilly Circus. In any case, the original rationale behind Aldwych, which opened in 1907, was to connect the northern suburbs to the theatre district – thus the popular nickname, the “Theatre Express”. (Ironically, the developers had to demolish the Royal Strand Theatre in order to make way for the station.) 

Because Aldwych was effectively a self-contained world, and could be temporarily cordoned off without disrupting key services, it moonlighted as an air raid shelter during the First and Second World Wars. In other words, the quirks that guaranteed its transportational failure inadvertently made it a perfect bunker, saving countless lives and hundreds of national treasures. In the 1940s, thousands of Londoners sheltered here from the Blitz, sleeping cheek by jowl wherever they could stretch out, including on the tracks. In fact, Aldwych housed so many people that the government frequently organised theatre shows and concerts, right here on the platform, complete with a makeshift stage (apt, given the station’s original, and interrupted, purpose). Few of the civilians would have known that just metres away, on the other side of a rather ordinary-looking door, the government was sheltering something else: the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum. And that during the First World War, Titians and Turners from the National Gallery had been stored in the very same tunnels. 

Numerous directors have, unsurprisingly, tapped into the station’s poignant wartime history. It’s featured as an air raid shelter in films such as Atonement, The Imitation Game, and, notably, The Edge of Love, which opens with scenes of a raid-shelter concert at none other than Aldwych station. And so, although Aldwych no longer ferries theatregoers in their evening finery, it lives on as a theatrical venue of another kind, bringing film scripts and music videos to life, and offering visitors a rare glimpse of bygone London.