Pavement Lights
The subway’s pavement lights can be seen here in Thurloe Street near the station entrance.
It seems there were originally six sets of pavement lights in the subway – including two small lights in the turn from the main tunnel to the steps leading into the station. They can be seen from outside adjacent to 32 Thurloe Street.
The pavement light in Thurloe Street as seen from the subway.
Glascrete pavement light by the Science Museum.
The other four sets of pavement lights were provided in the northern end of the tunnel. King’s (Glascrete) provided four pavement lights alongside the Science Museum during 1916-19. Clearly there were older pavement lights at these four locations, quite possibly they were removed during the building of the museum’s East Block.
A further set of three pavement lights were included as part of the subway’s 1908 extension. These can be seen immediately by the northern exit adjacent to the Science Museum.
The subway’s floors are not slippery…
The subway was built by and the floors largely by Wilke’s Metallic Flooring & Eureka Concrete Company, who provided the flooring in some of London’s grand buildings and for other railway companies. Some reports suggest work was also done by the Patent Metallic Paving Company. This may have been for the 1908 extension. Extolling the endurance of the new type of flooring surface, it was claimed that by 1905 that over 27 million people had walked the subway in just three years!
Wilkes was apparently a very short lived company. By 1891 it had wound up due to what appears to have been a legal dispute with the Midland Railway.
It seems Wilke’s work was however largely focussed on the longer straight sections of the subway. The short bit out of South Kensington station underneath Thurloe Street seems to have been delegated to a company known as Roadamant based in the City.
Roadamant’s presence evident in the subway floor.
The floor of the subway was originally heralded as being entirely non-slip. This is somewhat true except in certain conditions when a thin film of water of certain viscosity does make the floor’s surface slippery, as confirmed by tests made in 1986. According to the experimenters’ findings the more water there is the less slippery the floor is. Clearly the amount of footfall over the years has affected the floor’s original capabilities.
The Museum Exits
As well as the one by the Science Museum, two other dedicated exits were built. The first at the Natural History museum leads into its gardens, the second leads directly into the basement of the Victoria & Albert museum. The V&A tunnel was closed for several years but reopened in 2004
The steps down from the Natural History Museum grounds to the subway.
Above & below: Images showing the entry points of the Victoria & Albert museum’s connecting tunnel to the South Kensington subway.
V&A museum: Up the stairs to street level, down the stairs for the subway.