Jubilee Line |
| Hob Uid: 1309011 | |
Location :
Greater London Authority
Tower Hamlets, City of Westminster, Camden, Greenwich, Newham, Harrow, Southwark, Lambeth, Brent
Non Civil Parish
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| Grid Ref : TQ1757092540 |
| Summary : The Jubilee Line is the Underground's newest line, but serves stations, which originally opened over 100 years ago. Inaugurated on 1st May 1979, the Jubilee Line, so named by the Greater London Council in 1977, had its origin as the Fleet Line, authorised in 1969 to run from Charing Cross to Baker Street. Its construction was proposed for two main reasons: first, to relieve the heavily congested central section of the Bakerloo line, and second, to provide a Tube link with the Docklands. Furthermore, the Bakerloo's Stanmore branch would be transferred to the new line, which would then run south in new tunnels from Baker Street via Bond Street and Green Park to a new Trafalgar Square station (now Charing Cross), then to turn eastward along the line of the Strand as far as the City and thence across the river to New Cross or Lewisham. The first stage, to Charing Cross, was opened in 1979. The route to south-east London was authorised in 1971-2; but instead a route south of the Thames via Waterloo, continuing east to Docklands and the Greenwich penninsula and then north to Stratford, was preferred. Construction work began in 1993 and the Jubilee extension opened in three stages during 1999: Stratford to North Greenwich in late Spring; North Greenwich to Waterloo, late Summer; and Waterloo to Green Park, which allowed through services to run from Stratford to Stanmore, opened on Saturday 20 November 1999. The new section is 16km (10 miles) long, making the extended Jubilee Line from Stanmore to Stratford 36km (22.5 miles long). |
More information : The Jubilee Line, inaugurated on 1st May 1979, is London's newest Underground line. It is composed of four sections, some with a history stretching back over 100 years.
The section from Finchley Road to Stanmore was originally part of the Metropolitan Railway. The Metropolitan's main line from Baker Street to the north ran between Finchley Road and Wembley Park, where the branch to Stanmore curved off. By the late 1920s the Metropolitan was suffering from congestion due to several branches feeding into a single pair of tracks south of Finchley Road and the three stations before Baker Street ensured that express trains could not get a clear run.
To relieve the worst section new tubes were built from the Bakerloo Line station at Baker Street and surfacing at Finchley Road, while two of the Metropolitan tracks from there to Wembley Park, plus the Stanmore branch, were transferred to the Bakerloo. The three Metropolitan subsurface stations between Baker Street and Finchley Road were closed, replaced by two new tube stations. From Finchley Road to Wembley Park the fast and slow pairs were re-arranged, with the Bakerloo tracks between the Metropolitan ones - only Bakerloo trains stopped at the five intermediate stations - and a dive-under was constructed to take the Bakerloo tracks to the branch under the southbound Metropolitan tracks. The Bakerloo then operated two branches, one to Stanmore and one to Watford.
By the 1970s the southern end of the Bakerloo was overcrowded for the same reason that the Metropolitan had been - two busy suburban branches were feeding a single route in the central London area - and it was decided to build a new line to relieve it. Phase 1 of this line - initially named the Fleet Line - would take over the Stanmore branch and extend it via Bond Street and Green Park to Charing Cross (where the station incorporated the existing but separate Trafalgar Square station on the Bakerloo Line and Strand station on the Northern Line). From there, it would extend along Fleet Street to the Docklands, and eventually to Lewisham (later other routes would be proposed). During the Queen's Silver Jubilee year of 1977 the name was changed from "Fleet" to "Jubilee". In the end, only phase 1 of this original plan was completed, though the tunnels reach nearly to Aldwych, which would have been the next station. A short section of tunnel was also built just north of New Cross as an experiment in tunnelling techniques (the tunnel ran under a disused link from the west side of the station to the East London Line and would have formed part of the northbound line from Lewisham).
Further extension to the Jubilee Line was recommended in the East London Rail Study in 1989 with Royal Assent to the Bill obtained in March 1992.
Work started on the £3.5 billion project extended Jubilee Line in December 1993. The extension runs from Green Park to Stratford and opened in three phases during 1999.
The extended Jubilee Line was finally joined to the existing line on 20 November 1999 coinciding with the opening of Southwark station with Westminster station the last to be opened on 22 December 1999.
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