Shoreditch High Street is a railway station in
Shoreditch, London. The station is located on Bethnal Green Road close to
Shoreditch High Street and is served by London Overground services running
on the extended East London Line under the control of the London Rail
division of Transport for London. The station is located partly in the
London Borough of Hackney, with the station entrance on Braithwaite Street
in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and it is in Travelcard Zone 1.
The station officially opened to the public on 27 April 2010[2] with
services running between Dalston Junction and New Cross or New Cross Gate.
On 23 May 2010 services were extended from New Cross Gate to West Croydon or
Crystal Palace. The station replaced nearby Shoreditch, which closed on 9
June 2006. The next station to the south is Whitechapel and to the north is
Hoxton.
On the 1994 planning version of the underground map, the station was called
'Bishopsgate'.
The station is built on the former site of the Eastern Counties Railway's
Bishopsgate terminus, built in 1840, and is fully enclosed in a concrete box
structure so that future building works on the rest of the Bishopsgate site
can be carried out without requiring the line to close in the future. The
original station was later renamed Bishopsgate and converted for use as a
goods yard. It was destroyed by fire in 1964 and remained derelict until
being demolished in 2005. The station is situated on a section of track
constructed to link the original East London Line and the formerly disused
North London Railway's Kingsland Viaduct. Construction of the link included
a new bridge over Shoreditch High Street and links to Whitechapel via a
bridge over Brick Lane and a ramp on the site of the former Shoreditch tube
station.
In May 2008 a Tower Hamlets London Borough Councillor called for the new
station to be renamed Banglatown, claiming this would better reflect the
area in which it will stand, being a centre of the Bangladeshi community.
However Transport for London noted that changing the name would cost
£2million and "cause confusion". Mr Ullah has previously campaigned to
change the name of Aldgate East tube station to "Brick Lane".
There have also been discussions of creating an interchange with the Central
Line. However, this would not be able to happen until after the Crossrail
project is complete, due to extreme crowding on the Central Line during peak
times.