Section 1 - Piccadilly Line - Hatton Cross

Hatton Cross station opened in 1975, and for two and a half years it was as close as you could come to the airport on the tube. To be fair, it is right on the airport’s southern perimeter road. As a young plane spotter, I often took the tube to the station, and then the short bus ride to the Queen’s Building. It would be nice to say that the station building itself has some distinctive features. It would be nice, but it would be a lie. The station resembles nothing quite so much as a municipal bus terminus from the same era. Which is hardly surprising, I suppose, since it does have a fairly large bus station as part of the complex. I don’t hate Hatton Cross Station – it isn’t really distinctive enough to hate. But I do have an instinctive aversion to the brutalist architecture of the 1960s and 70s of which this is an example. If you removed the signs from the front of the building, and showed people a photograph of it, I somehow doubt they’d identify it as a tube station.