Timetable For Tube Ticket Office Closures Announced

Rachel Holdsworth
By Rachel Holdsworth Last edited 111 months ago
Timetable For Tube Ticket Office Closures Announced

Photo by Fred Adams from the Londonist Flickr pool

Transport for London (TfL) has released a timetable for "ticket hall scheduled transformation". We ran that through Google Translate, from the "PR wank" setting to "plain English" and came up with "ticket office closures".

You'll remember that TfL wants to close the vast majority of ticket offices at tube stations and turn the remainder into travel information centres. The first ticket offices to be "transformed" — sorry, closed — will be Chigwell, Embankment, Queensway, Roding Valley, Shepherd's Bush, South Wimbledon, Temple, Theydon Bois and Upminster Bridge, starting in February. TfL reckons 85% of the work will be finished by the end of 2015, with the last earmarked ticket office swept away by April 2016.

Disruption will generally be for about a month, with some stations needing up to three months to finish the work. Green Park and Baker Street, however, are special and will be disrupted for four months.

Why are ticket offices being closed? Well, TfL says it's to roll with the times, get staff out from behind glass windows and roaming station concourses with iPads and helping passengers use the machines. But it's also undeniable that these changes will result in the loss of around 900 front line jobs with some stations experiencing staff cuts (TfL will need 200 people to run all-night weekend tubes, but there's no saying they'll come from the 900). TfL faces severe budget cuts and needs to find money elsewhere, fast, either from cuts or increased revenue. Cutting staff will provide about 6% of the savings TfL needs, but it will likely find far more revenue by turning those newly empty ticket offices into shops or online shopping drop-off points.

If you want to find out when your local ticket office will close, take a look at this PDF.

Last Updated 04 December 2014