London Underground

The London Underground — also known as the Tube or simply the Underground — is a public metro system serving a large part of Greater London and parts of the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex.

The system serves 270 stations and has 250 miles of track. The network incorporates the world's first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway, which opened in 1863.

Alfred Hitchcock

Underground sign in "Sabotage"

• Hitchcock's short story "Fedora", published in the March 1921 edition of The Henley Telegraph, mentions Bank station.
• Islington Studios, where Hitchcock began his film career, was a converted former power station originally built to supply electricity to Finsbury Park and Moorgate Underground stations
• According to Michael Powell, the Hitchcocks' house at 153 Cromwell Road, Kensington, was near enough to the Underground that "the thunder of the passing trains was distant like the waves on the pebbles of Sandgate beach"
• Downhill (1927) contained a scene filmed at Maida Vale Tube Station showing Ivor Novello descending down the station's escalator.
• Hitchcock made his cameo in Blackmail (1929) as a Underground commuter being bothered by a young boy.
• Rich and Strange (1931) contained a scene filmed at the tube station situated under Waterloo Station.
• Karl Verloc's attempt to plant a bomb at the tube station at Piccadilly Circus in Sabotage (1936) fails when the bomb explodes before it can be delivered. At the start of the film, an unnamed tube station is shown plunged into darkness after an act of sabotage at Battersea Power Station.
• Leytonstone Tube Station contains 16 Hitchcock mosaics commissioned in 2000 to celebrate the centenary of the director's birth in district.

Links

• Wikipedia: London Underground