Wood Lane tube station

History

The Hammersmith and City line was opened on 13 June 1864 by the Metropolitan Railway (MR) as the Hammersmith branch line. The railway became part of London Underground in 1933 and the took on a separate identity as the Hammersmith and City line in 1988.

In 1908 the Franco-British Exhibition and the 1908 Summer Olympics came to London, the first of a number of major events in White City that attracted infrastructural investment by railway companies. Among others, the MR opened its Wood Lane station on the Hammersmith branch to serve the event. From 1927 it was used to transport the public to and from the greyhound racing at White City Stadium. The station opened and closed intermittently, and was renamed twice, to Wood Lane (White City) in 1920 and White City in 1947, before it closed in 1959 following fire damage. For the next 49 years, the Wood Lane area was served only by White City tube station on the Central line; Hammersmith line trains passed over the lane without stopping, the nearest station on that line approximately 1 km (0.62 mi) away at Shepherd's Bush.

In 2005 work commenced on the large-scale Westfield Shopping Centre. As part of the work, improvements were made to public transport including rebuilding Shepherd's Bush Central line station, a new Shepherd's Bush railway station and two bus interchanges. It was decided to build a new station on the Hammersmith & City line, just south-west of the old Metropolitan station on Wood Lane. In 2006 Transport for London decided on the name Wood Lane, reviving a historical name. This was the first time that a new station on the Tube had been given the name of a former station that had been closed for several years.

The station opened on 12 October 2008. In December 2009 Wood Lane was added to the Circle line when the line was extended to Hammersmith.

Design and construction

Wood Lane Underground Station was designed by Ian Ritchie Architects and it is clad in shot-peened stainless steel, gold anodised aluminium and granite with a 25-metre-high glass screen façade.

Construction was carried out by Costain. The station building occupies an irregularly-shaped site between Wood Lane and the railway viaduct, and presented particular challenges as it lies across the Central line. The lines remained operational during construction, which mostly took place at night.

The structure encases the railway viaduct and platforms are accessed via stairs and lifts either side of the brick arches. During construction the bridge of the Hammersmith & City line over Wood Lane had to be widened to accommodate a new track on the Central line, providing access to the new depot below the Westfield site. A bridge pier was removed and a new steel bridge structure slid into place over a new pier.

Location

The station is on Wood Lane, which runs north from Shepherd's Bush in the White City area. It serves the Westfield shopping centre and BBC Television Centre and Loftus Road stadium, the home of Queen's Park Rangers FC, is a short distance away.

Due to the heavy use of Oyster cards across the Underground network and the proximity of the ticket office at White City, there is no ticket office, although there are ticket machines.