Lord's is a disused London Underground station. It was opened in 1868 as St. John's Wood Road on the Metropolitan & St. John's Wood Railway, the first northward branch extension from Baker Street of the Metropolitan Railway (now the Metropolitan Line).
The station was renamed St Johns Wood on 1 April 1925 and Lords on 11 June 1939. The name of the station refers to the nearby Lord's Cricket Ground.
In the mid 1930s the Metropolitan Line was suffering congestion at the south end of its main route where trains from its many branches were struggling to share the limited capacity of its tracks between Finchley Road and Baker Street stations. To ease this congestion a new section of deep-level tunnel was constructed between Finchley Road and the Bakerloo Line tunnels at Baker Street station. The Metropolitan line's Stanmore branch services were then transferred to the Bakerloo Line on 20 November 1939 and diverted to run into Baker Street in the new tunnels, thus reducing the number of trains using the Metropolitan Line's tracks.
Metropolitan Line stations between Finchley Road and Baker Street were closed and a new St. John's Wood station was opened nearby on what was then the Stanmore branch of the Bakerloo Line, now the Jubilee line.
The surface building survived into the late 1960s before it was demolished.
Its close proximity to the main line out of Marylebone railway station has led to proposals to open a new interchange close to the vicinity of the former Lord's Station. This is not a high priority project, but tied into a longer-term strategy to consider re-opening former inner-city stations on Main Lines. Recent reports from Transport for London suggest this is not likely to happen in the next 30 years.
Famous quotes containing the words lord, tube and/or station:
“I’ve never laid a cane on the back of a lord before, but if you force me to I shall speedily become used to the practice.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie “answers” questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)