Not so simple: Finsbury Park (Part I)

Manor House to Highbury & Islington - take the Piccadilly line for one stop, use the cross-platform interchange, and take the Victoria line for one stop? Yes... but it used to be rather different. I'll explain in a series of posts, this first dealing with the early history of the line from Finsbury Park to Moorgate.

Think about Finsbury Park station to start with. Underground there are four platforms - two for the Piccadilly line and two for the Victoria line - but they were all built in the early 1900's. Naturally this causes the first stirrings of curiosity: why were the Victoria line platforms built sixty-odd years before the line opened?

The reason is not advance planning - that's never been a strong point of London's transport system. When the underground station was built two platforms (those to the west side of the station, today's southbound platforms) were for the Piccadilly line, and two platforms (those to the east, today's northbound platforms) were for the Great Northern & City Railway.

The GNCR was associated with the Great Northern Railway (the company running services through the mainline station above) and the intention was for some of the GNR's steam hauled suburban services to be routed through the new GNCR tunnels to deep-level tubes at Moorgate station - very handy for the City of London. At Finsbury Park the GNR engine would have been removed and replaced with an electric loco for the tunnel passage.

Before the line was complete however the two companies fell out. The connections from the surface station at Finsbury Park to the GNCR at Drayton Park were never finished. Holed up in underground platforms the GNCR was left to run a pretty useless little stub of a line (with heavy bus and tramcar competition) running from an inner suburban station to a terminal which was really only of any great interest to city workers at the start and end of their working day.

Rather than using their planned direct route, GNR trains to the City reached it by two other routes: via Canonbury to the North London Railway's Broad Street station and via the connections at King's Cross to the Metropolitan Railway's 'Widened Lines', running alongside the Met and Circle line between King's Cross and sub-surface terminal platforms at Moorgate.

Nothing further came of the original plans for running through suburban trains from the GNR. Never an attractive proposition in isolation, the GNCR company was fairly soon taken over by the Metropolitan Railway - still an independent pseudo-mainline railway with country branches. The Met didn't implement any grand designs on the GNCR, and the line entered (along with the rest of the Met) London Transport ownership in 1933 fundamentally similar in structures, services and passengers to when it was built. Expansionist LT soon formulated ambitious plans for it however.

To be continued...