Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  But the Commission rejected Pearson’s plan, and any other that sought to infringe the rights of central London landlords. The Commission recommended against new stations in the West End or the City, and the boundary line to the north would be the New Road. The presumption against railways in central London would remain effective until 1858 (Victoria Station), with one exception, which we will consider shortly. The inadvertent effect of this ruling was the creation of the lines and stations of the London Underground, because these would avoid the ban.

  Now to Pearson’s Plan B …

  In 1851 the Great Northern Railway had reached London and begun operating into a terminus at Maiden Lane, just north of the New Road. In 1854 they moved up to the New Road itself, with the opening of King’s Cross station, east of Euston. The railways were alighting on the New Road like birds perching on a branch (the Midland Railway would open St Pancras, between Euston and King’s Cross, in 1868), and Pearson took note. Whereas his first scheme had ignored the New Road stations, and simply sought to upstage them with a bigger and better – and madder – station of his own, his second plan tried to co-opt them.

  It involved a railway going beneath the New Road and connecting some or all of the main-line termini gathered there and then bending south towards the City (so far, so sensible), where it would conclude (and here his fancifulness broke out again) in another vast half-underground City terminus: a complex involving two stations, one for long-distance and one for local traffic, both with numerous platforms 300 yards long, with a 13-acre goods yard and engine stabling facilities. This time it was proposed the terminus would connect to some more tangible workmen’s estates – the north London suburbs being built along the route of the Great Northern Railway.

  The Corporation was interested in the idea, because it thought it might lead to the main-line railway companies funding municipal improvements in Farringdon, and in 1852 Pearson deposited his City Terminus Bill in Parliament. It was always doomed. The main-line railway companies might welcome an underground connection that would enable them to run through to the City, but why would they underwrite a vast terminus that would take away their business? Yes, an argument for the great City Terminus would be the amount of road traffic it might spare the city streets. But a stronger argument against was the amount of road traffic it might create. Plus, it contravened the ban of 1846.

  What was required now was the intervention of some men who were not gadflies.

  PEARSON MEETS THE BUSINESSMEN

  The logic of Pearson’s arguments was accepted, up to a point, by a consortium of businessmen. In August 1854, after Pearson’s own scheme had failed in Parliament, the consortium obtained royal assent for what had initially been called the Bayswater, Paddington & Holborn Bridge Railway, and which gradually became the ‘North Metropolitan’ and finally the Metropolitan Railway.

  It would run beneath the New Road from Paddington to King’s Cross, there drooping south towards the City, just as Pearson’s scheme had done. But there would be no sprawling terminus – instead, a more modest station at Farringdon. The line would connect to the Great Western main line at Paddington, in return for which that company would invest in the Metropolitan. There would also be a connection at King’s Cross to the Great Northern main line, in return for which that company would not invest in the Metropolitan. (But it would have to pay to use the tracks that would carry its trains through to the City.)

  The consortium set about a faltering campaign to raise the million pounds required, a job made harder by the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854. It should by now be apparent that Charles Pearson was not the sort of man to resent the success of a rival scheme, especially one that might bring the social benefits he had sought by his own proposal. In 1859, when it looked as though the Metropolitan Railway Company would be wound up with no line built, he wrote a pamphlet: A Twenty Minutes Letter to the Citizens of London in Favour of the Metropolitan Railway and City Station. Gadfly he may have been, but by this ‘letter’ he persuaded the Corporation of London to invest £200,000 in the line, a most unusual example of a public body investing in a Victorian railway. The Corporation also sold land in the Fleet Valley cheaply to the Metropolitan. What was its motive? The answer lay in the above-mentioned property development scheme. The corporation had just opened its new cattle market in Islington, and it had plans for clearances in the Fleet Valley that would make way for the new Farringdon Road, and adjacent meat market. It was felt that the Metropolitan Railway would serve the meat market, since it would carry both passengers and freight, and that it would reduce road congestion in the City. In fact, it would do the former but not the latter. Transport begets transport, and the coming of the Met to the City would only attract more of those swarming buses.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE METROPOLITAN RAILWAY

  THE LINE IS BUILT – AND OPENED

  The construction of the first stretch of the Metropolitan Railway began in October 1859, and the line was opened to the public on 10 January 1863. It was built on the cut-and-cover principle. The railway was laid into a shallow grave. The road, mainly the New Road, was dug up, and the tracks were laid down in a brick cutting that was then roofed over, with the road replaced on the top of the roof. For this reason a cut-and-cover railway is in engineering terms technically a bridge (because of the roofing-over) rather than a tunnel. The crown of the tunnel arches are sometimes just inches under the road. The early Underground lines were all built on the cut-and-cover principle, because tunnelling technology was not sufficiently advanced to make deep-level Tubes. (The cut-and-cover lines are the Metropolitan, District, Hammersmith & City, and the Circle, which is not so much a line as a service that uses the tracks of those other lines.)

  The first stretch of the Met was built for most of its length beneath the centre of New Road. It was advisable to avoid building an underground railway beneath private houses at the time, because the law would require you to buy those houses. The Met of 1863 was not entirely covered over. When it bends south between King’s Cross and Farringdon, it is in open cutting. Go to Swinton Street, WC1, five minutes’ walk south and east of King’s Cross. It’s a ghostly street of powdery-looking terraced houses. Where the terrace comes to an end on the south and east side, an 8-foot wall takes over. You know there must be something fascinating beyond that wall because someone’s tried to stop you seeing over, and there are shards of glass embedded in the top. However, there is a small step or foothold; find it, and look over the top. Then look down and you’ll see filthy pigeons on a brick ledge; look further down to discover the secret of Swinton Street: the tracks of the Metropolitan. Wait for a train, and you will observe that it traverses that crevice with satisfying violence, but not sufficient to disturb the pigeons, which are in league with the line. Go to Swinton Street in the evening, and you’re back in the King’s Cross of The Ladykillers: crepuscular, fumacious, railway-haunted.

  Or take an eastbound Met from King’s Cross outside the rush hour, when you ought to be able to find a window seat. Again, look up, to see the beautiful brick valley made by the Metropolitan: the towering arcaded walls with brick struts going over. It’s like being in the moat of Gormenghast Castle. This is hard-core London, and just before Farringdon station you will be able to glimpse the vast steel pipe that carries what was the Fleet River and is now the Fleet sewer over your head.

  The Fleet looks safely contained now, although you never know. It surprises me that no terrorist has made common cause with the surly and embittered Fleet, which, in Peter Ackroyd’s words, became ‘a river of death’ as it sidled through the meanest streets of London en route to the Thames. In London: The Biography Ackroyd describes its progress with melancholy relish. It ‘moved around Clerkenwell Hill and touched the stones of the Coldbath Prison; passed Saffron Hill, whose fragrant name concealed some of the worst rookeries in London … Then it flowed down into Chick Lane … the haven of felons and murderers.’ The Fleet made its last public appearance in June 1862, when it
burst into the Met building works east of King’s Cross. There is a famous illustration of the resulting chaos of collapsed brickwork, littered with wooden buttresses heaped as for a giant’s game of pick-up-sticks.

  The inundation is described in Arnold Bennett’s novel Riceyman Steps, which was written in 1923, but set in 1919:

  On the Wednesday the pavements sank definitely. The earth quaked. The entire populace fled to survey the scene of horror from safety. The terrific scaffolding and beams were flung like firewood into the air and fell with awful crashes. The populace screamed at the thought of workmen entombed and massacred. A silence! Then the great brick piers, fifty feet in height, moved bodily. The whole bottom of the excavation moved in one mass. A dark and fetid liquid appeared, oozing, rolling, surging, smashing everything in its restless track, and rushed into the mouth of the new tunnel. The crown of the arch of the mighty Fleet sewer had broken.

  The central character’s uncle tells the story ‘with such force and fire’ that he has a stroke and dies. The London Underground has been tangling with the buried rivers of London ever since – and with the Thames. What became the Jubilee Line was initially called the Fleet Line, an act of propitiation, perhaps, to this most abused river. When I mention that Fleet pipe at Farringdon, people will tend to say, ‘Yes, and it appears again in that great big pipe that goes over the platforms at Sloane Square station’, which is very satisfying since it gives me the opportunity to point out that the Fleet would not suddenly veer west at Farringdon in order to make a beeline for Chelsea. The river carried in the pipe at Sloane Square is the Westbourne, and the pipe is said to shake in a rainstorm. Behind one of the innocent-looking doors on the platform at Sloane Square is a horizontal metal grille, beneath which is a pump, working away in the seething tributaries of the Westbourne. But that’s nothing compared to Victoria Station, where a million gallons a day are pumped away, most of it from the Tyburn brook. There is a pumping house underneath the station that an Underground press officer once refused to let me see, sadistically adding, ‘It resembles the set of Phantom of the Opera.’ It is possible that the Waterloo & City line is nicknamed ‘The Drain’ because of the water pumped away, but there are other theories, the line being drain-like in so many ways. At the start of the Second World War floodgates would be installed at the ends of the under-Thames sections of the Bakerloo and the Northern lines to save them from inundation should bombs damage the riverbed.

  The other famous image from the Metropolitan before its official opening is a photograph of ‘Mr Gladstone at the Private View’. It was taken on 24 May 1862, and it shows Gladstone, Mrs Gladstone and John Fowler, the swaggering and super-rich engineer of the Met, together with other dignitaries and shareholders of the line sitting in two rough contractors’ wagons. The photograph reveals that Edgware Road had an arched glass roof, which it would lose soon after opening for the sake of improved ventilation. When I was writing my ‘Tube Talk’ column, a woman wrote to me praising Edgware Road. ‘What you have at Edgware Road is sky.’ What you also have is howling wind.

  (Most of the cut-and-cover stations had elegant, arched glass roofs, and most have now lost them. The surviving glass roof at Notting Hill Circle and District platforms is the reason you will generally feel good while waiting there. John Betjeman’s poem ‘Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Station’ was triggered by the loss of the glass roof – ‘Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station’ – and its replacement by low-level awnings as a result of repairs in 1955, following war damage. Aldersgate, incidentally, was on the Metropolitan extension beyond Farringdon. It started life in 1865 as ‘Aldersgate Street’, and is today Barbican.)

  Mr (and Mrs) Gladstone are given a preview of the Metropolitan Railway. They are at Edgware Road (which used to have a roof). Gladstone was very involved with railways and thought they were too important to be unregulated. He insisted on cheap trains for the travelling poor, and envisaged railway nationalisation. He lost money on Underground stocks, and his coffin would be carried to Westminster Abbey on the District Railway.

  In the Gladstone photo, the sitters look too small for their conveyances, and this is because they were sitting in extra-wide – that is, broad-gauge – wagons of the Great Western, which would run along the Met on broad-gauge tracks (7 foot 2 inches between the rails), together with trains using standard-gauge tracks of 4 foot 8½. In the Met’s own language, the line ran ‘on the mixed-gauge principle’, which makes the arrangement sound almost sensible. That broad gauge did not last long, and all Underground trains today run on the standard gauge. But there is a continuing distinction between the loading gauge (the size of the trains) of the deep-level Tube trains and the loading gauge of the cut-and-cover trains. The latter are bigger – as big as mainline trains. That’s why they’re less claustrophobic, and it’s why drivers on the cut-and-cover lines refer to the trains driven by their colleagues on the Tubes as ‘Hornbys’ – toy trains.

  The early Underground trains were essentially ordinary steam trains that just happened to be running below the streets in the middle of London. Being ordinary trains on ordinary tracks, they could then continue, having emerged from their tunnels, in the open air, which meant they became much entangled with main-line railways. In May 1898, for example, the funeral train of our Mr Gladstone would be brought from his country estate at Hawarden to Westminster station on the District Line via Willesden Junction. One of his biographers notes, ‘Victorians saw no indignity in a coffin for a state funeral arriving by Underground.’ But I don’t think it would be seemly that a Prime Minister be brought to his final resting place by a deep-level Tube train.

  I wonder whether the Grand Old Man, sitting in that wide wagon at Edgware Road, had any premonition of that later Underground event, or of the fact that he would lose £25,000 on Met and District stock in the 1880s. According to H. G. C. Matthew in Gladstone, 1809–1898 (1997), he took the loss ‘fairly equably’. Although Gladstone seems to us high-minded and remote, he was keen on public transport. He once said that the best way to see London is from the top of a bus. In 1900 the Railway Magazine ran a feature called ‘How Some Celebrities Occupy Their Time When Railway Travelling’. In spite of the present tense, it included dead celebrities, and it noted that Gladstone had occupied himself by translating the odes of Horace. As President of the Board of Trade in the 1840s, he was aware of the dangers of leaving so important a social force as railways unregulated. In fact, he showed himself willing to entertain railway nationalisation, and his Railway Act of 1844 reserved to the state the power to take control of the companies should they behave irresponsibly. Those powers were never used. He also required the operators to run ‘Parliamentary Trains’ – one each day calling at every station at a fare of not more than a penny per mile for Third Class.

  The Metropolitan Railway opened to the public on 10 January 1863. The Illustrated London News wrote:

  … it was calculated that more than 30,000 persons were carried over the line in the course of the day. Indeed, the desire to travel by this line on the opening day was more than the directors had provided for; and from nine o’clock in the morning till past midnight it was impossible to obtain a place in the up or Cityward line at any of the mid stations. In the evening the tide turned, and the crush at the

  Farringdon-street station was as great as at the doors of a theatre on the first night of some popular performer.

  The line’s begetter, Charles Pearson, had died of dropsy on 14 September 1862. He had naturally refused a payment from the Metropolitan in return for his advocacy of the line, but the company paid an annuity of £250 to his widow.

  The line was an immediate success, and well reviewed. On 30 November 1861 The Times had called the proposed railway ‘Utopian’, adding that ‘even if it could be accomplished, [it] would certainly never pay’. It described the scheme as ‘a subterranean railway awfully suggestive of dark, noisome tunnels, buried many fathoms deep beyond the reach of light or life’. But on the opening day
The Times reported the Metropolitan to be ‘the greatest engineering triumph of its day … ingenious contrivances for obtaining light and ventilation were particularly commended.’ (Two decades later, however, on 7 October 1884, the paper would be back to square one, reporting the journey from King’s Cross to Baker Street to be ‘a mild form of torture which no person would undergo if he could help it’.)

  WHAT WAS IT LIKE?

  The Times objected to the atmosphere, but let’s consider first the physical environment. The line connected the (quite) fresh air and semi-rural setting of Paddington to the heart of the City at Farringdon. If you travelled in that direction, you were on the ‘up’ line; the opposite direction was the ‘down’, and if I ever meet anybody who sticks with those terms, I will shake them by the hand. (Eastbound and westbound came in later, when the Americans got involved in the Tube.) The up and down lines ran next to each other in vault-like tunnels, whereas the Tube trains would occupy their own tunnels. That’s why the cut-and-cover lines are more human than the Tubes. They are more companionable. You can see people going the other way – your perspective is broadened.

  No surface building of the original Metropolitan survives. Perhaps this doesn’t matter. They were tackily decorous: Italianate, and clad in imitation white stone. In London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986) Alan A. Jackson calls them ‘cheap and nasty’. For the nearest equivalent we are referred to Bayswater, built when the Met pushed south of Paddington in 1868. Most of the stations, as noted earlier, had glass roofs, and the grandest glass-roofed station was the Met’s King’s Cross, a little way to the east of the main-line station. It was knocked down in 1910, and in the 1940s the whole cut-and-cover operation at King’s Cross was swept beneath the main-line station. The glass roofs were elegant, but of particular interest to the Victorians were the brick-roofed stations. The young readers of Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century (1876), by Robert Routledge, were directed towards Baker Street and Gower Street (now Euston Square), which were ‘completely underground’, showing ‘great boldness and inventiveness of design’. Great Portland Street was originally completely bricked over, but the arch was opened to the sky at the western end, and it remains so today. The boldness has also been lost at Euston Square, where horizontal iron girders now traverse the roof. They penetrate the lateral skylights – brick holes made through the springing of the roof arches – that were a feature of that station, and of Baker Street, where they survive in modified form. Because the streets have been moved around overhead, the apertures no longer necessarily rise up towards daylight, so electric light has been fitted into them to duplicate the effect.