The unfinished Northern line

Edgware in north west London used to look like that.

But thanks to these, it now looks like this. And a few miles away,

Bushey Heath was supposed to look like that.

But because of him, it looks like this.

That-these-this-this-that-him-what?-this... is the story of a town planning cock up that happened fifty years ago.

One of many examples of Unfinished London.

(♫♫♫)

I'm standing at the rather pointless Mill Hill East tube station.

It sits on its own at the end of a branch poking awkwardly out of the Northern line

and it's only wide enough for one train at a time, making the Tube more complicated for everybody.

You might wonder why would they put a station in such an awkward and confusing place?

The answer is they didn't do it on purpose

and the clues as to why it's ended up like it has can be seen from up there.

If you look on Google Earth, you can see the Northern line snaking through London between the houses

up here to Mill Hill East. But if you look carefully, you can see that the thin snaking line doesn't stop there.

It keeps going through this row of trees, under the M1

and between these houses in a dead straight line.

Just from looking you can tell that there used to be a train line here.

So what was this train line, and why isn't it a train line anymore?

It was a branch of the Great Northern Railway built in 1867 that went from Kings Cross to Edgware.

As in, the original Edgware station which has since been demolished

and turned into the Broadwalk shopping centre.

Some of this old-fashioned steam line became today's Northern line.

But the bit between Edgware and Mill Hill closed in 1964 under the orders of the infamous Doctor Beeching

Chairman of British Rail with an incurable phobia of trains.

*nrghh-grrrh-grrrh*

This station survived the axe because the line was electrified as far as here in 1939.

And today this tiny branch to Mill Hill East is all that's left. The rest of the line is now...

a bridge over nothing...

this footpath no one ever uses...

another bridge over nothing...

And this nature reserve I'm currently trespassing on.

But the interesting thing about this line is there would most probably still be trains on it right now

if it weren't for a big screw-up that happened 20 years before the line closed.

In the 30s there were plans to extend the Northern line from Mill Hill East over the old steam railway to Edgware

where it would have met the other end of the Northern Line. Then after that they were going to build

three new stations called Brockley Hill, Elstree South and Bushey Heath.

This project was called the Northern Heights Plan and on the Tube map it would have looked like this.

The architects from back then have left clues all over the place that they were really serious about building this extension.