PLATFORM 9¾: ARE THERE REAL HIDDEN RAILWAY STATIONS IN LONDON?

The mighty scarlet engine awaits, as white clouds of steam billow from the chimney—a stepping-stone to a magical far-off destination. All windows down, all pistons poised, all sense of being in a hurry gone, the Hogwarts Express will soon pull out. A fleeting presence in a momentary neighborhood, and soon the Express will run where the lake’s level breadth begins, where sky and water meet. Soon.

For now, though, the scarlet engine sits on a platform that denies its own existence: Platform 9¾, King’s Cross Station, London, England. Magically hidden behind the barrier between muggle platforms 9 and 10, platform 9¾ is where students board the train for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. An inquisitive young wizard might wonder what other fractional platforms lay between their whole-numbered counterparts. Why stop at 9¾? Perhaps there’s a platform where a magical version of the Orient Express waits to whisk passengers off to wizard-only villages in continental Europe. Or maybe on another there’s a quadrennial special to the Quidditch World Cup.

Platform 9¾ was the brainchild of then Minister for Magic, Evangeline Orpington, in the 1850s. The Ministry of Magic had long pondered the age-old problem of how to convey hundreds of students to and from Hogwarts every year, without attracting attention. They had procured the Hogwarts Express in the mid-1800s, surely a magnificent engine for its time. And a railway station had been built at Hogsmeade, in excited expectation of the engine’s imminent arrival.

But there remained the challenge of building a railway station in the middle of London. Surely that would strain even the muggles’ infamous resolve to miss the magic, which was exploding right in front of their very faces. So, a solution was struck: a hidden magical platform would be concealed within the brand new, muggle-built King’s Cross Station, reachable by witches and wizards only.

This cunning conceit, to secret a railway station in plain sight of a busy metropolis, makes one wonder what other stations might be concealed in the labyrinth that is old London town.

Railway Revolution

In a curious kind of magical way, it was photosynthesis that had led to Britain’s steam-powered Industrial Revolution. Millions of years before, during the clammy Carboniferous, plants on Earth had absorbed the sun’s energy, taking carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air, and using it to create living tissue. When the great plants of the Carboniferous died down into the Earth, their energy became frozen in time. Coal preserved sunlight, and when the British began to burn coal, its fire was the many years of sun-fire now set free from the tree. Coal was, and remains, the frozen sunshine of buried forests.

It was the thirst for fire-power that had led to the steam engine. The engines were first designed to pump water out of mines, to get at the fiery coal. Steam engines quickly became the first kind of engine to be widely used, and the spirit of their modern day. It powered all early locomotive trains, steamships, and factories. And over the next two centuries, steam power would forever change the world.

Those who built the trains and railroads were the shock troops of industrialization. Railways opened up countries and continents to capital. The rapidly expanding rail-lines spread from Britain like the giant web of a mechanized beast. And, at the very center of this huge machine, the heart of the circulating veins and capillaries of commerce, sat Victorian London. During the 19th century, London grew greatly. But the burgeoning development of a commuting population led to traffic congestion problems. Horse manure became a major concern.

Victorian London typically had 11,000 cabs and several thousand omnibuses. Each mode of transport used several horses, so the city had more than 50,000 horses in public transport alone, with each animal producing 15–35 pounds of manure a day. One commentator remarked, “How much pleasanter the streets of a great city would be if the horse was an extinct animal,”.

Sweepers were used to clear paths through the dung, which was usually sludge in the wet weather of London, or a fine blown powder on the odd dry day. But the piles of manure attracted huge numbers of flies. One estimate suggests that three billion flies hatched in horse manure per day in such cities, with tens of thousands of deaths each year blamed on the manure.

It gets worse.

The horses produced tens of thousands of gallons of urine daily, were amazingly noisy (their iron shoes on cobbles made conversation intolerable on the bustling streets), and were far more dangerous than modern motorized traffic, with a fatality rate 75 percent higher per capita than today.

The problems didn’t disappear when the horses died. The average working horse had a life expectancy of only three years. Scores died each day and, as dead horses were hard to shift, street cleaners would wait days for the corpses to rot, so they easily be sawed into chunks.

Going Underground

In short, London was a city desperately looking for a traffic solution! The train was hailed as an environmental savior. By the middle of the century, there were seven railway termini located around the urban center of the metropolis. And soon the idea arose of an underground railway, linking the City of London with these satellite stations.

Visitors to London will be familiar with its now long-established Underground. The tube was the world’s first subterranean railway. Today, over one hundred miles of underground, networked track serve around four million passengers a day, one of the largest on the planet. But, once in a while, ‘ghost’ stations are unearthed.

Engineers recently uncovered the remains of a lost station that shut a century ago in south London. Long-forgotten Southwark Park station was open for a little over a dozen years, from 1902 until its catacombs were closed for good in March 1915. Southwark Park was one of several stations in the metropolis that closed down due to the growing popularity of trams and buses, and the outbreak of World War I. It ferried commuters between the London Bridge and Greenwich.

With dystopian shades of the lugubrious steam-punk city that sits above, and a heavily tiled original ticket hall, which sits in the arches of a viaduct, Southwark Park’s creepy corridors and eerie atmosphere are reminiscent of the BioShock video game series. Urban explorers have snapped haunting photographs of other abandoned and long-forgotten London Underground stations. Lying deep below the city are disused platforms and derelict stations, which snake for miles underground.

Among them is the dusty Aldwych Underground station, it was closed in 1994 but has since been used as a set for several high-end movie and television productions, including Sherlock, Mr. Selfridge, and V for Vendetta. But perhaps the most enduring London Underground legend is the story of secret government tunnels, used during World War II.

During the war, the number of operable telecoms exchanges in London was very limited. One of the main exchanges was located in the City of London, a fair distance from Whitehall, which housed the War Office, the department of British Government that ran the British Army between the 17th century and 1964, when its duties were handed over to the Ministry of Defence.

As phone lines above ground proved impractical, a hybrid network of tunnels was created under Whitehall, using tube-tunneling techniques. Although this secret government tunnel was actually just a service tunnel, it also served as an ‘escape tunnel’, a potential route between Whitehall buildings in emergencies, such as gas attacks. Much of the detail of this secret tunnel network under Whitehall is locked away in the National Archives awaiting declassification.

So, put a note in your diaries for 2026. That’s when the fact behind further rumors will be released, as the Whitehall tunnels were reportedly also linked to the deep level telecoms tunnels constructed during the Cold War in case of imminent attack.