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British Museum tube station was a station on the London Underground's Central Line, located close to the British Museum, now closed.
It opened on 30 July 1900 with its entrance located near the junction of High Holborn and New Oxford Street. In December 1906, Holborn station opened on the Piccadilly Line less than a hundred yards away. The lack of a direct interchange was due to the intense competition between the rival underground railway companies, but with the amalgamation of the lines under a single management it was decided that it would make more sense to combine the stations.
An underground passageway was initially mooted, but the idea suffered from the complexity of tunnelling between the stations, and the large walking distance it would involve (no-one considered moving walkways at the time). It was decided that a better option would be to add Central Line platforms to Holborn station, replacing British Museum. The latter station was closed on 24 September 1933, with the new platforms at Holborn opening the following day.
British Museum station was subsequently re-used up to the 1960s as a military administrative office and emergency command post, but it is now wholly disused. It can no longer be accessed from the surface and the surface building was demolished in 1989, though it is still visible from passing trains. The (now removed) platform area is currently used by engineers to store sleepers.
The station featured in the 1972 horror film "Death Line", about a community of cannibals descended from Victorian railway workers and living in the station. The cannibals venture out at night to snatch travellers from the platforms of operating stations and take them back to their gruesome "pantry" at Museum station. Donald Pleasance stars as the investigating police inspector. When finally cornered, one of the cannibals screams "Mind The Gap!", obviously picked up parrot-fashion from the PA system in the Underground.
It was also involved in a Sherlock Holmes film, as the location reached by a secret tunnel leading from the inside of a Sarcophagus in the British Museum. The villain was finally cornered and forced into a sword duel on the disused platforms. The location was renamed 'Bloomsbury' in the film.
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