Quote from Penny McCarthy on March 3, 2025, 1:06 pm

Tickets are now available for tours running up until the end of September 2025 for London Transport Museum’s award-winning Hidden London tours. This time, tours of Charing Cross, Piccadilly Circus, and Aldwych disused station have been updated to feature refreshed content and enhanced audio-visual elements.

The launch of the refreshed tours forms part of a series of celebrations that will take place across the year to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the programme, whose first tour of the disused parts of Charing Cross Underground station was launched in June 2015.

Hidden London is a series of 12 exclusive guided tours, which take guests into secret locations around the network including disused stations, time-capsule corridors, forgotten platforms and wartime shelters, revealing little known historical facts from the museum’s archives along the way.

They are the only tours in the city that grant guests access to these closed-off locations, offering the public a unique chance to step into secret parts of the Underground network and to hear little known historical facts about London and its transport network, right where it all took place.

All Hidden London tours have recently been opened up to younger visitors aged 10 and over (down from a previous age limit of 14+), allowing families to join for the first time.

Popular tours have been refreshed

To celebrate the 10 years of the programme, Hidden London’s historical experts returned to TfL’s corporate archives and London Transport Museum’s collection to explore new documents, maps and pictures and add their latest findings to three of the tours’ narratives. Additional audio and visual content will also be brought in to further bring the locations’ stories to life and help make it more engaging for a wider and younger audience.

To coincide with the 80th anniversary of VE Day later this year, Aldwych: The End of the Line will feature more first-hand accounts from Londoners who sheltered in the now-disused station during the Second World War. Visitors will also hear more details on how Aldwych kept the nation’s treasures safe during air raids.

Tours for Aldwych: The End of the Line will start on 21 May 2025, with prices starting from £42.

Piccadilly Circus: The Heart of London will also explore the station’s role in the Second World War in more depth, with the addition of new audio and visual elements. There will also be a deeper dive into the station’s architectural heritage and its transformation over the years, starting from Leslie Green’s signature red-tiled exterior all the way to the Charles Holden’s modernist redesign of the 1920s. In addition to the disused Piccadilly line corridors, guests will also now be able to retrace the steps that Edwardian passengers would have taken to the Bakerloo line thanks to the addition of a new disused area to explore.

Tours for Piccadilly Circus: The Heart of London will start on 18 June 2025, with prices starting from £42.

Finally, the tour of the disused parts of Charing Cross Underground station has been renamed “Charing Cross: Behind the Silver Screen”. Guests will have more time to soak in the ‘hot-set’ atmosphere of the station’s Jubilee line and concourses, which despite having closed to the public in 1999 have featured in popular Film and TV productions including Skyfall (2012), The Good Liar (2019), One Love (2024), Sherlock (2010), and Gangs of London (2020). 

Tours for Charing Cross: Behind the Silver Screen will start on 18 April 2025, with prices starting from £42.

Other Tours Running in April to September

Also running this Spring and Summer will be the recently revamped tour of Clapham South: Subterranean Shelter, which takes visitors into the Second World War deep-level shelter that is hidden underneath Clapham South station. Now featuring historically accurate reconstructions of key areas including a canteen, it is led by a guide portraying a 1940s warden that takes visitors on the footsteps of a wartime family spending their first night at the shelter.

A popular choice for families, this tour will be offered on additional dates around half terms, summer and bank holidays, as well as on the 80^th Anniversary of VE DAY.

Other tours include Moorgate: Metropolitan Maze, which now takes visitors into the “Catacombs” section of the station to walk alongside the tracks of the former City Widened Lines underneath The Barbican Estate, as well as Baker Street: The World’s First Underground, new tour Dover Street: Alight Here for Green Park, Euston: the Lost Tunnels, Holborn: The Secret Platforms, and Hidden London’s above ground walking tour, Secrets of Central London.

Station tours will run from Wednesday - Sunday, with two to three locations running any given week. Secrets of Central London will be running every other Friday and Saturday.

Tickets are now available to book here: ltmuseum.co.uk/hidden-london. They include half price one-day entry to London Transport Museum (within a month of the tour date) and 10% discount on all full-priced products at the museum shop.