Two new London Underground stations opened on Monday morning, following a £1.1 billion development project.

The Tube’s first major expansion this century has seen two new stops added to the Northern Line in the south of the capital.

The first train on the route departed from Battersea Power Station at 5.28am, calling at the other new station, Nine Elms, before reaching the existing Kennington station.

One keen passenger, Peter Torre, wore a handmade sign saying he was the first person to travel the full length of the Northern Line to the end of the new extension.

London mayor Sadiq Khan says the services will play ‘a major role’ in the capital’s recovery from Covid-19 by ‘supporting thousands of new jobs, homes and businesses’.

TfL estimated that the new services will support 25,000 new jobs and 20,000 new homes.

The areas around Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station have seen extensive redevelopment in recent years, alongside the changes to the Underground map.

The historic power station, which closed in 1983 and once generated electricity for a fifth of London homes, will reopen next summer as a home to shops, restaurants and the main UK office of Apple.

The new US embassy is also in Nine Elms.

The Underground redevelopment is the first major expansion of the Tube since the Jubilee line opened in the late 1990s.

Some £1billion of funding was borrowed by The Greater London Authority for the project, which will be funded through business rates from the local area and about £270 million of contributions from developers.

The Tube extension in numbers

£1 billion: The amount borrowed by the Greater London Assembly to fund the project

272: The number of stations now on the London Underground network

1: The Zone which Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms is in

12: The number of trains on the line per hour in peak periods, by mid-2022

Major construction on the two-mile twin railway tunnel between Kennington and Battersea began in 2015.

There will initially be a peak-time service of six trains per hour, falling to five per hour during off-peak periods.

Those frequencies will then be doubled by mid-2022.

Meanwhile, a new Crossrail project, called the Elizabeth Line, is due to open in May 2023 after a number of delays

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