As the London Tube celebrates 150 years of glory and service, a vintage piece of underground British real estate is about to hit the market. The Brompton Road Tube Station, located in a corner of central London between Harrods and the Victoria and Albert Museum, will be auctioned off in September, according to several news reports.
The structure is estimated to sell for $31 million. Jones Lang LaSalle is handling the sale and apparently, the station has the potential to become one of the grandest homes of Britain. It is being sold off to cut costs.
The Tube station operated from 1906 to 1934. It was removed from the Piccadilly line due to shortage of traffic and usage. Sometime in 1938, the station was purchased by the War Office and used as a Luftwaffe command center during the World War II. The structure was used as the Army's 1st Anti-Aircraft Division to protect the city during the Blitz. The building currently houses the London University Royal Naval Unit, the London University Air Squadron and 46F Squadron Air Training Corps and is owned by the Ministry of Defense (MoD). A new venue would be allotted for the units before the building is sold, reports The Evening Standard.
The building stands perfectly steady with its brown and green brick wall tiles. In the pictures at BBC, the insides look like scenes from old war movies.
"Although I'm not a military historian, I imagine that down here it would have been the same sort of thing as you see in wartime films. There would have been maps on the walls, there would have been perhaps an operations table and perhaps a scale model of part of the city, actually physically moving scale models about with the anti-aircraft batteries so people could envisage exactly where they were in the city," Julian Chafer, a MoD surveyor who has been working on the site, said to the Telegraph.
The station had already garnered a lot of public interest even before it was offered for sale. The Standard reports that Ajit Chambers, the CEO of The Old London Underground Company, had extended an offer of $39 million for the site sometime back in April 2013. However, he was turned down by the Ministry saying that it was not for sale.
Check out a video where Ajit Chambers tours the underground station below:
Now that the building is set to be auctioned off in September, Chambers will be allowed to bid. The Qatari Foundation has also expressed its interest in the site making it one of the main contenders for the historic site.
