Bethnal Green tube station
Bethnal Green is an underground station in London. It is in Travelcard Zone 2 on the Central Line. The station lies between Liverpool Street and Mile End Stations. The stations are open for 24 hours on a Friday and Saturday as part of the Night Tube Service. The station was opened as part of the planned Central Line eastern expansion on 4th December 1946. The station had been used as an air-raid shelter.
History
Development
The 1935 - 1940 London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) New Works Programme included the new deep level station at Bethnal Green as park of the Central Line extension from Liverpool Street to Ongar and Woodford.
Wartime disaster
On the 3rd March 1943, British Media reported a heavy RAF Raid on Berlin the night of 1/2 March 1943. The Civil air-raid siren sound at 8.17pm, when then started a large orderly flow of people went down the stairs into Bethnal Green Station. How-ever a middle-aged woman and a child fell down the last three steps from the bottom of the stairs which caused people to fall around them. In the end 173 people mostly women and children died due to asphyxiation.
Memorials
In 1993, a plaque commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1943 disaster was put up on the south-eastern staircase where the incident took place. It bears the coat of Arms of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and its records the event as "the worst civilian disaster of the Second World War.
