Baker Street is a London Underground station, located at the junction of Baker Street and Marylebone Road in the City of Westminster. It is one of the original stations of the Metropolitan Railway (MR), the world's first underground railway, opened on 10 January 1863.
The station is in London fare zone 1 and is served by five lines. On the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines the station is between Edgware Road and Great Portland Street stations, and on the Metropolitan line it is between Finchley Road and Great Portland Street stations. On the Bakerloo line the station is between Marylebone and Regent's Park stations, and on the Jubilee line it is between St John's Wood and Bond Street stations.
Entrances to the station are in Chiltern Court, designed by Metropolitan Railway architect Charles Walter Clark.
Location
The station has entrances on Baker Street, Chiltern Street (ticket holders only) and Marylebone Road.
A statue of Sherlock Holmes is outside the Marylebone Road entrance. Nearby attractions include Regent's Park, Lord's Cricket Ground, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, and Madame Tussauds.
History Metropolitan Railway – the world's first underground railway In the first half of the 19th century, the population and physical extent of London grew greatly. The congested streets and the distance to the city from the stations to the north and west prompted many attempts to get parliamentary approval to build new railway lines into the city. In 1852, Charles Pearson planned a railway from Farringdon to King's Cross. Although the plan was supported by the city, the railway companies were not interested and the company struggled to proceed. The Bayswater, Paddington, and Holborn Bridge Railway Company was established to connect the Great Western Railway's (GWR) Paddington station to Pearson's route at King's Cross. A bill was published in November 1852 and in January 1853 the directors held their first meeting and appointed John Fowler as its engineer. Several bills were submitted for a route between Paddington and Farringdon. The company's name was also to be changed again, to Metropolitan Railway and the route was approved on 7 August 1854.
Construction began in March 1860; using the "cut-and-cover" method to dig the tunnel. Despite several accidents during construction, work was complete by the end of 1862 at a cost of £1.3 million. Rail services through the station opened to the public on Saturday, 10 January 1863.
In the next few years, extensions of the line were made at both ends with connections from Paddington to the GWR's Hammersmith and City Railway (H&CR) and at Gloucester Road to the District Railway (DR). From 1871, the MR and the DR operated a joint Inner Circle service between Mansion House and Moorgate Street.
North-western "branch" In April 1868, the Metropolitan & St John's Wood Railway (M&SJWR) opened a single-track railway in tunnel to Swiss Cottage from new platforms at Baker Street East (which eventually become the present Metropolitan line platforms). The line was worked by the MR with a train every 20 minutes. A junction was built with the original route at Baker Street, but there were no through trains after 1869.
The M&SJWR branch was extended in 1879 to Willesden Green and, in 1880, to Neasden and Harrow-on-the-Hill. Two years later, the single-track tunnel between Baker Street and Swiss Cottage was duplicated and the M&SJWR was absorbed by the MR.
Bakerloo and Jubilee lines
In November 1891, a private bill was presented to Parliament for the construction of the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (BS&WR). The railway was planned to run entirely underground from Marylebone to Elephant & Castle via Baker Street and Waterloo and was approved in 1900. Construction commenced in August 1898 under the direction of Sir Benjamin Baker, W. R. Galbraith and R. F. Church with building work by Perry & Company of Tredegar Works, Bow. Test trains began running in 1905. The official opening of the BS&WR by Sir Edwin Cornwall took place on 10 March 1906. The first section of the BS&WR was between Baker Street and Lambeth North. Baker Street was the temporary northern terminus of the line until it was extended to Marylebone on 27 March 1907, a year after the rest of the line. The BS&WR's station building designed by Leslie Green stood on Baker Street and served the tube platforms with lifts, but these were supplemented with escalators in 1914, linking the Metropolitan line and the Bakerloo line platforms by a new concourse excavated under the Metropolitan line. An elaborately decorated restaurant and tea-room was added above Green's terminal building, the Chiltern Court Restaurant, which was opened in 1913.
On 1 July 1933, the MR and BS&WR amalgamated with other Underground railways, tramway companies and bus operators to form the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB), and the MR became the Metropolitan line, while the BS&WR became the Bakerloo line of London Transport. However, there was a bottleneck on the Metropolitan line at Finchley Road where four tracks merge into two to Baker Street. LPTB decided to extend the Bakerloo line from Baker Street as a branch line, taking over the existing section between Finchley Road and Stanmore. Construction began in April 1936. On 20 November 1939, following the construction of an additional southbound platform and connecting tube tunnels between Baker Street and Finchley Road stations, the Bakerloo line took over the Metropolitan line's stopping services between Finchley Road and Wembley Park and its Stanmore branch. The current Bakerloo ticket hall and escalators to the lower concourse were provided in conjunction with the new service.
After the Victoria line had been completed in the 1960s, the new Jubilee line was proposed which would take a route via Baker Street, Bond Street, Trafalgar Square, Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Circus and Cannon Street, then proceeding into southeast London. This new line was to have been called the Fleet line. The Jubilee line added an extra northbound platform and took over the Bakerloo line service between Stanmore and Baker Street, opening on 1 May 1979.
Circle and Hammersmith & City lines The initial route on the Hammersmith & City line was formed by the H&CR, running between Hammersmith and Moorgate. Services were eventually extended to Barking via the DR and shared with the existing MR tracks between Baker Street and Liverpool Street. The route between Hammersmith and Barking was shown on the tube map as part of the Metropolitan line, but since 1990 has been shown separately, the Metropolitan line becoming the route from Aldgate to Baker Street and northwards through "Metro-Land" to Uxbridge, Watford and Amersham.
The circle line was initially formed by the combination of the MR and DR routes, which were between Edgware Road and South Kensington, Edgware Road and Aldgate via King's Cross St Pancras, South Kensington and Mansion House, and a joint railway between Mansion House and Aldgate. Since 1949, the Circle line is shown separately on the map.
Incidents On 18 June 1925, electric locomotive No.4 collided with a passenger train when a signal was changed from green to red just as the locomotive was passing it. Six people were injured.
On 23 August 1973, a bomb was found in a carrier bag in the ticket hall. The bomb was defused by the bomb squad. A week later, on 30 August, a member of staff found another bomb left on the overbridge. Again, it was defused without any injury.
The station today
Baker Street station is the combination of three separate stations, with several booking offices from different periods. There were major changes in 1891–1893 and 1910–1912. The earliest part are the two platforms now used by the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines which are situated on a roughly east-to-west alignment beneath Marylebone Road, spanning approximately the stretch between Upper Baker Street and Allsop Place. This was part of the original Metropolitan Railway from Bishop's Road (now Paddington (Circle and Hammersmith & City lines) station to Farringdon Street (now Farringdon) which opened on 10 January 1863.
The platforms serving the main branch of the Metropolitan line towards Harrow and beyond are located within the triangle formed by Marylebone Road, Upper Baker Street and Allsop Place, following the alignment of Allsop Place. This station was the second section which was opened on 13 April 1868 by the Metropolitan & St. John's Wood Railway. This was later absorbed by the Metropolitan Railway and is usually known by the Metropolitan as Baker Street East station.
The third and final section is the deep-level tube station of the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway (now part of the Bakerloo line), situated at a lower level beneath the site of Baker Street East, opened on 10 March 1906. This part of the station now contains four platforms, two each for the Bakerloo and Jubilee lines.
This station is a terminus for some Metropolitan line trains, but there is also a connecting curve that joins to the Circle line just beyond the platforms, allowing Metropolitan line through services to run to Aldgate. The deep-level Bakerloo and Jubilee lines platforms are arranged in a cross-platform interchange layout and there are track connections between the two lines just to the north of the station. Access to the Bakerloo and Jubilee lines is only via escalators.
With ten platforms overall, Baker Street has the greatest number of London Underground platforms of any station on the network. Since Swiss Cottage and St John's Wood have replaced the former three stations between Finchley Road and Baker Street on the Metropolitan line, it takes an average of five and a half minutes to travel between them. Essentially, the Metropolitan Line operates as a fast service while the Jubilee Line offers local service between the two stations.
As part of the Transported by Design programme of activities, on 15 October 2015, after two months of public voting, Baker Street underground station's platforms were elected by Londoners as one of the 10 favourite transport design icons.
The former Chiltern Court Restaurant above the station is still in use today as the Metropolitan Bar, part of the Wetherspoons pub chain. The rest of the block, known as Chiltern Court and completed by the Metropolitan Railway's in-house architect, Charles Walter Clark in 1929, houses residential apartments.
Sub-surface platforms
One of the MR's original stations, now the Circle and Hammersmith & City line platforms 5 and 6 are the best preserved dating from the station's opening in 1863. Plaques of the Metropolitan Railway's coat of arms along the platform and old plans and photographs depict the station which has changed remarkably little in over a hundred and fifty years. Restoration work in the 1980s on the oldest portions of Baker Street station brought it back to something similar to its 1863 appearance.