London’s labyrinth of tubes, tunnels, platforms, and passageways is filled to the brim with secrets. But very few of its fragments come more surreptitious than this. There’s a station in north London that would have been sat snugly between Hampstead and Golders Green on the Northern Line, had it not been abandoned before it was even fully constructed.
The history of North End Station
North End station (also known as Bull and Bush due to its close proximity to a popular pub of the same name) is the London Tube station that was – quite literally – stopped in its tracks. It was set to become part of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, and serve a new residential development that was being built in the area. However, the development plans were cancelled which meant the station became somewhat superfluous. It wasn’t until 1906 (when the tunnels and passageways had already been excavated, and parts of the platforms had already been built) that the decision was made to abandon the station. And instead, those tunnels, passageways, and platforms have been left disused beneath the streets of London for over a century.
Due to the planned location, the station would have sat 221 feet below ground (the deepest on the whole of the London Underground network). And – as with many of London’s abandoned stations – it came in handy during various wars. The existence of North End station was kept secret for quite some time, making it the perfect spot to store secret archives during World War II. And during the Cold War, a spiral staircase was built to the lower passageways, and they were used as floodgate control room. It’s also thought that North End station is the very spot that Winston Churchill used as his secret hideout, which he referred to as ‘The Paddock’. But this has never actually been confirmed.
North End station nowadays
Nowadays, the exits leading from the abandoned platforms are only used during emergency evacuations. The entrance building that was constructed during the 1950s was disguised as an electricity substation, and it remains pretty inconspicuous to this very day. There’s a platform-width gap on the section of the Northern Line that runs between Hampstead and Golders Green. But aside from that, this little pocket of London’s transport history stays fairly under the radar. And North End remains the station that never really was.