Brompton Road 1934-2009

BROMPTON ROAD

info@bromptonroad.org.uk
P.O. Box 63718, London, SW3 9AT

by Adrian Davies

Passing Brompton Road...

Eighty years ago, on Sunday 29th July 1934, Brompton Road, perhaps the least remembered of the Piccadilly line’s “lost stations”, closed its doors to passengers.

Brompton Road station in 1906
(c) TfL London Transport Museum

Where was the station? Just off the busy Brompton Road in a little side street with the unfortunate name of Cottage Place, the passer by can see a curious sight, part of a building clad in red, “ox blood” faience tiles, claiming to be no. 206 Brompton Road. It looks nothing like the white fronted mock Georgian pastiche with which it shares a postal address, nor the other, older and quainter buildings in Cottage Place.

Brompton Oratory prewar
A pre-war view of the Oratory taken from Brompton Road.

Until its recent sale by the Ministry of Defence to an as yet unidentified purchaser, possibly an Ukrainian oligarch, though that sale might have fallen through, it served as the headquarters of the University of London Air Squadron. Formerly it had a very different use, as probably the least known of the Piccadilly line’s four “lost” stations, perhaps the most famous of which is Down Street (Mayfair), the most likely to re-open is York Road, and the most recently lost is Aldwych (formerly Strand), which only closed in 1994.