Wood Lane Tube Station - History

History

The present-day 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 1922 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 which attracted infrastructural investment by railway companies. Among others, the MR opened its Wood Lane station on the Hammersmith branch to serve the event area. The station opened and closed intermittently, and was renamed twice, as Wood Lane (White City) in 1920 and White City in 1947, before it finally closed in 1959 following fire damage. For the next 49 years, the Wood Lane area was served only by the neighbouring White City tube station on the Central line; Hammersmith line trains passed over the lane without stopping, the nearest station on that line lying 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 redevelopment work, a number of improvements were made to public transport in the area, including the rebuilding of Shepherd's Bush Central line station, the construction of a new Shepherd's Bush railway station and two new bus interchanges to serve the planned shopping complex. It was also decided to build a new station on the Hammersmith & City line, on a site 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 brand new station on the Tube had been given the name of a disused station.

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.