On Wed, 23 Dec 2015 01:01:38 -0000 (UTC), Recliner
wrote:

Charles Ellson wrote:
On Tue, 22 Dec 2015 21:12:06 +0000, Scott
wrote:

On Tue, 22 Dec 2015 20:54:26 +0000, Graeme Wall
wrote:

On 22/12/2015 20:48, Charles Ellson wrote:
On Tue, 22 Dec 2015 08:08:59 +0000, e27002 aurora
wrote:

On Mon, 21 Dec 2015 22:30:05 -0800 (PST), Offramp
wrote:

London Underground has secured planning permission and listed
building consent from Lambeth Council to turn a park-side rotunda
building near Clapham South Tube station into a new restaurant or
café with exhibition space, bringing the historic Grade II World War
Two shelter back to life.

A café or restaurant will be created on the site, offering views over Clapham Common.

Under the Rotunda, 180 steps below ground and under the Northern
line tunnels, lie eight deep-level air-raid shelters that were built
between 1940 and 1942. The vast tunnels are one of seven deep level
networks constructed along the Northern line. It was not until 1944,
when the bombing of London intensified with the use of V-1 and V-2
bombs, that the shelter was used for its intended purpose of housing
up to 8,000 Londoners during air-raids. It closed after less than a year in May 1945.

TfL has rented out the shelter for secure archive storage in the
past. In 1998, English Heritage awarded the shelter Grade II listed
status in recognition of its history, noting that it is the only
deep-level shelter remaining that retains much of the original
signage and is one of the few to retain many of the original bunk beds...

Much better, IMHO to use it for its original purpose. To wit as part
of a fast, limited stop pair quadrupling the TfL Northern Line.

That wasn't the original purpose (note that Wonkypaedia fails to
supply a source) rather than a "maybe" use after the war (see second
sentence in "History" in :-
http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/featur...rs/index.html).
The shelters were built near existing tube lines with access and
service links to them (and possibly using earlier survey records) thus
consequentially were parallel to them.


The original deep Northern Line tunnels were built along te Bank branch
IIRC, the ones around Clapham were built as shelters but with the idea
of linking them up to the earlier tunnels post war.

This was my understanding, that the various tunnels could be linked up
after the war was over to provide an express line. Had the full route
been intact, I suspect it would have been brought into use.

The locations are probably why they haven't been brought into use as
they would would in effect be four-tracking parts of the Northern and
Central Lines rather than providing alternative routes as all the
newer tube lines have done.

I assume Crossrail wasn't able to make any use of the shelters on its
route?

IIRC only the Chancery Lane (ex censored telephone exchange) shelter
comes anywhere near and in the right alignment with Crossrail turning
off toward Farringdon before it reaches it. It's possibly also not
deep enough or big enough.

In effect, Crossrail is an express four tracking of the Central
line from Ealing Broadway to Stratford.

I was having similar thoughts (although more in the style of
reinstating Ealing-Southend) but looking at a map it is maybe more
comparable to the post-war tube lines which have added additional
combinations of routes across London with little parallel running.