February 2021 Speaker
Once again due to Covid restrictions this meeting was organised as a Zoom meeting by our Chairman Maurice liaising with our speaker, Nick Dobson, to talk to us about ‘An Underground guide to Historical London’. He gave us a very informative presentation on the history of the underground.
Nick has lived and worked in East London and North West Essex for most of his life. He started by giving us some history of the London Underground Railway which was a world first when The Metropolitan Railway from Paddington to Farringdon in 1863 after many years of manual excavation with very basic tools and machinery. This line serviced 6 stations and various suburbs were created around these stations where shops and houses were built.
The Central line started construction in the 1930’s , but the underground tunnel took many years to construct and was not completed before 1939 when the second World War started, so some of the incomplete tunnels were used as munition tunnels in 1942-45 to keep the explosives safe from the German bombs hitting London. Nick gave us many interesting facts about various stations including that the Monument Station still has an original wooden escalator.
Borough Road station was opened in December 1890 and was the first underground station on the new South Bank line of the Thames. In 1890 the first baby was born in an underground station, at The Elephant and Castle.
Nick also mentioned the many statues, memorials, leisure gardens and monuments, which had been erected outside various underground stations including Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Charing Cross/Embankment, north of the Thames.
He then crossed over the Thames to remind us of more famous stations such as Woodford Green which is where Winston Churchill was an MP for many years, and Gants Hill station which was modelled on the Moscow underground ornate decorations. He also mentioned that tube stations were used as underground shelters for many residents during the bombing in the WW2, and I expect some of us will remember our parents relating stories about these memories.
I hope that one day we may be able to go wandering around London again to view some of these wonderful sights as we may have done a few years ago!
It was very encouraging to see that we had a virtual audience of over 80 members who had all managed to access the Zoom link successfully.