Clapham South Deep-Level Shelter

My second Hidden London Tour (I wrote about the first here) was to Clapham Deep-Level Shelter.

The tour met outside Clapham South Station. Across the road from the entrance to the station at the southeast corner of Clapham Common is a pillbox structure that served a one of the entrances to the shelter.

The entrance the tour used is slightly further south of the station on Ballham Hill. From the outside, it's undetectable as it's been integrated with the surrounding buildings.

There are 180 steps down to the shelter (as we were told repeatedly). The journey down was fairly easy, but I can't say I was looking forward to the return to the surface.

The bottom of the stairs led out into a corridor, which was not all that dissimilar to some of the passageways between platforms in Underground Stations, although the signs on the walls gave an obvious indication of its World War II use.

From the slightly underwhelming entrance corridor, the tour moved on to the shelters themselves. These were all named after historical Admirals.

The shelters began construction in 1940 in response to the Blitz, although were only completed after it had finished. They were available though when the V1 attacks on London began in 1944.

At the time, the shelters were constructed with the intention of using them as the starting point of an express line that would run beneath the existing Northern and Central Lines. Shelters were completed at Chancery Lane (Central Line) and at Belsize Park, Camden Town, Goodge Street, Stockwell, Clapham North and Clapham South (Northern Line). A proposed shelter at St Paul's was not built due to worries about undermining the Cathedral, and a shelter at Oval Station was not completed due to construction difficulties.

Rather than being built to accommodate Underground Trains, the shelters are actually full-scale railway tunnels. Two parallel tunnels were constructed - one for southbound trains, the other for northbound trains.

The tunnels were then divided into a top and bottom half and sectioned off to create the shelters. 

The capacity of the shelters was originally planned to accommodate 10,000 people at each location, although this would have been a bit of a squeeze. It was finally decided to reduce this number to 8,000. However, the shelters never reached full occupancy.

Access to the shelters was granted by ticket. For people bombed out of their homes, semi-permanent residency was granted. Those people would be able to store their own bedding in the shelters; everyone else would have to bring their own.

Places in the shelter were allocated according to a numbering system that can be seen on the bunks.

Air vent.

After the war, the shelter at Clapham South was used for a number of other purposes. In 1948 it was used to temporarily accommodate Jamaican  immigrants who had travelled to the UK on Empire Windrush.

Three years later in 1951, the shelter became the Festival Hotel for the Festival of Britain.

The shelter's constant temperature also made it suitable for archival storage, a purpose that it served for several years.

On the way back up to the street level, one of the guides pointed out a feature of the staircase that had not been so obvious on the way down. The shelter uses a double-spiral staircase with one of the staircases going to the top level of the tunnels, with the other going down to the bottom level.

Double-spiral staircase. While it might not be immediately obvious, the landing on the opposite side belongs to the other staircase.

And yes, the 160-step climb wasn't fun. I managed to be first to the top, but I couldn't talk for five minutes afterwards.