Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  Mayhew’s survey found that 69 per cent of Met travellers went by third class, 20.5 per cent second, 10.5 per cent first. The Met would abolish second class in 1905 at the time of electrification. It would go down to one class in 1941 – by which time it was the Metropolitan Line – and its passengers would make a beeline for the ex-first seats, just as third-class passengers had made a beeline for the ex-second seats after 1905, since they had not been physically removed or sabotaged to make them less comfortable. All the Tubes had only had one class since their inception – all except one, whose name need not bother us for the moment, but which fell into the ownership of guess which class-conscious company? The Metropolitan.

  It may seem that the Met was a snobbish outfit, a betrayer of the egalitarian dreams of Charles Pearson, but in being one of the pioneers of working men’s fares the company had helped to bring about a revolution that would allow the working classes to live in London. Cheap trains would supersede Gladstone’s well-meant Parliamentary Trains. The acts authorising the subsequent Underground lines would include a stipulation that cheap early morning fares be provided, and the Cheap Trains Act of 1883 would standardise the terms for all railways. The working man’s railway par excellence was the Great Eastern, whose cheap fares were responsible for the great bulge of north-east London, and the growth of Walthamstow, Tottenham and the environs.

  A couple of years ago I met a woman in a Suffolk pub who was very proud of having just bought an Edwardian house in Leytonstone, east London. I told her that her property was almost certainly built as a result of the Cheap Trains Act. She seemed deflated as, I must admit, was my intention. ‘Are you sure it was called the cheap trains act?’ she asked. ‘I mean, as crude as that?’ ‘I’m afraid it was,’ I replied.

  Working men’s fares began to be abolished from the early 1950s, but there is one wispy, ghostly survival of the scheme on the Underground. For most purposes the morning peak, with its more expensive travel, is defined as 4.30 to 9.30 a.m., but in the case of Oyster Card single fares, the morning peak begins at 6.30. It is the less well-paid jobs that require people to travel before 6.30 (you still see men with their tool bags on the first Tubes of the day), so the generous impulse behind the working men’s tickets has not entirely died out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE METROPOLITAN AND ITS ASSOCIATES

  THE HAMMERSMITH & CITY AND THE ‘EXTENSION RAILWAY’

  It was always envisaged, by government and the directors of the Metropolitan, that the railway would expand, and an easterly extension towards Moorgate was authorised even before the opening of the original stretch. In 1864 a Joint Select Committee of both houses of Parliament came out in favour of an ‘inner circuit’, a loop joining the main line termini to the north with those that were emerging to the south in the early 1860s: Victoria, Charing Cross and Cannon Street. To make this loop, the Met would droop down from Moorgate to Tower Hill at the easterly end, and from Paddington towards Brompton at its westerly end. The base of the arch thus created would be a line running along the north bank of the river built by a separate company, the Metropolitan District Railway. The authorising acts were passed in July 1864, and this legislation brought into being what is today the Circle Line … all of which sounds very simple. In reality, it would be a painful process.

  Before we broach the Circle saga, two other extensions of the Met need to be mentioned. The first is the Hammersmith & City Railway – now the western part of the Hammersmith and City Line. It was built and jointly funded by the Metropolitan and the Great Western, even as they were arguing over operation of the Metropolitan. It opened in June 1864, running north on 20-foot-high viaducts from the pretty village of Hammersmith via Shepherd’s Bush to Latimer Road (where there was a connection to a Kensington station via the West London Railway) before proceeding north and east, to connect with the original westerly terminus of the Metropolitan, at Paddington (Bishop’s Road). There it dived underground, eventually enabling its train services to run over, and be entangled with, the easterly extensions of the Metropolitan and the District.

  The Hammersmith & City is an annoying railway – an anomaly or distracting complication, like a hair in the gate of a cinema projector. For example, that connection to west London would allow trains of various operators to run from north to south London in complicated ways. And although built by the Met and Great Western, it was initially owned by a third company: the Hammersmith & City Railway Company, and the line only exists because two of its directors owned land along the route, which they could – and did – sell back to the railway at vast profit.

  The line would feature on Underground maps as part of the Metropolitan, and was therefore coloured purple along with the rest of the Met. But in 1989 it became pink (‘Why do I got to be Mr Pink?’ says Steve Buscemi in Reservoir Dogs), the colour denoting a line running from Hammersmith to Barking. From 2008 its original westerly stretch also doubled as part of the Circle service – an ‘extension’ of the Circle Line, like a piece of Sellotape pulled away from the roll. And one further complication: the original Hammersmith & City Railway was built on the high level.

  It has its charm, though. Royal Oak is like a country branch line dropped down amid the main line approaches to Paddington. It’s as if two very different train sets got mixed up in the same box. Westbourne Park is also countrified, with valanced canopies and fancy ironwork (which is painted a dingy yellow). West of here, it ascends to its viaduct where, 20 foot off the ground, the Westway seeks to emulate it: two scruffy reprobates shouldering their way through a not very pretty streetscape: the one a railway built by corporate buccaneers, the other a road constructed as part of a discredited plan to girdle London with motorways. A lot of streets and squares, built speculatively with the coming of the Hammersmith & City, failed to go ‘up’ as expected. Christian Wolmar notes:

  The squares near Ladbroke Grove station … never managed to attract the kind of people for which they were designed and sank rapidly into multiple occupation, becoming almost as bad as the nearby rookeries of north-west Kensington. It was only with the gentrification process which started a hundred years later, in the 1970s, that these squares started to attract the class for which they had been built.

  People who’d been with me at university in the early Eighties were part of that gentrification process, and I associate it with the smell of dope smoke floating through the shabby-genteel house bordering the H & C.

  As for Hammersmith itself, that’s now a transport hub, but unfortunately cars were invited to the party, so the centre is a roaring roundabout. There are two Underground stations. That serving the District and Piccadilly is on one side of an un-crossable road called Hammersmith Broadway; that serving the Hammersmith & City is on the other side. Whichever exit you emerge from, at whichever station, you are immediately lost.

  Before moving on to the Metropolitan’s painful encirclement of central London in supposed partnership with the District, there is an emerging north-pointing prong that ought to be noted. In April 1868 a line was constructed north from Baker Street by the Metropolitan & St John’s Wood Railway, a subsidiary of the Met that would be incorporated into the parent in 1872. The line went up to Swiss Cottage, occupying for much of the way a single-bore tunnel that only accommodated one train like a deep-level Tube tunnel, even though the line was built on the cut-and-cover principle associated with vault-like tunnels holding two trains. There was barely room to open the outward swinging doors of the Metropolitan carriages, and since there were no corridors connecting the compartments of these carriages, the passenger had just better hope that no prolonged delays occurred within the tunnel – because they would have been prisoners.

  In 1872 a second, parallel, single-bore tunnel was built to serve the line, creating the possibility of two train loads of passengers being trapped. But these little tunnels, emerging into the open at Finchley Road (reached in 1879) were the start of something big. By the early twentieth century it would be possible to think of the
m as two mouseholes in the skirting board of a wall separating two great ballrooms. On the south side was the ballroom of central London and the City; to the north, the ballroom of the suburbs that would grow up alongside this rapidly extending projection of the Metropolitan, suburbs made famous in the Twenties as Metroland. The line was known – and still is known to elderly traditionalists – as ‘The Extension Railway’.

  THE CITY WIDENED

  We are about to broach the fraught saga of the Circle Line, but there is another Metropolitan spin-off that comes first, one that has always appealed to me by the baleful beauty of its name: the City Widened Lines or ‘The Widened Lines’ for short. Its modern legacy is the central core of the Thameslink service, and whereas there are still elderly buffers who speak of ‘The Extension Railway’ (described above), or call the Circle Line ‘The Inner Circle’, you will not find many Londoners who speak of Thameslink as ‘The City Widened’, and if you did find one he’d probably be wearing a bowler hat.

  This is a story of north–south connection, and it begins with the fact that late in 1863 the Great Northern Railway completed a subterranean connection from its terminus at King’s Cross to the tracks of the Metropolitan enabling the Great Northern to run through to the Met’s easterly terminus at Farringdon Street. As mentioned, the Met, in its descent towards the heart of the City, extended in 1865 from Farringdon Street to a station called Moorgate Street (now Moorgate), via Aldersgate Street (now Barbican).

  In making this extension, the Metropolitan also built a connection from Farringdon Street towards an overground railway that had just barged its way into the City from Kent. This railway was the London, Chatham & Dover. In 1860 it had obtained an Act permitting an exception to the ban on railways in central London recommended in 1846. The line would traverse a bridge at Blackfriars before running along a viaduct to a station called Ludgate Hill.

  In proceeding north from the Thames towards Ludgate Hill station, the line crossed over an iron bridge spanning Ludgate Hill itself (between what is now a Waterstone’s and a Santander bank), neatly obliterating any view of St Paul’s from Ludgate Circus or Fleet Street. A thousand people had put their names to a petition against the bridge. To add insult to injury, it carried a small thicket of railway signals as well as regular steam trains. There is a Gustave Doré engraving of the street under the bridge. In the jostling throng every Victorian artefact you would expect seemed present: horses, carts, carriages (including a hearse), top hats, slouch hats, canes. The only item missing is a steam engine – until you see one going over the bridge in the background. In The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales in 1869 a certain J. M. Wilson fumed: ‘That viaduct has utterly spoiled one of the finest street views in the metropolis, and is one of the most unsightly objects ever constructed, in any situation, anywhere in the world.’ But I rather liked it. It was demolished in the late Eighties, and to my mind Ludgate Circus has always looked incomplete without it. But let us follow a London, Chatham & Dover train over that bridge in 1865. On reaching Ludgate Hill it descends into a tunnel and runs north through the new Snow Hill Tunnel to connect with the Metropolitan at Farringdon.

  Engraving by Gustave Doré of the viaduct that used to run over Ludgate Hill. In conjunction with the Snow Hill Tunnel, this route – a spin-off from the Metropolitan Railway – allowed trains to run from the north to the south of England via central London. The viaduct was hated when it was built in the mid 1860’s, since it blocked views of St Paul’s from the west. But the author of this book, who recalls the viaduct from its last years (the late 1980s), liked it.

  Even though the Met was supposed to be concentrating on building the ‘Inner Circle’, it had now made itself into a gateway between north and south London. It envisaged profitable demand for use of this gateway by ‘guest’ railways. The portal offered trains from the north a chance to run through to the south of England or into the heart of the City at Moorgate Street. Trains from the south could run into Ludgate Hill, thus gaining the western part of the City, or head through to the north of England. What trains from the south could not do – at first – was branch right to access the Met station at Moorgate Street.

  Being accessible from the north, Moorgate Street was an attractive prospect for the Midland Railway, whose terminus at St Pancras opened alongside King’s Cross in 1868. The Midland plugged itself into the Met by means of a tunnel under St Pancras. The tunnel started to the north of the station, and involved the excavation of St Pancras churchyard. There were reports of thigh bones and skulls being tossed about as work progressed. A respected architect called Arthur Blomfield was called in to bring some decorum to the site, and his apprentice was Thomas Hardy. In St Pancras Station (2007) Simon Bradley writes: ‘Hardy’s biographers speculate how far this gruesome business may have deepened the writer’s tendency to see the skull beneath the skin of life.’

  In order to accommodate its paying guests, the Metropolitan doubled the two tracks running between King’s Cross and Moorgate Street, these two extra lines running in parallel tunnels or cuttings and coming together at its stations on that stretch. These are the Widened Lines. Just north of Farringdon station, and to the east of Ray Street, there is a wide cutting bounded by another of those brick walls nicely calculated to be just too high for you to see over. So prop your bike against it, and stand on the down-pointing pedal crank. You are looking at the Ray Street Gridiron, a spectacular bridge in a cutting that carries the Metropolitan, the supposed Underground, over the Widened Lines (now Thameslink).

  In 1871 a junction was created from the southern end of the Snow Hill Tunnel towards the Widened Lines, intersecting with them as they run beneath the meat market at Smithfield, which was new at the time. By this means, trains from the south were able to reach Moorgate Street. In 1874 a station was also created at the southern end of the Snow Hill Tunnel: Snow Hill station. It was underneath the new Holborn Viaduct. It was the companion to a station built during the same year at the end of a 300-yard cut-and-cover branch line running from Ludgate Hill to a station giving access to the roadway of Holborn Viaduct. This upper station was called, logically enough, Holborn Viaduct. In 1912 its downtrodden companion was renamed, rather demeaningly, Holborn Viaduct Low Level. The upper station was destroyed in the Blitz. The shell of the lower station can still be seen at the southern end of the Snow Hill Tunnel from a Thameslink train.

  Anyone standing on the platforms of the Metropolitan at King’s Cross, Farringdon, Aldersgate Street or Moorgate would have been diverted by the site of a variety of ‘guests’. The Great Northern and the Midland ran commuters into Moorgate and operated services of passengers or goods to the south of England. In the late nineteenth century a service ran from Liverpool to Paris via the Widened Lines and a steamer from Folkestone. (Depart Liverpool 8 a.m.; arrive Paris 10.50 p.m.) But there wasn’t much call for that sort of thing. London was too beguiling. People didn’t want to travel through it without getting off.

  There were goods sidings under Smithfield Market, and condensing steam engines – and later diesels – pulled wagons full of frozen meat from Paddington to there until July 1962. Those sidings now form a subterranean car park between what remains of the market and St Bart’s Hospital. Walk down the winding ramp, and as you descend you will see that the walls become arcaded, like the station walls of the old parent company; they become excitingly Metropolitanised.

  From the south, the main users were the London, Chatham & Dover and the South Eastern Railway, whose chairmen were respectively James Staats Forbes and Edward Watkin, two perennial adversaries whose names are going to crop up in the Circle trauma.

  The operations of the Widened Lines, as viewed from the Met platforms, must have seemed archaic after 1905, when the Metropolitan began to be electrified: all those filthy guest engines trying their best – sort of – to stifle their emissions, and passenger carriages still lit by oil. (Steam would survive on the Widened Lines until 1962.) In 1916 the Snow Hill Tunnel was closed to passenger
trains, so those from the south terminated at Holborn Viaduct, and those from the north could only go as far as Moorgate.

  In 1971 the Snow Hill Tunnel was closed entirely. In 1988 it was re-opened for the purpose of running trains from Bedford to Brighton. In 1990 City Thameslink station was opened, a sprawling underground complex taking the place of Holborn Viaduct and Ludgate Hill stations. ‘It’s very Blade Runner,’ a PR for the station told me shortly after the opening. She also said that Thameslink trains were deliberately garish, so as to lure drivers stuck on the M1, which runs alongside the line around Radlett. But I don’t think the overcrowded Thameslink service could handle any more passengers today. As for garishness, what I like about the Widened Lines in their previous incarnation is the absence of that quality. Surely it was never summer on the Widened Lines. It was dark mornings and dark evenings; damp worsted, bowler hats, tightly furled umbrellas, smoke fumes and steam, cigarettes and a stiff whisky in the Holborn Viaduct Hotel – and more of those every day for the bowler-hatted commuter who has reached the limit of his promotion, a man who might, in his cups, lament: ‘The City has not widened sufficiently for my liking.’