In this, the year of the 150th anniversary of the creation of what we now know as the London Underground, it’s only fitting that we take a look at the city’s oldest Tube station – Baker Street.

Opened on 10th January, 1863, by the Metropolitan Railway, the Grade II* listed property was designed by John Fowler, the company’s engineer in chief. While some stations on the initial railway – which stretched from Paddington to Farringdon – had platforms located in open cuttings, Baker Street was one of only three initial stations (the other two were at what was then named Gower Street (now Euston Square) and Great Portland Street) which was genuinely located underground, with subterranean platforms covered by brick barrel-vaults and lit by gaslights as well as natural light brought from the surface by “lunettes”.

The station was subsequently extended and further developed and, thanks to the company’s desire to make Baker Street its headquarters and “flagship” station, it underwent a major overhaul in 1911-13 with Charles Walter Clark, another Metropolitan Railway employee, designing a new grand booking hall and concourse featuring a lost property office, “ladies’ room” and a WH Smith bookstall.

Features inside include a cast-iron screen – complete with clock –  installed at the entrance to the lower concourse in 1925 to help control passenger flow during the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, a marble memorial to Metropolitan Railway employees who died in World War I, and, in a nod to the proximity of his fictitious Baker Street residence, large and small Sherlock Holmes silhouettes on tiles located at various places inside (there’s a statue of him outside the station).

For more on the 150th anniversary, see www.tfl.gov.uk/tube150.