North End – known to transport staff as Bull & Bush after the famous pub – was abandoned after the lower parts of the station were built 67 metres down.
Today, only the access building can be spotted behind railings in Hampstead Way – and it’s Hampstead that has the honour of being the deepest station on the Tube at 58.5 metres below ground level.
Plans to take the then the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway line further north to Golders Green were controversial because it meant tunnelling under Hampstead Heath.
American financier Charles Yerkes had to battle with Heath users and residents who feared it would damage the ecology of their beloved green space.
But permission was granted in 1903 and it was hoped the new North End/Bull & Bush station would serve a housing development being planned north of the Heath.
However philanthropist Dame Henrietta Barnett, who lived in Hampstead Lane and was in the middle of planning her own ideal suburb near Golders Green, managed to torpedo the scheme.
In 1904 she galvanised locals into buying land from Eton College to create the Hampstead Heath extension.
Although works on the tunnels and passageways for the Bull and Bush station had begun a year earlier – it was clear by 1906 that the influx of new homes would never materialise.
Works on the station came to a halt, and today, Northern line trains rattle past the uncompleted platforms.
They were however used during the Second World War II to store secret archives that were only accessible from the cabs of service trains.
Then during the Cold War in the 1950s a shaft was dug down to a secret control centre built to manage the emergency floodgates throughout the Tube network in the event of a nuclear attack.
A spiral staircase of 197 steps was installed to give access to the control room connected to the abandoned station and a manual lift stopping short of the surface, where staff had to ascend stairs to the entrance which was disguised as an electricity sub-station because it was part of the nation’s civil defence.
Today it’s on a side road close to the pub, which became famous for a music hall song by Florrie Forde urging her beau to ‘Come Come Come and make eyes at me down at the Old Bull & Bush.’
It was a hit in 1904 – the same year the station plans were abandoned – and references the pub’s popularity with Londoners as a destination for day trips.
