History
The station was opened on 30 June 1879 by the Metropolitan Railway (MR, now the Metropolitan Line) on its extension from its now closed station at St. John's Wood (a different station from the current St. John's Wood Jubilee Line station). The station was rebuilt in 1914 with entrances incorporated into a new parade of shops.
By the mid 1930s the Metropolitan Line was suffering from congestion on its main routes from north London caused by the limited capacity of its tracks between Finchley Road and Baker Street stations. To alleviate this congestion new sections of deep tube tunnels were bored between Finchley Road and Baker Street to carry some of the traffic from the Stanmore branch and stations south of Wembley Park. These new tunnels opened on 20 November 1939 and from that date Finchley Road station was also served by Bakerloo Line trains running from Baker Street using the new tunnels. The Bakerloo Line services were subsequently transferred to the Jubilee Line when that line commenced operation on 1 May 1979.
Finchley Road was also the name of a nearby Midland Railway station which closed in 1927. The remains of these platforms are visible from Thameslink trains running on the Midland Main Line.
Analysis of earth removed when tunnelling towards the station revealed that its site was on the edge of the glacier which covered Britain to the north throughout the last Ice Age, as illustrated in episode 3 (Ice Age) of the BBC series British Isles: A Natural History
Read more about this topic: Finchley Road Tube Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)