The 10 weirdest stations on the London Underground

Most of the 272 stations on the Tube map are unremarkable brick boxes with a roundel outside. A few are not. Some were designed to look like nothing else on earth, some were built around a church nobody would let the railway demolish, and one is famous purely because a radio panel show turned its name into a decades-long private joke.

Here are ten stations worth a second look, all of them real stops you can find on the London game or browse in the network explorer.

1. Piccadilly Circus has no station building at all

There is no ticket hall on the surface at Piccadilly Circus, no roundel-topped entrance, nothing but stairs down into pavement kiosks. The entire booking hall was built underground in the 1920s, a circular concourse below the road junction, because the London County Council would not allow a conventional station building to spoil the view of the Circus above. It remains one of the only stations on the network where the whole customer-facing building sits below street level.

2. Southgate looks like it landed rather than got built

Charles Holden's 1933 design for Southgate is a low circular drum with a flat concrete roof that appears to float on a band of windows, with no visible means of support. It is topped by an illuminated fitting that has been compared to a Tesla coil lifted from a Frankenstein film set. The building is Grade II* listed, keeps its original bronze paving and column lighting, and gets booked for period dramas more often than most Underground stations get booked by passengers.

3. Arnos Grove is a giant brick drum modelled on a Swedish library

A few stops down the Piccadilly line, Arnos Grove opened in 1932 as a cylindrical ticket hall of brick and glass, capped in concrete. Holden reportedly based the shape on Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm City Library, though one of his own assistants claimed the real source was a Danish sanatorium lodge. Either way, the critic Jonathan Glancey called it a complete work of art, and it is Grade II* listed alongside Southgate.

4. Gants Hill has a Moscow Metro concourse and no building on top

In the 1930s, London Underground's engineers advised on the construction of the Moscow Metro, and an internal report on what they had seen in Russia led to a decision to build a station in London to a similar style. Gants Hill, on the Central line, opened in 1947 with a barrel-vaulted lower concourse lit like a Soviet showpiece, roundel clocks set into the ceiling and miniature roundels tiled at platform level. There is no surface building whatsoever: you reach the whole thing through pedestrian subways under a roundabout, which makes it the only Holden-designed concourse on the network with nothing standing above it.

5. East Finchley is watched over by a ten-foot archer

Above the entrance of East Finchley, on the Northern line, a bronze-effect archer by the sculptor Eric Aumonier kneels 3 metres tall, arrow just released, aimed straight down the platforms towards the tunnel mouth. It was put there in 1940 to nod to the area's history near the old Royal Forest of Enfield hunting grounds. The local community newspaper liked it enough to put it on the masthead and call itself The Archer.

6. Bank was built around a church crypt because the church refused to move

When the City & South London Railway wanted a station near Lombard Street in the 1890s, its first plan was to demolish St Mary Woolnoth, a Wren church, entirely. Public objection killed that plan, so engineers built the ticket hall and lift shaft inside the church's own crypt instead, exhuming the bodies buried there, underpinning the church's foundations and bracing the crypt with a steel frame so the building above could keep standing on top of a working Northern and Central line interchange. The old lift entrance is still there, on the corner of Lombard Street, now doing business as a branch of Starbucks.

7. Aldgate is reputedly built over a plague pit

Aldgate opened in 1876 on the District and Circle lines, on a site behind St Botolph's Aldgate church that several local histories describe as a burial ground for roughly a thousand plague victims. The claim is old and widely repeated rather than archaeologically settled, hedged even in the sources that mention it, but it is one of the more durable pieces of Tube folklore, and station staff have been asked about it for well over a century.

8. Mornington Crescent is famous for a game that has no rules

The station itself, on the Northern line, is unremarkable. Its name is not, thanks to the BBC Radio 4 panel show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, which invented a game called Mornington Crescent in 1978: players take turns naming London Underground stations, apparently building towards some strategic goal, until someone says "Mornington Crescent" and wins. There are no real rules. The entire point is to sound as if there were, a joke so committed that people still ask taxi drivers and tourist guides to explain the scoring system.

9. Temple used to close for the weekend

For much of its history, Temple station, serving the Inns of Court on the Circle and District lines, shut on Sundays: the legal quarter around it emptied out completely once the barristers went home for the weekend, and there was no one left to use it. It only moved to seven-day opening once weekend visitor numbers to Somerset House next door made the closure look increasingly odd.

10. Three station names exist twice on the map, and they are not connected

Search the network and you will find two stations called Paddington, two called Edgware Road, and two called Hammersmith, each pair a short walk apart but treated as entirely separate stations with separate entrances. The Edgware Roads sit on opposite sides of the same road junction; the Paddingtons are named for the old Bishop's Road and Praed Street entrances of the same historic complex; the Hammersmiths serve different lines with no direct interchange passage. New arrivals reliably plan a change at the wrong one.