Hidden London has been running tours into the closed-off parts of the Underground for ten years and has never done a Halloween one. This October it does, eleven storeys beneath Clapham South, and it is built on recordings of Tube staff describing things they cannot explain.
Clapham South: Ghosts of the Underground runs four times a day, Wednesday to Sunday, from 21 October to 1 November. Tickets are on sale now.
The setting is the deep-level shelter under the station, which is one of the strangest spaces in London whatever month you visit it. Nearly a mile of corridors, 180 steps down, and it has been empty for seventy years.
What is actually down there
Eight deep-level shelters were completed beneath London during the Second World War, of which only five ever opened to the public. Clapham South took shelterers from 1944 and could hold more than 8,000 people in bunks.
Its sixteen sections were named alphabetically after naval commanders, which is the detail that stays with you once you are down there: Anson, Beatty, Collingwood, Drake, and on through Nelson and Parry, painted on the walls at every junction so that thousands of people sleeping underground could find their own bed in the dark.
The part of its history that is not about the war
In June 1948, 236 people who had arrived on the Empire Windrush were housed here. They paid two shillings a night for a bunk and meals, and the last of them left on 12 July. The shelter was meant to be a seventy-two hour billet and for many it was rather longer than that.
Many Caribbean migrants went on to settle in Brixton, and the shelter’s proximity is usually given as part of the reason why. It is worth being careful with that as a tidy piece of cause and effect, because the archives are more hedged about it than the story usually is, but the fact of 236 people spending their first British nights eleven storeys under Clapham is not in doubt.
The shelter had a second life after that. In 1951 it reopened as the Festival Hotel for visitors to the Festival of Britain, three shillings a night for bed and breakfast, sleeping up to 1,500 people. Troops stayed here for George VI’s funeral and visitors for the Coronation. From 1975 it was leased out as secure archive storage.
What the tour does with it
Guests go in through an entrance the regular Clapham South tour does not use, and see areas of the shelter that have not been open to the public before. The wartime material is newly researched first-hand accounts of Londoners who sheltered across the network. Running against it are recorded interviews with current and former London Underground staff, talking about sounds, sightings and things that stayed with them long after a shift ended.
Then lighting, sound and projection are used to let the two run into each other. It is written for adults, though the minimum age is 10, and it is worth saying plainly that none of this is presented as evidence of anything. It is people telling you what they experienced in a place where a great many people have been frightened, and a shelter that is genuinely unnerving to stand in does the rest.
The London x London Take: The Hidden London tours are consistently the best thing London Transport Museum does, and the ones that work best are the ones where the place is doing the heavy lifting rather than the theming. Clapham South qualifies. If you are choosing between this and the regular Clapham South: Subterranean Shelter tour, take this one for the access alone, because a new entrance and previously closed sections is not a small thing on a site people have been touring for years. Book early: Hidden London dates go, and a twelve-day run at four tours a day is not much stock. And take a layer, because it is cold down there in a way that catches people out in October.
Need to know
- What: Clapham South: Ghosts of the Underground, a Hidden London tour
- Where: Clapham South deep-level shelter, Balham Hill, London SW12
- When: 21 October to 1 November, Wednesday to Sunday, four tours a day
- Price: From £39 adults, £36 concessions and children. Minimum age 10
- Included: Half-price day entry to London Transport Museum in Covent Garden within a month, where under-18s go free, plus 10% off in the museum shops
- Booking: ltmuseum.co.uk/hidden-london
- Also on: Ten other Hidden London tours run year round, including Aldwych, Charing Cross, Green Park, Baker Street and Holborn
More underground London in our piece on London’s abandoned Tube stations, and the museum end of the ticket in our guide to things to do in Covent Garden.
