Earth & places · Inventions & technology

The escalators moved the door, so the station changed its name

Green Park is one of those London Underground stations that quietly serves three separate lines, tucked beside the park on either side of Piccadilly, linking the Jubilee, Piccadilly and Victoria routes in the heart of the West End. It opened in 1906 as Dover Street, built by a company racing against several rival schemes that all wanted to tunnel under Piccadilly around the same spot, with backers falling out, bills failing in parliament, and funding collapsing before one group finally got tunnelling underway. The original station, designed with the era's standard red-tiled frontage and cream-and-blue tiled platforms, relied on lifts to reach platforms nearly ninety feet down, and only in the 1930s was it rebuilt with escalators, a new underground ticket hall, and entrances cut into the park itself, at which point it took on its present name.

The station kept growing as London's network expanded. Work on the Victoria line in the 1960s meant enlarging the ticket hall and digging new passageways, a job complicated when soft ground collapsed during tunnelling and had to be chemically stabilised, and the line's opening in 1969 was marked by the Queen herself riding the first train. A decade later the Jubilee line arrived, originally planned as an east-west route called the Fleet line before being renamed for the Queen's Silver Jubilee, pushing platforms even deeper beneath the streets; its later extension toward Canary Wharf required fresh tunnels branching off near Green Park. More recent upgrades added step-free lifts ahead of the 2012 Olympics, retiled the platforms, restored some decorative tilework that had been removed, and installed a system using underground water to help cool the station.

The station has also seen tragedy and appears in unexpected places. In 1975 a bomb planted by an IRA unit exploded at a bus stop outside, killing a young man and injuring twenty others as part of a wider bombing campaign that also damaged the nearby Ritz. Today it sits among notable neighbours including St James's Palace, Fortnum & Mason and the Royal Academy, and serves as one of the two stations nearest Buckingham Palace. It ranks among the busiest stations on the network, and its old Dover Street incarnation was even recreated as a film set for a 1997 adaptation of a Henry James novel. A long-dormant proposal would one day extend the Docklands Light Railway through the area, though nothing has come of it since it was floated.

For its first decades the station was called Dover Street, after the road its entrance stood on — the name only stopped fitting once the building was modernised.

Read the whole of Green Park tube station on Wikipedia

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