Track 02 · Village · 1:36
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Stop one. Hampstead Underground station, which is the deepest hole in London.
The platforms are fifty-eight and a half metres beneath the pavement you are standing on. A hundred and ninety-two feet, and the deepest of any station on the network. It has never had an escalator and it never will, because the climb is too steep to build one. The lifts are the deepest on the Underground, and the emergency staircase spiralling around them runs to more than three hundred and twenty steps.
The reason is the hill rather than the tunnel. Leslie Green's station opened in nineteen oh seven near the top of a hill of London clay, and the railway underneath had to stay roughly level while the ground above it climbed.
Now the better fact, and you cannot see any of it. Half a mile north of here, under the Heath you are about to walk across, there is a station that never opened. North End, or Bull and Bush. The platforms were dug out and then the housing that was meant to fill them was never built, because Henrietta Barnett bought the land above and made sure it stayed empty. Trains pass through the unlit space every few minutes. In the nineteen fifties it was quietly fitted out as a control room for the tunnel floodgates, in case of nuclear attack.
Free, unless you go down.
South down Heath Street, on the right-hand pavement, about two minutes. Church Row opens on your right, and it will stop you where you stand.
51.55654, -0.17812 · where this is on a map