Seven Sisters Platform

Seven Sisters Platform

Seven Sisters Entrance

Seven Sisters Entrance

Seven Sisters Platform

Seven Sisters Platform

 

The station was constructed by the Great Eastern Railway (GER) on its Stoke Newington & Edmonton Railway line and opened on 22 July 1872. On 1 January 1878, the GER opened a branch line, the Palace Gates Line, from Seven Sisters station to Palace Gates (Wood Green) station to the north-west. The Palace Gates Line was closed by British Rail in 1963 and the branch line track and platforms at Seven Sisters have been removed. On 24 July 1967 planning permission was granted to convert the station for London Underground use. The first section of the Victoria line opened on 1 September 1968 serving Seven Sisters, although a shared entrance and interchange facilities with the surface station were not opened until December 1968. The original GER entrance to the station was situated in West Green Road at the north end of the surface station, but the new combined entrance was opened in Seven Sisters Road at the south end on the site of a former wood merchants yard, connecting to the west end of the Victoria line platforms. The original (1872) entrance was closed at that time.

 

The Dorset map of 1619 shows the area we know today as Seven Sisters named as Page Greene. However, by 1805 the first series Ordnance Survey map was showing the area as Seven Sisters. The name is derived from seven elms which were planted in a circle with a walnut tree at their centre on an area of common land known as Page Green. The clump was known as the Seven Sisters by 1732. In his early seventeenth-century work, Brief Description of Tottenham, local vicar and historian William Bedwell singled out the walnut tree for particular mention. He wrote of it as a local 'arboreal wonder' which 'flourished without growing bigger'. He described it as popularly associated with the burning of an unknown Protestant. At the time of Domesday, the area was within the Manor of Tottenham held by Waltheof II, Earl of Northumbria, the last of the great Anglo-Saxon Earls. In May 2013 it was announced that the station would be on the latest proposed route for Crossrail 2, with a double-ended underground station built linking South Tottenham and Seven Sisters stations. There is also speculation that the tree was ancient, possibly going back as far as Roman times, perhaps standing in a sacred grove or pagan place of worship. The station is in Travel Card Zone 3. The station has wi-fi, cash machine, Euro cash machines, payphones and escalators, but no toilets.

 

Connections: Victoria Line. National Rail. London Buses routes 41, 76, 123, 149, 230, 243, 259, 279, 318, 349, 476 and W4 and night routes N41, N73 and N279 serve the station.