The Station in Popular Culture
- In the Neil Gaiman novel Neverwhere the main character, Richard Mayhew, a Londoner, protests that there is no British Museum Station - only to be proved wrong when the train he is on stops there.
- The station was mentioned in the 1972 horror film Death Line, but contrary to popular belief, it is not the station portrayed in the film as being the home of a community of cannibals descended from Victorian railway workers. The cannibals venture out at night to snatch travellers from the platforms of operating stations and take them back to their gruesome 'pantry' at an incomplete station. Donald Pleasence stars as the investigating police inspector, and when finally cornered, one of the cannibals screams a corrupted form of "Mind the doors!", obviously having picked it up parrot-fashion from the guards on the Underground trains. The station in question is named simply 'Museum' and is clearly stated as being 'between' Holborn and British Museum stations in a conversation between Pleasance's character and a colleague. It is supposedly part of a completely separate line that was not completed owing to the construction company going bankrupt. Signs in the abandoned station also only state 'Museum' as the name.
- The station did feature in the Bulldog Drummond spin-off film Bulldog Jack (not a Sherlock Holmes film, as some sources claim), as the location reached by a secret tunnel leading from the inside of a sarcophagus in the British Museum. The villain (Ralph Richardson) was finally cornered and forced into a sword duel on the disused platforms, which were a studio set. The station was renamed 'Bloomsbury' in the film.
- The station briefly featured in the computer game Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror, in which Nico Collard escapes from the British Museum and finds the station. She then manages to stop the passing trains. The station in the game, however, is depicted as having its exit actually inside the British Museum itself. A station named 'Museum' also features in the earlier game Beneath a Steel Sky, by the same company, but the apparent Australian setting for the latter game, as well as its proximity to a station named 'St James' suggests this is actually Museum railway station, Sydney.
- The station is mentioned in the novel Tunnel Vision by Keith Lowe. It mentions that a restaurant is on the site of the old station, of which there is nothing left.
- The station appears in 'Pornography' by Simon Stephens. A brother takes his sister there saying, 'It's for the British Museum. It's not been used for sixty years. They closed it because there was no need of it any more. With Holborn and Tottenham Court Road.' The sister says, 'You can imagine the people... Standing there.'
- The station is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh called Amen-Ra which would appear and scream so loudly that the noise would carry down the tunnels to adjourning stations.
Read more about this topic: British Museum Tube Station
Famous quotes containing the words station, popular and/or culture:
“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)
“Parents’ ability to survive a child’s unabating needs, wants, and demands...varies enormously. Some people can give and give....Whether children are good or bad, brilliant or just about normal, enormously popular or born loners, they keep their cool and say just the right thing at all times...even when they are miserable themselves, inexhaustible springs of emotional energy, reserved just for children, keep flowing unabated.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)