Original Station Plans

[Geoffram]

Not sure whether this should go into this or the Historical thread, but I wonder if there exist plans - either in a book or a more informal arrangement - of London Underground Stations as they were first built. For example, how was the Central London station at Tottenham Court Road originally laid out? It's obvious the current Oxford Street south side entrance used to be the main booking hall, but now there are two staircases on either side of a central structure that goes down to the mezzanine where there is the connecting passageway to what was the CCEHR booking hall. Is this a disused lift shaft? Also, there are offices on the staircase as you go down. What were they? How did you get to the lifts at Bank Central Line?
In his book on the Yerkes tiling system, Douglas Rose did a great job revealing early plans for Oxford Circus, but I just wondered if any more exist?

[21146]

The "Tiles of the Unexpected" book has good plans of the original LER tunnel stations. Not cheap though!

[railtechnician]

The "Bridge Engineers" (as they used to be known) will have all the station plans as they were/are the Civil Engineering section responsible for structures and if the library at 55, Broadway still exists (not sure if it was transferred to the LT/TfL Museum) there will surely be copies if not the original documents.
There are certainly disused lift shafts at Tottenham Court Road and perhaps not immediately obvious or noticed but when descending the escalators to the lower circulating area one walks straight through one and an adjacent one is occupied by station staff offices, these being enroute to the Central line which also has some disused area passageways leading to a pump room. Below these shafts lie the access to the lower escalator machine chamber and one of the running tunnels and the area houses a comms equipment room. I spent three months down there diverting all the main telephone cables from the old Leicester Square tandem exchange as enabling works for the Cental Line Project 20 years ago. The area of shaft directly over one's head has a ventilation fan in it and the top of the shaft is accessible from the ticket hall area.
The old Northern line lift shafts off the passageway and staircase from the lower circulating area also once housed comms equipment which I was involved in installing 30 years ago, it's been a few years since I was last there but the last time was in the mid 1990s surveying the site for the CrossRail Project but there were certainly 4 disused lift shafts, two per line. Many years ago we used the top of one which had been capped as a cable store but the station was modernised once or twice since then and the geography at street level changed somewhat.

I haven't worked at Bank/Monument complex since the station was cut in half vertically (yes literally) in preparation for the DLR tunnel to be bored under it. We did diversion works all over the place there and there used to be a 3 foot diameter gas main running around the ticket hall in a passageway that had to be diverted as I recall. I really can't remember much of what was at street level there as most of my work was down on the platforms and under them diverting cables.
Many of the stations that I worked at have vast disused areas with old shafts etc, Oxford Circus is a good example with five disused shafts as I recall basically on opposite sides of Argyll Street beneath the two original station buildings which these days have IIRC Victoria Line and Central offices above the entrances named Western House and Oxford Circus House. One of the shafts house the substation on about five floors as I recall, another is a ventilation shaft, one is completely empty except for the 104 pair telephone cable that I ran down to track level from the street and two more are under the Argyll Street exit/entrance. I do wonder how many people realise that they are walking across a 60-70ft drop on a reinforced concrete cap of perhaps 18" thickness. The same is true at Moorgate booking hall!


I have to say that there is nothing like working in such places and I worked in many many not so well known nooks and crannies and disused stations, truly explorer's heaven !