Wood Lane tube station

Wood Lane is a London Underground station, located in the White City area of west London, England, UK. It is on the Circle and Hammersmith & City Lines, between Latimer Road and Shepherd's Bush Market stations. The station lies in Travelcard Zone 2.

Although it is on a line which has been in operation since 1864, the station itself is new, having opened in 2008. It is situated near the site of a station of the same name on this line which closed in 1959.

History
The present-day Hammersmith and City line was opened on 13 June 1864 by the Metropolitan Railway (MR) as the Hammersmith branch line. The railway became part of London Underground in 1922 and the took on a separate identity as the Hammersmith and City line in 1988.

In 1908 the Franco-British Exhibition and the 1908 Summer Olympics came to London, the first of a number of major events in White City which attracted infrastructural investment by railway companies. Among others, the MR opened its Wood Lane station on the Hammersmith branch to serve the event area. The station opened and closed intermittently, and was renamed twice, as Wood Lane (White City) in 1920 and White City in 1947, before it finally closed in 1959 following fire damage. For the next 49 years, the Wood Lane area was served only by the neighbouring White City tube station on the Central Line; Hammersmith line trains passed over the lane without stopping, the nearest station on that line lying approximately 1 km away at Shepherd's Bush.

In 2005 work commenced on the large-scale Westfield Shopping Centre. As part of the redevleopment work, a number of improvements were made to public transport in the area, including the rebuilding of Shepherd's Bush Central line station, the construction of a new Shepherd's Bush railway station and two new bus interchanges to serve the planned shopping complex. It was also decided to build a new station on the Hammersmith & City line, on a site just south-west of the old Metropolitan station on Wood Lane. In 2006 Transport for London decided on the name Wood Lane, reviving a historical name. This was the first time that a brand new station on the Tube had been given the name of a disused station.

The station opened on 12 October 2008. In December 2009 Wood lane was added to the Circle line when the line was extended to Hammersmith.

Design and construction
Construction work was carried out by Costains. The station building occupies an irregularly-shaped site between Wood Lane and the railway line viaduct, and presented particular challenges when constructed as it also lies across the deep-level Central Line. The lines remained operational during construction, which mostly took place at night. It was designed by Ian Ritchie Architects and it is clad in shot-peened stainless steel, gold anodised aluminium and granite with a 25-metre-high glass screen façade.

The structure encases the railway viaduct and platforms are accessed via stairs and lifts either side of the brick arches. During construction of the station, the bridge of the Hammersmith & City line over Wood Lane had to be widened to accommodate a new track on the Central Line, providing access to the new subterranean train depot below the Westfield site. A bridge pier was removed and a new steel bridge structure slid into place over a new pier.

Location
The station is situated on Wood Lane, a road which runs north from Shepherd's Bush in the White City area. It serves the nearby Westfield shopping centre and BBC Television Centre, and Loftus Road stadium, the home of Queen's Park Rangers FC, lies a short distance away.

Due to the heavy use of Oyster cards across the Underground network and the proximity of the ticket office at White City, there is no staffed ticket office at this station, although there are ticket machines on-site.

Transport links
Wood Lane station is a short walk from White City station on the Central line providing an easy interchange between the lines.

The nearby White City bus station on Ariel Way is served by a number of London Bus routes.