Aldgate tube station

Aldgate tube station is a London Underground station located at Aldgate in the City of London.

The station is on the Circle Line between Tower Hill and Liverpool Street. It is also the eastern terminus of the Metropolitan Line. It is in Travelcard Zone 1, and its ticket office is part-time only.

Platforms 1 and 4 at Aldgate are two of the only three platforms on the network to be served exclusively by the Circle Line (the other being Platform 2 at Gloucester Road). All other Circle Line platforms are shared by the District, Metropolitan and/or Hammersmith & City Lines.

History

The station was opened on November 18 1876 with the southbound extension to Tower Hill opening on September 25 1882, completing the Circle. Services from Aldgate originally ran far further west than they do now, reaching as far as Richmond, and trains also used to run from Aldgate to Hammersmith (the Hammersmith & City Line now bypasses the station). It only became the terminus of the Metropolitan line in 1941. Prior to that, Metropolitan trains had continued on to the southern termini of the East London Line. The station was badly damaged by German bombing during World War II.

In 2005, one of the four bombs in the 7 July 2005 London bombings was detonated by Shehzad Tanweer on a Circle Line train that had left Liverpool Street and was close to Aldgate. Of the tube stations affected by the bombings, Aldgate was the first to be reopened, once police had handed back control of the site to London Underground following the extensive search for evidence. Once the damaged tunnel was repaired by Metronet engineers, the line was reopened, also allowing the Metropolitan Line to be fully restored, since the closure had meant all trains had terminated two stations early at Moorgate.

In literature

Aldgate tube station plays an important role in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" (published in the anthology "His Last Bow").

In the story, the body of a junior clerk named Cadogan West is found on the tracks outside Aldgate station, with a number of stolen plans for the Bruce-Partington submarine in his pocket. It seems clear enough that "the man, dead or alive, either fell or was precipitated from a train." But why, wonders Holmes, did the dead man not have a ticket?

It turns out that the body was placed on top of a train carriage "before" it reached Aldgate, via a window in a house on a cutting overlooking the Metropolitan Line. Holmes realises that the body only fell off the carriage roof when the train was jolted by the dense concentration of points at Aldgate.

Gallery

ee also

*List of London Underground stations

References

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