Станция метро Грин-Парк: История и расположение

London Underground station

Green Park is a London Underground station located on the edge of Green Park, with entrances on both sides of Piccadilly. The station is served by three lines: Jubilee, Piccadilly and Victoria. On the Jubilee line, it is between Bond Street and Westminster stations; on the Piccadilly line, it is between Hyde Park Corner and Piccadilly Circus stations and on the Victoria line, it is between Victoria and Oxford Circus stations. It is in fare zone 1. The station was opened in 1906 by the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (GNP&BR) and was originally named Dover Street due to its location in that street. It was modernised in the 1930s when lifts were replaced with escalators and extended in the 1960s and 1970s when the Victoria and Jubilee lines were constructed. The station is near The Ritz Hotel, the Royal Academy of Arts, St James's Palace, Berkeley Square, Bond Street, the Burlington Arcade and Fortnum & Mason, and is one of two serving Buckingham Palace (the other being St James's Park).

During the final years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century numerous competing schemes for underground railways through central London were proposed. A number of the schemes submitted to parliament for approval as private bills included proposals for lines running under Piccadilly with stations in the area of the current Green Park station. The first two proposals came before parliament in 1897. The Brompton and Piccadilly Circus Railway (B&PCR) proposed a line between South Kensington and Piccadilly Circus and the City and West End Railway (C&WER) proposed a line between Hammersmith and Cannon Street. The B&PCR proposed a station on the north side at Dover Street and the C&WER proposed a station on the south side at Arlington Street. Following review by parliament, the C&WER bill was rejected and the B&PCR bill was approved and received royal assent in August 1897. In 1902, the Charing Cross, Hammersmith and District Railway (CCH&DR) proposed a line between Charing Cross and Barnes with a parallel shuttle line running between Hyde Park Corner and Charing Cross. A station was planned at Walsingham House on the north east corner of Green Park. This scheme was rejected by parliament. The same year, the Central London Railway (CLR, now the central section of the Central line) submitted a bill that aimed to turn its line running between Shepherd's Bush and Bank into a loop by constructing a second roughly parallel line to the south. This would have run along Piccadilly with a station at St James's Street just to the east of Dover Street. Delayed while a royal commission considered general principles of underground railways in London, the scheme was never fully considered and although it was re presented in 1903, it was dropped two years later. A third scheme for 1902 was the Piccadilly, City and North East London Railway (PC&NELR) which proposed a route between Hammersmith and Southgate. It planned a station at Albemarle Street, just to the east of Dover Street. Although favoured in parliament and likely to be approved, this scheme failed due to a falling out between the backers and the sale of part of the proposals to a rival. In 1905, some of the promoters of the PC&NELR regrouped and submitted a proposal for the Hammersmith, City and North East London Railway. As the CLR had done previously, the company proposed a station at St James's Street. Owing to failures in the application process, this scheme was also rejected.

While the various rival schemes were unsuccessful in obtaining parliamentary approval, the B&PCR was unsuccessful in raising the funds needed to construct its line. It was not until after the B&PCR had been taken over by Charles Yerkes's Metropolitan District Electric Traction Company that the money became available. Tunnelling began in 1902 shortly before the B&PCR was merged with the Great Northern and Strand Railway to create the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (GNP&BR, the predecessor of the Piccadilly line). The GNP&BR opened the station on 15 December 1906 as Dover Street. As with most of the other GNP&BR stations, the station building, on the east side of Dover Street, was designed by Leslie Green. It featured the company's standard red glazed terracotta facade with wide semi circular arches at first floor level. Platform and passageway walls were decorated in glazed cream tiles in Green's standard arrangement with margins, patterning and station names in mid blue. When it opened, the station to the west was Down Street. The station was provided with four Otis electric lifts paired in two 23 feet (7 m) diameter shafts and a spiral stair in a smaller shaft. The platforms are below the level of Piccadilly.

The station was busy and unsuccessful attempts to control crowds with gates at platform level were made in 1918. In the 1930s, the station was included amongst those modernised in conjunction with the northern and western extensions of the Piccadilly line. A new sub surface ticket hall was opened on 18 September 1933 with a pair of Otis escalators provided to replace the lifts. The new ticket hall was accessed from subway entrances in Piccadilly. On the north side, an entrance was provided in Devonshire House on the corner with Stratton Street; on the south side an entrance was constructed on a piece of land taken from the park. The shelter for the southern entrance was designed by Charles Holden. The original station building, the lifts and the redundant below ground passages were closed and the station was renamed Green Park. Part of the ground floor was used as a tea shop until the 1960s. In 1955, a third escalator was added to help deal with increased passenger numbers.

Proposals for an underground line linking Victoria to Finsbury Park date from 1937 when planning by the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) for future services considered a variety of new routes and extensions to existing lines. Parliament approved the line in 1955, but a shortage of funds meant that work did not start until after government loans were approved in 1962. Construction works began in 1962. The 1930s ticket hall under the roadway of Piccadilly was enlarged to provide space for new Victoria line escalators and a long interchange passageway was provided between the Victoria line and Piccadilly line platforms. In 1965 a collapse of soft ground during the excavation of one of the tunnels near Green Park station meant that the ground had to be chemically stabilised before work could continue. The disused station building in Dover Street was demolished the following year in conjunction with the works for the new line. A vent shaft was constructed and an electrical sub station was built in the basement of the new building. efn|Planning permission was granted in 1965 for a new building and in 1968 for a ventilation shaft for the Victoria line and an electrical sub station. efn|The project was a TfL funded games enabling project in its investment programme, though not a project specifically funded as a result of the success of the London 2012 Games bid. It was included in the strategy on accessible transport published by the London 2012 Olympic Delivery Authority and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The other stations where games enabling step free access projects were carried out were Baker Street (sub surface lines) and Southfields. efn|With the two low level lifts installed when the new interchange passage was opened in 1999, interchange for wheelchair users between all platforms is possible. The Diana Fountain was relocated from its original site in the centre of the park to form the centrepiece of the new entrance. To help moderate temperatures in the station, a system using cool ground water extracted from boreholes sunk into the chalk aquifer below London was installed. The extracted water passes through a heat exchanger connected to the cast iron tunnel lining and the warmed water is returned to the aquifer through a second set of boreholes away.

In July 2005, a report, DLR Horizon 2020 Study, for the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) examined "pragmatic development schemes" to expand and improve the DLR network between 2012 and 2020. One of the proposals was an extension of the DLR from Bank to Charing Cross. Unused tunnels under Strand constructed as part of Stage 1 of the Fleet line would be enlarged to accommodate the larger DLR trains. In 2011, the DLR published a proposal to continue the extension to Victoria via Green Park. No further work has been done on these proposals.

At around 9:00 pm on 9 October 1975, members of the Provisional IRA's Balcombe Street Gang detonated a bomb at a bus stop outside Green Park station, killing 23 year old Graham Ronald Tuck and injuring 20 others. The attack was part of a bombing campaign carried out by the gang and in addition to the death and injuries caused damage to the Ritz Hotel and neighbouring buildings.

The station is in Travelcard Zone 1, between Bond Street and Westminster on the Jubilee line, Hyde Park Corner and Piccadilly Circus on the Piccadilly line and Victoria and Oxford Circus on the Victoria line. On weekdays Jubilee line trains typically run every 2–21/2 minutes between 05:38 and 00:34 northbound and 05:26 and 00:45 southbound; on the Piccadilly line trains typically run every 2½–3½ minutes between 05:48 and 00:34 westbound and 00:32 eastbound, and on the Victoria line trains typically run every 100–135 seconds between 05:36 and 00:39 northbound and 05:36 and 00:31 southbound. As of it is the station on the London Underground with million passengers using it per year.

The opening scene of the 1997 film version of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove was set on the eastbound platforms at both Dover Street and Knightsbridge stations, both represented by the same studio mock up, complete with a working recreation of a 1906 Stock train.