The next time you’re grumbling about delays on your way to work, or the utterly preposterous layout of a certain tube station, take a moment to remember that a lot of the London Underground was built over 100 years ago. They didn’t have computers or mechanised diggers back then – just armies of soot-faced children who were forced to dig out tunnels with their bare hands and stick some bricks together with their own spit.

By way of proof, we dug through the archives to find photos of the tube network from as far back as the late nineteenth century, and re-shot them from a modern perspective. Side by side, they show how – as the world around them morphs and grows – many of the stations we pass through every day have looked the way they do for over a century. Remarkable.

See more then-and-now pictures of tube stations right here.

Back in the present day, we're all still waiting for the night tube. Could these mysterious TfL owls mean it could be launching soon?

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