A long-term aspiration to run more trains on the Northern line could see a new depot being built on the site of a former railway horse hospital in North London.
Transport for London (TfL) aspires to increase the number of trains on the Northern line at peak times to 36 per hour, but doing so would require 45 additional berths to accommodate the extra trains required for the more intensive service.
TfL has worked out that this would require at least two new depots, one on each branch of the Northern line, and a possible site has been identified at Totteridge & Whetstone station on the High Barnet branch of the Northern line.
Thanks to a quirk of railway and industrial heritage, there’s a large plot of disused land next to the station, but with an unusual history attached to it.
Although part of the London Underground, the station was originally opened by the Great Northern Railway in 1872 as a mainline railway station, and later operated by LNER, before being taken over by London Underground in 1940. Like most railways of the time, there were a lot more facilities next to the station that you would find today, for cargo, coal, parcels, and often livestock.
But what stands out is that next to the station was the Great Northern’s horse hospital, which you can see in this photo as the large building (at about 9 o’clock) between the water tower and the railway cottages.
The Great Northern owned around 1,000 horses when the hospital opened in 1884, which, at the average price of the time, represented an investment of around £60,000, so looking after them was sensible.
The horses were used for carting luggage to and from stations, for small freight movements within station yards, and for the railway company’s horse-drawn buses in central London. They had stables near King’s Cross, but fear of an outbreak of the highly contagious Glanders disease in urban centres led the railway company to build a palace for horses in Totteridge.
Capable of caring for 55 horses at a time, the luxurious stables even had a Turkish bath in the centre, which could be used to treat the animals with hot steam generated in a basement boilerhouse.
Eventually, the horses weren’t needed, and the site was turned into a Soft Drinks Works, later the Planston Works, which eventually closed down, and the site was cleared in around 2017/18.
Also sitting next to the station was a goods yard with a single siding, which was kept in use by British Rail right up to October 1962, when it was turned into the station car park.
Today, these two sites sitting next to each other are being eyed up as suitable for housing developments – but one with a bit of a twist.
If it all goes ahead, they need the additional stabling for trains, and the land next to Totteridge & Whetstone station is just the right size for 15 trains to be stabled there on the site of the old horse stables.
But rather than just building an open-air train stabling yard, there is a potential option to bury them beneath housing. The site is on a raised area, so it would be possible to level the ground by a few metres and erect a new roof slab above the trains at roughly the same height as the street level was before.
Then build housing on top of the podium slab.
Although only a concept at this stage, and nothing is confirmed, the proposed housing could be a mix of houses and low-level blocks of flats running around the edges of the site, with a large courtyard in the centre.
The higher buildings on the railway side would act as a sound barrier, deflecting the noise from the railway below. Depending on the configuration and land acquisitions, between 200 and 600 homes could be built on top of the new Northern line train depot.
However, a Freedom of Information request warns that, since the high-level study was carried out in 2021, some housing policies and legislation have changed, as have market conditions, making the study untenable.
So that could mean no houses.
Against that, some of the tightening of planning restrictions that have made the project hard to push forward until now are themselves likely to be relaxed in the near future. There’s also a plan that any future housing next to a railway station will be prioritised, substantially reducing the burden of obtaining planning permission.
If anything were to go ahead, it would likely be required to offer a step-free upgrade to the tube station as a local benefit for passengers. Also, the housing is simply a way of subsidising the cost of building the railway sidings, which would still be needed if the Northern line is to carry more trains.
And of course, all this is subject to being able to buy more Northern line trains.
The existing Northern line trains are on a PFI deal with Alstom until 2033, by which time they will be around 35 years old. By national rail standards, they would be ripe for replacement. However, London Underground is usually expected to get another decade (or more) out of its trains before being allowed to replace them.
That gives them a decade or so to prepare for the additional sidings. Whether one of them ends up at Totteridge and Whetstone is still to be decided.
