Dover Street: The Abandoned Tube Station Hidden Within A Functioning One

Last Updated 27 January 2025

Dover Street: The Abandoned Tube Station Hidden Within A Functioning One
A man in high vis in a huge ventilator shaft
The climax of the tour is this behemoth of a ventilation shaft. The angle has to be seen to be believed.

Savvy Londoners know about Down Street Tube station — and every tourist and his dog knows about the Churchill War Rooms. But were you aware of the top secret wartime offices of Dover Street station?

Your first question may be 'What's Dover Street station when it's at home?' The answer: it was the original Underground station where Green Park now stands. Built in 1906 to serve the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway line (GNP&BR), now the Piccadilly line, Dover Street took its name from the side street where the passenger lifts emerged. But its humble status meant it wasn't long for this Underground network.

Photos of Dover Street station as it was
Dover Street station existed from 1906 until Green Park station came along in 1933.
A Tube train as seen from above the platform
The tour offers some interesting angles of Green Park station platforms.

As the GNP&BR line crept out into the suburbs and encouraged a boom in passengers, it became important to speed up the trains. Smaller stations, including Down Street, Brompton Road and York Road, were shuttered outright. (Covent Garden station, too, was earmarked for closure — a suggestion that was later wisely dropped.) Dover Street — thanks to its prominent position by institutions like Buckingham Palace and the Ritz — instead enjoyed a sweeping makeover. In 1933, the lifts were scrapped in favour of newfangled escalators, which in turn shifted the station's entrances/exits to where you still find them now. At the same time, the name Dover Street was scrubbed out, and a fresh name was emblazoned: Green Park.

A To The Trains sign
Walk through passageways untrodden by passengers for the best part of a century.
People walking through an abandon tunnel
Who knew all this was going on behind the scenes at Green Park.

The latest Hidden London tour to launch — Dover Street: Alight here for Green Park is the 12th in London Transport Museum's wildly successful series — weaves familiar magic. Through anonymous doors on commuter-thronged corridors, you slip into the darkness of smut-dusted passageways, where no passenger has stepped since 1933. Torches are shone on palimpsests of walls, some revealing ghost signs that send shivers down the spine: 'To The Trains'. You peek through grilles to watch today's passengers waiting for their train, and yourself start to feel like a ghost. Admittedly, Dover Street doesn't have the abandoned platforms boasted by Aldwych or Charing Cross, but there are other treasures to uncover — not least the station's secretive chapter in wartime.

A man in top hat and tails on a Tube train
Lord Ashfield with his daughter. Ashfield worked (and slept) at Dover Street throughout much of the Second World War. Image: public domain
Old cornicing
Decorative features of Lord Ashfield's underground bedroom — he wanted to forget he was in a Tube station.

While some of the old Dover Street station — including its smart oxblood frontage — was commandeered by an Express Dairies tearoom, when the Second World War came along it was a shoo-in for subterranean offices — in this case for the London Transport Executive Board. Conference rooms, toilets and kitchens were installed in and around Dover Street's disused lift shafts. Hidden London's tour ushers you into the former bedroom of transport big cheese Lord Ashfield. There's no bed/giant ashtray like you'll find in the Churchill War Rooms but still extant is some of the plasterwork, cornicing and skirting boards; Ashfield was keen not to be reminded he was living and working in an abandoned Tube station. While around £7,000 was spent converting nearby Down Street station, where Winston Churchill took refuge during the Blitz, Dover Street cost a whistle-inducing £45,000. The compact transport team working down here enjoyed relative (though deserved) luxury. From the gloomy netherworld of Dover Street — which was quickly threaded with telephone lines — London was kept moving. Following the Balham Tube disaster, London Transport had Balham up and running again within six weeks — little short of a miracle.

A staircase leading down into a ventilation shaft
A Victoria/Jubilee line ventilation shaft, used to pump cooling air through Green Park station.
A shot of a Green Park platform through a grille
Better than watching TV.

The extension of Green Park, of course, carried on way after the 1930s. The second half of the Hidden London tour whisks you through more unmarked portals into ventilation shafts dug for the Victoria and Jubilee lines during the 1960s and 70s. The piece de resistance is a gaping shaft, which kinks upwards at a dizzyingly steep angle, and can only be truly admired in the flesh. It's an experience made all the more bracing by the chill rush of air barging past you. Behind the doors, grilles and vents of London's workaday Underground stations, an incalculable number of secrets still lie waiting in the darkness.

Hidden London: Dover Street: Alight here for Green Park, tickets now on sale

All images by Londonist.