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Explore London’s secret underground network on a Hidden London tour

Did you know that there were whole sections of London’s underground network that lay hidden in plain sight? At the London Transport Museum you can explore secret parts of London’s Underground Network on a Hidden London Tour

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Behind closed doors are disused stations and platforms, former ticket halls; and time-capsule corridors that have remained frozen in time since they saw their last commuter – complete with vintage signs, advertising posters and all.

Those secret spaces are usually off limits to the public, but thanks to London Transport Museum ’s award-winning Hidden London tours, you too can now gain exclusive access, both in person and online.

The Hidden London programme include tours of Aldwych disused station’ s ‘abandoned’ ticket halls, original lifts and tunnels; the remains of Piccadilly Circus’s original Edwardian station; and the disused Jubilee line platforms at Charing Cross that have featured in many famous British TV and film productions including Paddington Bear (2013), Killing Eve (2019) and A Spy Among Friends (2022).

Also on offer are tours of the original 19 th century passageways and features at west London station Shepherd’s Bush; Down Street, a bomb-proof wartime bunker and former station that lays concealed between the Piccadilly line tracks in Mayfair; and Clapham South, an expansive Second World War shelter hidden under the streets of south London.

An exclusive walking tour, Secrets of Central London , also takes you around Covent Garden and the surrounding area to reveal unique, fascinating and historical tales and titbits about this part of the city and how it has transformed over the last 200 years.

All tours are guided and share the exclusive historical stories that the museum’s experts found in its extensive archive and collection; allowing you to discover little-known facts about London, right where all this history took place.

If your next trip to London is still a long way away or if going underground simply isn’t your thing, the museum also offers a series of live virtual tours including one launched to celebrate the Tube’s 160 th birthday earlier this year, Discovering the Forgotten Underground, which explores how some spaces on the network came to be disused over the years.

The virtual tours are held live via Zoom and hosted by a tour guide, using a combination of video footage, historical documents and archive images. Other virtual tours include visits of disused stations York Road and Brompton Road, and behind the scenes glimpses into two of London’s newest Elizabeth line stations, Tottenham Court Road and Liverpool Street.

The Hidden London tours were named ’Best Hidden Gem in the World’ at the International Tiqets ’ Remarkable Venue Awards 2022 by public vote.

Tickets are available to book via London Transport Museum’s website at here.

Tours run throughout the year with new dates frequently released. Subscribers to the Museum’s free e-newsletter get 24-hour priority booking upon release.

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These London Tours Explore Abandoned Tube Stations And Other Secret Spots Of The City

Early 2024 tickets for the London Transport Museum's award-winning Hidden London tours will be released tomorrow (November 8).

Here at Secret London , we sure do love a bit of transport talk . Tubes , trains, buses , bikes; you name it, we’ve written (and had an extensive conversation) about it. So, you can imagine how enthusiastic we are about the London Transport Museum – and more specifically, their Hidden London tours. I mean, who doesn’t love discovering hidden gems of London’s historic Transport Network?

Luckily for us (and our fellow transport-lovers), the ever-so popular Hidden London tours will be returning to the capital at the start of 2024 , and you can secure your space as early as tomorrow (November 8). Yippee!

What is a Hidden London tour?

The historical experts over at the London Transport Museum have curated these fascinating tours based on the museums extensive archive and collection. The exclusive tours will uncover the whats, whys and whens of some forgotten London locations . You’ll be taken along by expert guides, learning interesting facts by the bucket-load as you go. A variety of tours are running from January 10 until the end of March , each giving a unique glimpse into London’s history .

Granting visitors behind-the-scenes access to locations on the transport network that are usually closed to the public, Hidden London tours were voted ‘ Best Hidden Gem in the World ‘ at the Tiqets Remarkable Venue Awards last year. So they’re certainly doing something right, hey?

What tours are on offer?

There will be seven in-person tours on offer, ensuring that there’s something for everybody to enjoy. Discover deserted passageways and original design details of Piccadilly Circus station or explore the exclusive (and usually, no-entry) areas of Charing Cross . Be transported back in time at Baker Street and adventure into the disused parts of London’s first underground station . Uncover a labyrinth of dark and dusty passageways in Euston , unveil the secrets of Shepherd’s Bush , or head underground to the subterranean WWII shelters, built deep beneath the streets of Clapham South .

A virtual tour, retracing the 160-year history of the London Underground will also be taking place and a new experience will be available; combining a tour of Piccadilly Circus with a delicious meal at the Hard Rock Café.

If all that still leaves you wanting more, super-fans can also subscribe to Hidden London Hangouts , a regular series hosted on London Transport Museum’s YouTube channel. Watch as the series takes viewers behind the scenes of some of the Hidden London tours , as they explore various nooks and crannies of the transport system and share their thoughts and findings. Count me in.

Find out more and book your Hidden London tour here .

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Going underground: a subterranean tour of London's abandoned tube stations

Tours through abandoned Tube stations open a unique window onto London’s historic roots.

Standing on a strip-lit London Underground platform, I’m staring at the billboards across the tracks. Primary colours jump out above grimy rails. To the left is a placard for cheap holidays in the sun, to the right a poster for new West End play Diana’s Fortune. But the adverts are strangely vague when it comes to details. Holidays where, exactly? And why no mention of which theatre is staging the play?  

“They’re all fake ads,” says my Hidden London guide, Pat Dennis, with a laugh, pointing out posters for fictitious estate agents and non-existent clothing brands. We’re deep in Charing Cross Underground station, at the heart of the capital’s transport network, but if we were hoping to hop on the next train we’d be in for a wait. “This platform has been out of service since 1999,” he says. “It was part of the Jubilee Line. Now it’s used for films, TV shows and music videos. We’ve had Matt Damon and Daniel Craig down here, Paddington, Madonna, Dua Lipa — you name them.”  

The bogus ads, it transpires, help avoid any awkward issues over product placement. They also add to the discombobulation of entering a secret underworld. When Pat greets our group in the station’s ticket hall, we’re surrounded by a jostle of commuters and free newspapers. Then we step through an anonymous metal door and everything becomes real but unreal, with empty escalators, silent corridors and the far-off rumble of trains on other lines.

Over the following hour and a quarter, we get a full overview of this deserted wing of the station. We’re given the history of Charing Cross itself. We’re shown footage from Skyfall where James Bond slides down the same escalators we’ve just descended. We’re even taken into the cavernous dark of the ventilation shafts and construction tunnels, at one point spying through a grille, 007-style, on travellers waiting for a Northern Line train. It all feels fascinatingly clandestine.

This, of course, is very much the intention. Organised by the London Transport Museum, which funnels profits from tickets into its educational arm, these behind-the-scenes tours are run by Hidden London in eight different Tube stations. The visits make the most of the fact that multiple areas of certain stations are now disused, for reasons varying from low passenger numbers to rerouted lines.  

“All the stations we visit have their own selling points,” says Pat, explaining that tours are scheduled for different stations at different times each year, to keep demand high. Many of these tours touch on the Second World War, when the tunnels doubled as air-raid shelters. Clapham South, for example, has more than a mile of deep-level passageways, while Down Street — which Winston Churchill used as a secret wartime bunker — was closed to passengers back in 1932, yet still exists, murky and history-laden, under the streets of W1. And while the defunct platforms of Charing Cross remain modern-looking, the concealed parts of Aldwych and Euston are time capsules full of period architecture and fading posters.

( 5 of north London's most scenic walking routes .)

I head to another station, Moorgate, for the next tour. It takes its name from a former gate in the old city walls, which looked out across marshland. Today the area is all commercial buildings and cafes, but the station has plenty of history. It opened in 1865 as part of the Metropolitan Line — the world’s oldest underground — and originally had gas-lit wooden carriages trundling along its tracks.  

“The early trains didn’t even have windows,” says my guide Tommy Carr. “The logic was that there was nothing to look at in a tunnel, then they realised passengers liked seeing which stations they were stopping at.” The station was initially just a shallow one, created using the old-fashioned cut-and-cover method — digging a big trench, laying down tracks, then roofing it over again — before the deep-level underground arrived in 1900.

We venture into the belly of the station, stepping into a low-lit maze of maintenance tunnels and disused lift shafts. A tiled passageway closed since 1939 still bears fragments of adverts for soap and books; further on we’re shown an old tunnelling shield — a vast, hollow, metal cylinder lying on its side — created as a kind of protective sheath for workers, who stood inside it to hand-excavate the tunnels. Stretching 16 feet across, the shield was simply left there when work was completed.

Less than 90 minutes later I’m back in the fresh air, a little dazed. Today’s Tube is many things — functional, sprawling — and the sheer breadth and history of the network means parts of it are stuck in time.

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You can now go on hidden London tours of secret tube stations

London Transport’s Hidden London tours take visitors to remote and closed stations and tunnels on the Underground

Londoners are suckers for the Underground. Sure, we moan about it constantly, but – like school, marriage and German cooking – if you can just look at it in a slightly different way, it can become magical. Specifically, we get a collective frisson as a city thinking about all the spooky shut-off tube tunnels, disused stations and plentiful ghosts below our feet. To speak to that romantic and spooky appetite, London Transport Museum has just announced a new season of its ever-popular Hidden London tours of unseen parts of the capital’s vast transport network, including some new places they’ve never visited before.

There are in-person and virtual tours available, so even if you live miles from London (or don’t fancy creeping about in a filthy warren), you can still be a tube explorer.

Highlights of the new season include evening tours of Charing Cross and Down Street stations. The Jubilee line platforms at Charing Cross have been inoperative since 1999, and since used for lots of film and TV productions. Down Street station, meanwhile, you might not even have heard of. Located in Mayfair, it was shut down way back in 1932 because of low passenger numbers (locals presumably all travelled by Rolls-Royce). In WWII, it was used as an air raid shelter and, intriguingly, was used by Winston Churchill during the Blitz.

Another perennial favourite are the tours of Aldwych tube station on the Strand near Somerset House, and there are also in-person tours of Shepherd’s Bush station’s hidden nooks and crannies, and the same at Euston.

Virtual tours allow visitors a behind-the-scenes look at the new Elizabeth line stations at Tottenham Court Road and Liverpool Street, as well as a look at the closed Kingsway areas of Holborn.

So, you can spend a whole lot more time on the tube, if you fancy it. Do – it’s really worth it. But book soon – these tours always sell out.

Find more details of London Transport Museum’s ‘Hidden London’ tours and book places here .

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• Chris Waywell Deputy Editor, Time Out London

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