Hammersmith and City Line Archives

Just a short trip around from Euston Square (or a short walk up the Euston Road if you’re above ground) you come to Tube Stop Baby’s next station to tick off the list – Great Portland Street.

Above ground the station basically sits in the middle of a roundabout. But a very attractive roundabout if you’re a tube fan like myself. We didn’t manage a visit to the outside part of the station with Tube Stop Baby this time around, but I’m pretty sure we will return at some point. Possibly on a trip to Regents Park or nearby London Zoo.

Great Portland Street station is like its neighbours Euston Square and Baker Street in that it formed part of the very original Metropolitan Railway. The station has undergone quite a few identity changes though. It originally opened as Portland Road (1863), before later becoming Great Portland Street (1917). It hasn’t been the case ever since though. 1923 saw it become Great Portland Street and Regents Park although the Regents Park part was then dropped in 1933 and it went back to being Great Portland Street as we know it today. I had wondered if the Regents Park element of the title was dropped to tie in with the opening of the nearby Bakerloo line station of the same name, but a bit of research suggests that actually opened in 1906. I might need to do a tad more research to understand exactly what went on there.

Down at platform level the station has a really atmospheric feel to it (much like at Baker Street) mainly from the lights hanging from the ceiling. At the western end of the platform you can see daylight. Whilst this might be unexpected to some visitors it comes from the days when steam trains used to run along this part of the underground and they needed somewhere for the steam and smoke to escape.

This challenge so far is really showing me that I want to explore all these stations both above and below ground, but with Tube Stop Baby in a pram for most of the time this is quite a challenge at the moment as the tube network is far from fully accessible. It might just be that separate visits have to be made to each level of the stations for now!

Tube Stop Baby Facts – Great Portland Street

Date of visit: 10 January 2019

Underground Line(s) – Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan

Zone: 1

If you want to know more about our Tube Stop Baby Challenge then pop over here and have a read.

Euston Square station used to be on my daily commute to university when I was a student in London. At the time it was a very nondescript station that you disappeared down into through a very plain looking entrance on the south side of Euston Road, at the top of Gower Street. Very occasionally a student night out might mean I had to take the equally nondescript entrance on the north side of the road and go through the underpass, but rarely. I never really looked at the station as a destination of any sort, but boy they’ve spruced it up since those days.

Euston Square was given a new entrance in 2006 on the south side of the road as part of the new headquarters of the Wellcome Trust building on the corner of Euston Road and Gower Street. There’s even lift access now to the Westbound platforms.

Euston Square is a bit of a strange station in that it so often gets confused with nearly Euston on the National Rail Mainline. Euston is served by some of the deep level tube lines, but the older cut and cover lines (Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan) are a short walk away at the separate Euston Square station. It’s not a long walk between the two (and the latest version of the tube map actually now shows the connection with a dotted line between them) but I always used to find confused tourists on the platforms trying to work out where their train to Manchester or Birmingham was going from. There has been lots of talk of creating a subway linking the two stations, and it may still happen, but as yet there are no firm plans to do so.

Euston Square was originally opened in 1863 as Gower Street station, which makes sense seeing as it is on the corner of Gower Street, but it was renamed in 1909 to give it the current name.

If you look carefully on the platforms there you will see some slightly different roundels in the tile work. Alongside the station name there are two roundels in solid colours instead of the traditional red and blue.

One is yellow and the other purple, and across the centre they say either Circle Line or Metropolitan Line. These date form 1983, before the time of the Hammersmith & City line, hence the fact that there isn’t a pink version.

I’m told that the only other place on the Underground where you see the name of a line on the bar of a roundel is Holland Park. I’ll have to try to remember to seek it out when we visit there.

Tube Stop Baby Facts – Euston Square