The Coming of the Tube
The opening of Belsize Park station on 22 June 1907 was among the most transformative events in the neighbourhood's history. The Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway — one of the several electric deep-level tube railways being constructed under London in the Edwardian period — drove its tunnels beneath Haverstock Hill and Belsize Park to create a rapid transit connection to the West End that reduced journey times to Charing Cross from the better part of an hour by horse bus to less than fifteen minutes. The effect on land values, on the pace of residential development, and on the character of the neighbourhood was immediate and lasting.
The Hampstead tube, as it was popularly known, was one of a series of deep-level electric underground railways promoted and constructed by the American businessman Charles Tyson Yerkes, who had acquired control of several London underground lines and was engaged in a massive programme of electrification and extension. Yerkes brought to London the techniques and technologies — third-rail electrification, electric lifts, standard passenger car designs — that he had developed in Chicago's elevated railway system, applying them to the very different conditions of deep-level tube tunnelling beneath the streets of a Victorian city.
The engineering of the deep-level tube at Belsize Park presented particular challenges. The station lies at one of the deepest points of the Hampstead branch of the tube, with the platforms more than fifty metres below street level. The long lift shafts required to connect the platforms to the surface were among the deepest on the entire system, and the construction of the tunnels through the London Clay beneath Belsize Park required the precision and care that characterised the best engineering work of the Edwardian period. The tube at Belsize Park is not merely a transport facility but an engineering achievement of considerable distinction.
Leslie Green and the Station Architecture
The surface building of Belsize Park station was designed by Leslie Green, the architect who designed all the stations on the Yerkes tube railways and in doing so created one of London's most recognisable architectural idioms. Green's stations are immediately identifiable by their ox-blood glazed terracotta facades — a deep, warm red that reads with great presence on the London street — combined with the characteristic round-headed windows on the first floor and the general air of solidity and authority that the material imparts. The buildings were conceived as urban landmarks, not merely as functional access points to the underground: they were designed to be seen from a distance, to establish the presence of the railway in the streetscape, and to provide the kind of architectural dignity appropriate to a major public facility.
The Belsize Park station building is a particularly successful example of Green's approach. Its position on a corner site, with curved frontages addressing both Haverstock Hill and Belsize Park, allowed Green to deploy his architectural vocabulary on two elevations simultaneously, creating a building with a more three-dimensional presence than the simpler frontages of some of his other stations. The glazed terracotta cladding, fired at the Hathern Station Brick and Terra Cotta Company's works in Leicestershire, was applied with great precision, and the resulting surface has proved exceptionally durable and weather-resistant over more than a century of service.
The interior of the station — the booking hall, the lift lobbies, the passages connecting the lifts to the platform tunnels — was designed with the same care as the exterior. Green's interiors used the same ox-blood terracotta for the lower walls, with white glazed brick above and a variety of mosaic and geometric tile work for the floors and the station name panels. The characteristic station name tiles, with their white letters on a dark background, have become one of the iconic images of early tube travel and have been carefully preserved or restored at Belsize Park as at other Green stations on the network.
The Wartime Deep Shelter
The extraordinary depth of Belsize Park station — its platforms lying nearly fifty metres beneath the street — gave it a strategic military value that its designers in 1907 could not have anticipated. When the Second World War brought the German Blitz to London in 1940, the deep tube tunnels offered a degree of protection against bombing that no surface shelter could match, and the deep-level stations became refuges for Londoners seeking safety from the nightly raids. Belsize Park station was among those used as a shelter, and the scenes of hundreds of Londoners sleeping on the platforms and in the passages became one of the defining images of civilian life in the Blitz.
But Belsize Park's wartime story went deeper than the conventional tube shelter narrative. The station was selected as the site for one of a series of deep shelter tunnels constructed by the government beneath the existing tube system for purposes that combined civilian shelter with military use. Work on the Belsize Park deep shelter began in 1942, and the completed facility — a pair of parallel tunnels each 400 metres long and large enough to accommodate several thousand people — was one of the most impressive civil engineering projects of the wartime period. The shelters were completed in 1942 and served various purposes during the remaining war years.
The exact purposes to which the Belsize Park deep shelter was put during the war remain partially obscured by official secrecy. It is known that the shelter was used by military and government agencies as well as civilian purposes, and the particular depth and security of the tunnels made them attractive for storage and communications uses that required protection against bombing. The full history of the shelter's wartime use has been the subject of considerable speculation among local historians and enthusiasts of underground London, and some aspects of it remain unclear even now that most wartime records are in the public domain.
The Station in Later Life
Belsize Park station has continued to serve the neighbourhood throughout the post-war period and into the twenty-first century. It remains one of the busiest stations on the Hampstead branch of the Northern Line, handling a large passenger flow from the residential streets of Belsize Park, Hampstead, and the surrounding area. The station's infrastructure has been updated on several occasions — the original lifts have been replaced with modern equipment, the signalling has been modernised, and various safety and accessibility improvements have been made — but the surface building and the basic character of the station have been preserved with considerable care.
The listing of the station building at Grade II has provided formal protection for Green's architecture, ensuring that any future modifications must take account of the building's historic character. The glazed terracotta facade has been cleaned and conserved, its condition maintained to a standard that allows the full effect of the original design to be appreciated by the millions of passengers who pass through the building each year. The Leslie Green stations of the London underground are among the most important surviving examples of Edwardian public architecture in London, and Belsize Park is one of the finest examples in the group.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*