London Transport Museum: Hidden London tours

As part of their range of exclusive tours to disused Tube stations and sites, you can travel back to by-gone eras and discover what these ‘forgotten’ parts of the Tube network are like first hand.

There are whole host of exciting in-person tours for you to choose from starting this September. Enter parts of Euston station concealed for over 50 years where you can see a gallery of preserved vintage advertising poster fragments for iconic films and prroducts. Discover the engineering feats at Moorgate station, one of London’s first Underground stations, and where you can see the only complete Greathead cutting shield in-situ from 1904. Or maybe you fancy seeing the iconic design in the Heart of London on a behind-the-scenes tours of Piccadilly Circus and see passageways and lift shafts that have been closed to the public since 1929.

This autumn, London Transport Museum is adding a new tour of Shepherd’s Bush Underground station to its line-up. The Shepherd’s Bush station of today would struggle to make the top 20 of London’s busiest Underground stations, but when it was designed in the late 19th Century, it was with huge numbers of passengers in mind. Opening in 1900, Shepherd’s Bush station was the original western terminus of the Central London Railway (today’s Central line) – only the third deep Tube railway to be built in London. The brand new line cut through the centre of the capital to provide an essential commuter link from London’s Western suburbs to the City of London

Having undergone several major upgrades and renovations since it first opened, the modern station is almost unrecognisable from the original, but in areas of the station no longer accessible to the general public remain remnants of the original early 20th central station, frozen in time.

Each Hidden London tour group has a limited number of people per tour so you will get to see these spaces without the crowds. Tours are led by one of the Museum’s expert guides telling you all you want to know about the history and design used to create these iconic stations.

The tours include a number of locations featured on UKTV’s popular Secrets of the London Underground series. Fans of the show can follow in the footsteps of presenters Siddy Holloway and Tim Dunn to explore these special sites for themselves.

A new season of virtual Hidden London tours will also be available to book. Join from anywhere in the world via Zoom to get up close to out-of-bounds areas on the network. Expert guides will share the history of these mysterious parts of London’s transport system through a gallery of contemporary photos, videos, never-before-seen footage as well as archival images from London Transport Museum’s collection. Access to many sites on the virtual tour roster is so restricted that in-person Hidden London tours will never be possible, making these virtual experiences particularly special.

Tickets for all Hidden London tours go on public sale on Wednesday 3 August. Head to ltmuseum.co.uk/hidden-london to book your tickets and sign up to the Museum’s enewsletter to get priority bookin