History
Angel station was originally built by the City & South London Railway, and opened in 1901 as the northern terminus of a new extension from Moorgate. It is one of five stations on the London Underground named after a public house - in this case the once-famous Angel inn, which dates back to at least 1638. (The other stations are Elephant & Castle, Manor House, Royal Oak and Swiss Cottage.) As with many other stations on the line, it was originally built with a single central island platform serving two tracks – an arrangement still seen at Clapham North and Clapham Common – and access from street level was via lifts. The most recent lifts were of the Otis "drum hoist" design used throughout the rest of the tube system, but were of about half the size. For years, the station regularly suffered from congestion,overcrowding and genuine fear in passengers due to the incredibly narrow island platform (barely 12 feet (3.7 m) in width), which therefore constituted a major safety issue (this was documented in Molly Dineen's The Heart of the Angel). Consequently, the station was comprehensively rebuilt, re-opening in 1992.
A new section of tunnel was excavated for a new northbound platform and the southbound platform was rebuilt to completely occupy the original 30-foot tunnel, explaining why it is larger than most deep-level platforms. The lifts and the ground level building originally on the corner of Torrens Street and City Road were closed and a new station entrance was opened around the corner in Islington High Street. Because of the distance of the new entrance from the platforms, and their depth, two flights of escalators were required aligned approximately at a right-angle.
Read more about this topic: Angel Tube Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)