Vauxhall Cross is a fictional London, England tube station shown in the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day. Several previous Bond films had featured satellite MI6 offices in varying locations around the world (such as an Egyptian tomb, a submarine, a South American monastery, and the sunken cruise ship Queen Elizabeth); in this case it is an abandoned tube station, not far from where MI6's main headquarters is situated.
In the film, Bond (who at this point in the film is on the run from MI6), mysteriously receives a key to a door on the southeast end of Westminster Bridge, walks down a flight of stairs and finds himself inside the station where he encounters his superior, M, and they conduct a secret meeting. The station appears to be in use primarily by the Q-Branch of MI6 as an auxiliary testing facility for new equipment. The quartermaster of Q Branch, known as Q, is shown to have a virtual reality room, a shooting range, as well as a storeroom for gadgets used by Bond in previous missions (in keeping with the anniversary theme of Die Another Day, all past gadgets shown on screen come from previous Bond films dating back to 1962). One of the tube tunnels has been converted into a garage where the virtually invisible stealth Aston Martin V12 Vanquish is stored.
Vauxhall Cross may have been inspired by Down Street tube station, which was used as a government shelter during World War II. In the film a visible trackside line diagram places Vauxhall Cross on the Piccadilly line where Down Street was, listing the stations as:
- Vauxhall Cross
- Hyde Park Corner
- Knightsbridge
- (Brompton Road and South Kensington missing)
- Gloucester Road
- Earl's Court
- Barons Court
- Hammersmith
- (Turnham Green missing)
- Acton Town
Actually, Down Street is some 2 km (1.2 mi) west of the Westminster Bridge location shown in the film, and 2.6 km (1.6 mi) north-west of the real Vauxhall Cross, the location of MI6's real-life headquarters, as well as the actual Vauxhall Victoria Line station. Alternatively, the same line diagram would be broadly consistent with a separate - though unusually long - branch running off the Piccadilly line between Hyde Park Corner and Down Street/Green Park.
Famous quotes containing the words cross, tube and/or station:
“The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie “answers” questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)