The Underground Map Book Club features books about London which we have either read ourselves and deserved a five star review or has come recommended via the users on our Facebook page.
Hidden London is an exploration of the abandoned tributaries of London’s vast and vital transportation network through breathtaking images and unexpected stories.
The book is a lavishly illustrated history of disused and repurposed London Underground spaces. It provides the first narrative of a previously secret and barely understood aspect of London’s history. Behind locked doors and lost entrances lies a secret world of abandoned stations, redundant passageways, empty elevator shafts, and cavernous ventilation ducts.
The Tube is an ever-expanding network that has left in its wake hidden places and spaces. Hidden London opens up the lost worlds of London’s Underground and offers a fascinating analysis of why Underground spaces-including the deep-level shelter at Clapham South, the closed Aldwych station, the lost tunnels of Euston-have fallen into disuse and how they have been repurposed.
With access to previously unseen archives, architectural drawings, and images, the authors create an authoritative account of London’s hidden Underground story. This surprising and at times myth-breaking narrative interweaves spectacular, newly commissioned photography of disused stations and Underground structures today.
Hidden London has lent its name to a series of tours undertaken by the London Transport Museum into disused stations seeing abandoned infrastructure, former passageways, old posters lining the walls and more.
Work underway in early 1931 on the cutting just south of the planned Kingsbury Station. The picture was taken close to where the Fryent Way bridge across the cutting would be built, and the hill that can be seen faintly in the background is Barn Hill.
From “Meccano Magazine”, May 1934