London’s abandoned underground tunnels are red-hot right now

We’re caught up in the flow of people hurrying through Charing Cross underground station when Tommy, in his high-vis jacket, beckons us over to a metal door. “Come this way,” he says, doing a head count to ensure there are no stragglers.

Entering the doorway, we’re faced with a scene that looks familiar yet unusual. Escalators plunge down towards the platforms, like they do at Tube stations across London. But they’re empty and switched off. It feels eerily quiet and the hairs on the back of my neck stiffen. Then Tommy says to follow him and his colleague, Emily, down the sleeping steps.

The thriller screenwriter in me would love to tell you that this duo are leading us into peril (from which we’ll stage a daring escape), but they’re actually friendly guides for the London Transport Museum, whose immersive Hidden London tours invite you into secretive subterranean spaces usually out of bounds to the public.

We’re on the Charing Cross: Access All Areas tour, a 75-minute trawl through an abandoned part of the station that has become a red-hot filming location, with scores of movies and TV shows, from Spooks and Skyfall to Killing Eve and The Bourne Ultimatum, shot down here.

We walk along silent corridors and a pair of old platforms, where the terrazzo flooring, garishly green tiled walls, posters and signage have a surreal bygone quality. We’re told production crews often make tweaks, adding fake ads or replacing signs to pretend this is another station, or indeed another network (it doubled as the New York subway in the Marvel flick Morbius). It costs about $5000 an hour to hire this space out.

“Skyfall was the biggest production,” says Tommy. “They were here for five months. There were 450 cast, crew, extras. They ended up using about 10 minutes of footage in the film.” We pause by a TV screen and watch a montage of clips. There’s Daniel Craig, as James Bond, chasing Javier Bardem’s Skyfall villain, Raoul Silva. At one point, 007 whooshes down past the (moving) escalators.

“If you have a Hollywood budget we can turn them on,” says Emily. The bit where Bond leaps onto a moving Tube train was not shot here. Though the tracks are still live, dangerous stunts aren’t permitted for health and safety reasons.

We continue, discovering other tunnels behind other metal doors, including one that Craig dashed through in Skyfall. Emitting a metallic, musty scent, cluttered with nuts, bolts, pillars and railings, it takes us under Trafalgar Square. “It’s the nicest way to cross it,” says Emily. “No tourists or pigeons here.”