Do the Strand

Very occasionally, the London Transport Museum opens the disused Aldwych/Strand station for slightly geeky types to wander around, not all of them men with pony-tails.

Today was one such day and as I stood in the queue waiting, there was a great danger I would be disappointed.  If a station is kept locked from view in a busy street, it is easy to populate this place with all the remembered furniture and smells of old tube stations, in one's head.

As is usual for me, the really interesting things were incidental, like this beautiful sink in the ladies' toilets:

I could not see in the abandoned lift shafts at all, so I just stuck my camera in hopefully:

We were informed by more than one LT Museum volunteer that the platform on which we stood had not been used by trains since 1917, so this geekette pipes up - "How come these posters are from the Seventies then?"  Ah, it turns out they used to use the station to experiment with adhesives and tiling to be used elswhere.  Some excellent posters.

 

  

 

Apparently the tube tunnel on the other platform was used in the Prodigy's "Firestarter" video but they switched the electricity off because, as the LT Museum chap said, we didn't want to incinerate Keith Flint.

If you want a more sensible idea of the station's history, I suggest looking here