Unusual London Attractions You Will Probably Never See
There are a number of attractions in London that you find have been written about and promoted over and over again. All of the promotional material handed out in tourist offices and hotels across the city will tell you about the regular attractions, the ancient historical buildings, the incredible modern architecture of places like the Shard and the inspiring museums that can be found in the city. But what about the attractions that are not generally promoted?
The Northern Outfall Sewer
Like any other major city, there are literally thousands of miles of underground tunnels that make up the sewer system. The sewers that run beneath the city of London are a feat of Victorian engineering and actually quite spectacular. Occasionally there are tours that will take visitors down to see some of the fabulous brick work that make up this complicated tunnel network. If you are worried about the smell, believe it or not you will hardly notice it as you will be concentrating that hard on not slipping and falling into the foul water!
The Stores of the Science Museum
The exhibits that you see in the halls of the Science Museum are in fact only a mere 8% of the whole collection. The majority of the collection is housed not in or beneath the museum as you might expect but rather in an ostentatious Edwardian building not far from London’s Olympia. Within the walls you can find articles from the Apollo missions through to Roman fertility icons. The building known as Blythe House also holds some of the collections from the British Museum and the V&A. Each museum’s collections are accessed from different entrances as despite sharing a rather elegant storage facility they have nothing to do with each other.
A Ghost Underground Station
While Aldwych station is opened up on a regular basis by Transport for London for different events, one of the more forgotten abandoned stations is that of Brompton Road. This is a station that was once active on the busy Piccadilly line. The station was closed in 1934, the access tunnels were blocked off and it was more or less forgotten. Many aspects of the station remain as they were on the day that the station closed including the World War II relics that remain there including an oversized map which plots the city’s air defences.
The Clerkenwell Catacombs
Think about all of the television shows where you have seen the characters having whispered conversations in seemingly endless brick caverns, they have all probably been filmed in the same place, namely the tunnels of what was once the Clerkenwell House of Detention. While the prison no longer remains the subterranean catacombs do. There were at one time quite a busy tourist attraction but these days there is no access to the general public. However they are regularly used by film and television crews. Where the prison once stood with its 286 detention cells you will now find the rather impressive looking Hugh Myddleton School.
