Engineers came up with a crafty way to build the station where they did
London has a lot of rivers, and it also has a lot of Underground stations. There’s a great example of the two crossing paths above the tracks of a Tube station.
It’s can be found at Sloane Square, in the King’s Road area of Chelsea. The station sits in Zone 1 on the Circle and District lines.
The River Westbourne flows through Kilburn, Paddington, Hyde Park and Chelsea, before joining the River Thames at Chelsea Bridge.
When building the station, the experts couldn’t figure out how to build the station atop the Westbourne, so they were left with one option: to cut through it. The water was funnelled via pipes ahead of the station’s opening in 1868.
Today you can still see the aqueduct carrying the water across the tracks in a pipe which is hidden within a green-coloured conduit. Eagle-eyed Londoners may have seen it as they stand on the platform by the exits.
And even more surprisingly, the station was hit by a bomb during The Blitz in WWII. Somehow the piping survived and the station avoided catastrophic flooding.
The blast killed 37 people and injured 79 more who were on a train at the time of impact. The ticket hall, escalators and roof were obliterated but the river’s iron pipe survived.
The Westbourne has also been pumped into Kensington Gardens.
Its waters of the river were originally pure and in the 13th century conduits were laid to carry water from the Westbourne into the City of London, to drink.
Next time you’re at Sloane Square station, keep your eye out for the forgotten London river.
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