Finchley Road tube station

Finchley Road
Finchley Road Location of Finchley Road in Greater London
Location	Finchley Road
Local authority	London Borough of Camden
Managed by	London Underground
Number of platforms	4
Fare zone	2
OSI	Finchley Road & Frognal [1]
London Underground annual entry and exit
2012	9.37 million[2]
2013	9.90 million[2]
2014	10.06 million[2]
2015	9.95 million[2]
Key dates
1879	Opened (MR)
1939	Start (Bakerloo line)
1 August 1941	Goods yard closed[3]
1979	End (Bakerloo line)
1979	Start (Jubilee line)
Other information
Lists of stations	DLR Underground National Rail Tramlink
London Transport portalCoordinates: 51°32′50″N 0°10′49″W / 51.5472°N 0.18027°W

Finchley Road is a London Underground station at the corner of Finchley Road and Canfield Gardens in the London Borough of Camden, north London. It is on the Jubilee line, between West Hampstead and Swiss Cottage and on the Metropolitan line between Baker Street and Wembley Park. It is in Travelcard Zone 2.

The station is 100 yards south of the O₂ Shopping Centre. It serves the Frognal and South Hampstead areas. It is also a five-minute walk from the Finchley Road & Frognal station on the London Overground's North London Line, and this is marked as an official out-of-system interchange.

History

The station entrance.

The station was opened on 30 June 1879 by the Metropolitan Railway (MR, now the Metropolitan line) on its extension from its now closed station at St. John's Wood (a different station from the current St. John's Wood Jubilee line station). The station was rebuilt in 1914 with entrances incorporated into a new parade of shops.

By the mid-1930s the Metropolitan line was suffering from congestion on its main routes from north west London, caused by the limited capacity of its tracks between Finchley Road and Baker Street stations. To alleviate this congestion new sections of deep tube tunnels were bored between Finchley Road and Baker Street to carry some of the traffic from the Stanmore branch and stations south of Wembley Park. These new tunnels opened on 20 November 1939 and from that date Finchley Road station was also served by Bakerloo line trains running from Baker Street using the new tunnels. The Bakerloo line services were subsequently transferred to the Jubilee line when that line commenced operation on 1 May 1979.

Finchley Road was also the name of a nearby Midland Railway station which closed in 1927. The remains of these platforms are visible from Thameslink trains running on the Midland Main Line.

Analysis of earth removed when tunnelling towards the station revealed that its site was the southern limit of a glacier which covered Britain in one of the Ice Ages, as illustrated in episode 3 (Ice Age) of the BBC series British Isles: A Natural History^[4]

Services

Looking north along the Jubilee line platforms.

Finchley Road entrance in 1978

Finchley Road is served by London Underground Jubilee and Metropolitan line services. The Jubilee line, which is a stopping (or local) service, operates a service frequency of 16 tph (trains per hour) between Stanmore and Stratford Regional. The Metropolitan line offers "stopping services" (with some peak hour "fast" and "semi-fast" services) (no Metropolitan line services stop at stations between Finchley Road and Wembley Park) from Aldgate and Baker Street to the north-west of London and certain stations in the "home counties".

Connections

London Buses routes 13, 82, 113, 187, 268 and C11 and night routes N13 and N113 serve the station.

References

1. "Out of Station Interchanges" (Microsoft Excel). Transport for London. May 2010. Archived from the original on 2012-03-12.
2. "Multi-year station entry-and-exit figures" (XLS). London Underground station passenger usage data. Transport for London. April 2016. Retrieved 3 May 2016.
3. Hardy, Brian, ed. (March 2011). "How it used to be - freight on The Underground 50 years ago". Underground News (London Underground Railway Society) (591): 175–183. ISSN 0306-8617.
4. "British Isles: A Natural History". BBC. Archived from the original on 2004-09-15.

External links

• London Transport Museum Photographic Archive
  • Finchley Road station, 1910
  • Finchley Road station, Finchley Road entrance, 1933
  • Ticket hall, 1934
  • View of platforms, 1964
  • Finchley Road station, 2001
• "Finchley Road station, Canfield Gardens entrance, 1933". railwayarchive.org.uk.