Mike Jordan

The lifts at Earls Court Piccadilly Line station … 
(see, for full story: Will, Shall, Show and Shewn)

Geoff Fletcher

There is a terrifying short story about a disused tube lift shaft going up to a shop. I read it years ago – it was called "South Kentish Town", and was about an office guy who travelled the same line every day and read his newspaper while his brain subconsciously counted the stations off until he reached his destination. One evening, the train made an unscheduled stop  at a disused station — South Kentish Town – just before his destination, the doors opened, and he got off while still engrossed in his paper, the requisite stops having been counted off in his mind.  The rest of the tale concerned his increasingly desperate efforts to escape the station (this was way before mobile phones), including a horribly harrowing description of him climbing the disused lift shaft in the dark and reaching the shop floor at the top, only to see the lights shining through the cracks go out as it closed for the night, just as he was about to  knock on the boards to attract attention. He then had to climb all the way down again. He was finally rescued by a LT track repair team hours later, by which time he had sunk into the depths of despair as the trains rattled by uncaring and unaware of his predicament.

Bernie Newnham

Surely all he had to do was wait till the fluffers arrived after the current was turned off.

Graeme Wall

<http://www.michaeljamiesonbristow.com/south-kentish-town>

Then there’s BH’s private station on the Bakerloo line:<http://underground-history.co.uk/bbcbh.php>

Maurice Fleischer

The first part of that ‘underground history’ shows a plan of BH and its immediate surrounds including the location of the Stronghold, an old WWII bunker.

Now that takes me back to my most tender of years in the early part of the war. I lived in and beneath my parent’s shop just off Baker Street and the whole of London W1 and its immediate surroundings was my playground. It was at that time that a bomb dropped just at the back of BH which flattened that area shown on the plan and after clearance it became a derelict site. As an appendage to that fact one newspaper reporter wrote “if they had to bomb Broadcasting House why on earth didn’t they do it whilst Sandy McPherson was there playing his damned organ” – and for those of you who are mere youngsters, Sandy McPherson broadcast every day (and I can still hear his signature tune over and over again in my head) over the radio supposedly to keep up the spirits of the population during the blitz until in the end most of the population had the ‘heeby jeebies’ as soon as the first bars were played… However, I digress.

Back to the back of BH. I used to wander around the West End, often on my own, investigating bomb sites and other mysterious looking places and on one occasion I squeezed through the hoarding around the bombed out BH area to see a shack in the middle, exactly where the Stronghold is shown. I approached it and noticed that the door was ajar so I ventured inside to see loads and loads of boxes lying on the ground. They didn’t appear to be locked and I gingerly opened one of them to see it was filled with live ammunition. I hastily dropped the lid, shot out of the building, squeezed back out through the hoarding and ran home to mummy!!

Obviously it was being used as a temporary store with no attempt at security.