The station was opened in 1890 as part of the world's first underground electric railway and its surface building remains largely unaltered.

James Henry Greathead was the engineer for the railway and had used the tunnelling method on the Tower Subway bored under the River Thames in 1869.

Construction work began in 1886,[8] and in 1887 the railway was granted additional approval for an extension to Kennington, Oval and Stockwell.

[11][n 1] The CL&SS changed its name to the City and South London Railway (C&SLR) early in 1890.

[17] The station building is a single-storey structure topped by a dome which originally housed the hydraulic equipment for the lifts.

In 1913, the C&SLR obtained permission to enlarge the tunnels to enable it to use new modern rolling stock, but World War I delayed the works.

These were undertaken as part of a programme of works including an extension of the Hampstead Tube from Embankment to Kennington.

[22] To achieve a convenient arrangement for the interchange between the existing tunnels and the new ones to Embankment, several changes were made to the organisation of the station below ground.

These passages were at a higher level than before, so the bottom landings of the lifts and the emergency stairs were raised by 11 feet (3.4 m) to match them.

[6][n 9] To enable trains from Waterloo to reverse, a loop tunnel was constructed connecting the new southbound and northbound platforms.

A siding constructed between the two existing tunnels provided a reversing facility for trains coming from Elephant & Castle.

[27] Following the completion of the extension and reconstruction works, the C&SLR and the Hampstead Tube operated as a single line, although they retained their own identities into the 1930s.

[36] In 2014, Transport for London (TfL) was granted parliamentary approval to construct an extension of the Charing Cross branch from Kennington to Battersea Power Station via Nine Elms.