Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  The City & South London was also the first British passenger railway to offer only one class. In A History of London Transport Barker and Robbins suggest that ‘The idea of a uniform fare was copied from the New York elevated railroad’, and here was the start of the American cultural influence on the London Underground that would soon take the form of direct involvement by actual Americans.

  The City & South London initially had a flat single fare of 2d., but it was the Central London Railway, opened ten years later, that would be nicknamed ‘The Tuppenny Tube’ for its flat fare of the same amount. The Central was so-called by the Daily Mail, which no doubt would have christened the City & South London ‘The Tuppenny Tube’ had the paper existed in 1890, but it was not founded until 1896, the age of mass media lagging slightly behind the age of mass transit.

  The stations on the City & South London were small but pretty, with cupolas to accommodate the winding gear of the small and claustrophobic hydraulic lifts. With these domes the stations looked like little observatories, and you can see the effect at Kennington, the only surviving surface building of the original construction. The tunnels varied between 10 foot 2 and 10 foot 6 in diameter – narrower than all subsequent Tubes, and they would have to be widened in the 1920s.

  The carriages were about 26 feet long, 7½ high and just over 6 feet wide – in other words, narrow and low. They featured longitudinal benches, as in Shillibeer’s omnibus. Most of the seating on the early Tubes was longitudinal (you sat with your back to the side of the carriage, as on the Waltzer at the fairground) and it is so once again today.

  The benches were padded. Each was meant to hold sixteen people, but would often hold twenty, with another twenty standing in the gangway in between. Bear in mind that all this could be happening in the smoking carriage, where most people would have been smoking cigars and pipes rather than cigarettes. There were no straps to hang from, but there were handrails, as in modern Tube trains. Above the benches were narrow slits of window – so narrow that from a distance the carriages looked like goods wagons. The passengers called the carriages ‘padded cells’, and Punch christened the line ‘the sardine box railway’.

  One of the carriages is now displayed in the London Transport Museum, where it is overseen by an actor wearing the dark double-breasted uniform of a City & South London guard (making him, incidentally, by far the best-dressed man in the London Transport Museum). The actor told me that some people experienced claustrophobia when sitting in the carriage even as displayed, with its end-door propped permanently open in the bright and airy museum. ‘Quite a fug builds up in there,’ he said. He believed that, when the line first opened, clerks heading for the City would get out at the stop just before the river – London Bridge – and walk over the bridge, nonchalantly remarking that they wanted to take a brief constitutional before starting work, when in fact they were scared of going under the river on the train. The railway was more than 100 feet down under the Thames and never less than 45 feet underground along its length.

  The actor also told me that the window slits had been clear glass, but the passengers had found the view of the passing tunnel rings disturbing – ‘quite stroboscopic, I expect’ – so the glass was made opaque, which in turn increased the claustrophobia, and proper widows would be provided on all subsequent Underground trains.

  Passengers entered and exited the carriages by means of end-doors. This was partly because the sides were taken up by the continuous bench seats. All the early tubes would use end doors – called bulkhead doors – and these would lead onto small platforms at the carriage ends, where a guard would stand. He would sometimes allow passengers to travel on these platforms, with, on at least one occasion, fatal results, but he would not let them off until the train came to a complete stop in a station, whereupon he would open a lattice gate to the side. For this chap to have controlled entry and exit of passengers from a position within the carriage would have taken up too much space, and mid-carriage entry and exit would only become practical with the refinement of automatically controlled sliding air doors which would be pioneered on the Bakerloo in 1920, and rolled out on a large scale in the Standard Tube stock of 1923, at which point Tube trains started to look like Tube trains. Station names were written on the dimly lit platform walls, but since there were no carriage windows, guards called out the names.

  The railway used the ‘Third Rail’ system of electrification, like all the early Tubes. (But it would soon be replaced across the network by another system even more exciting – Fourth Rail!) The electric locomotives were under-powered and strained to draw the three carriages coupled behind. They looked like two upright pianos with their backs touching. There were two engine men in case one of them fainted or died, the ‘dead man’s handle’ of the later Tubes (a fail-safe device that stops the train if the driver does not maintain manual pressure on a lever) not having been perfected. The engines exerted a magnetic fascination, and in a chapter of The Railway Lover’s Companion (1963) called ‘Tuppenny Tubes’, C. Hamilton Ellis wrote that ‘In 1892 a passenger fell off a leading car platform, where the conductor took people to “watch the engine” … The unfortunate passenger was cut up in the tunnel and the horrified conductor fled into hiding.’ The year before, at Oval, a man had also got his head stuck in the gate of a lift that was ascending. As the lift gate rose towards a girder, it cut his head off. However (and it’s a big ‘however’ as far as that man is concerned), the safety record of the railway would be generally excellent.

  In 1890 Punch wrote: ‘[The train is] so packed with people that getting in or out was a regular scrimmage. We entirely endorse the railway company’s advertisement that it is “the warmest line in London”.’ John Betjeman would later recall that the railway ‘smelt of feet’, and the carriages may have continued to smell of feet after they were taken out of service in the 1920s because some of them found use as changing rooms beside the playing fields of southern England.

  The railway followed the streets to avoid having to buy the freeholds of properties. As a result, it found itself pointing east when it arrived at its terminus in King William Street, where the two tunnels were built on top of each other so as to stay within the width of the road. If it had extended from there, it would have ended up in Wapping, and there wasn’t much money in going there, as we have just seen. So ten years after it opened, the directors of the railway doubled back, as it were, to the previous station, Borough, for a rethink. From there a new tunnel forged its way to London Bridge (creating an interchange with the mainline station). It then went underneath the old tunnel that kinked east towards King William Street, and progressed to the heart of the City: first to Bank, then to Moorgate, where it arrived in February 1900. By June of that year it had also opened through to Clapham Common via Clapham Road (now Clapham North). The hallmark of the City & South London, remember, was smallness, and to stay within the width of the road those Clapham stations below ground were hardly wider than the two tracks brought in to a single tunnel. Grudgingly aware that it had to accommodate the passengers somewhere, narrow island platforms were fitted between the tracks, and today everyone waiting at these stations in rush hour thinks they’re going to be jostled into the path of the trains.

  The abandoned tunnel between Borough and King William Street was used as an air-raid shelter in the Second World War, and if you stand more or less in the middle of the northbound Northern Line platform at London Bridge today, you can see the old northbound tunnel to King William Street through some ventilation shafts over your head. The old tunnel is now used to ventilate the new one, although its reputation would suggest it didn’t have much air to spare. (Spurned King William Street is now called Monument Street; an office block called Regis House sits atop the old station.)

  By the time the City & South London had reached Bank on its crawl north, the Waterloo & City Railway had already got there, and these two would be joined soon after by the Central London Railway and the Great Northern & City Railway (for eac
h of which see below). At Moorgate the City & South London met the Metropolitan and built its headquarters: a handsome brick and Portland stone building that still stands, forming the most impressive part of the modern Moorgate station. It bears the company’s arms: a carving of a bridge over water, the two arches of the bridge also resembling Tube tunnels. It shows what the company was about: connecting the City with South London.

  In burrowing into the heart of the City, the company had risked further enormous capital expenditure in order to increase fare revenue, but in spite of high passenger numbers its profitability was not improved. By its arrival at Bank and Moorgate, however, the railway contributed to an important social effect. It would speed up the process by which the City of London was being turned from a place to live and work into a place to work only. In 1851 the resident population of the City was 129,000, many of whom were shopkeepers, tailors, craftsmen and artisans, who ‘lived over the shop’. By 1901 the population had shrunk to 27,000. Most of the City was rebuilt as offices over that period, creating a target for the armies of commuters that the Underground would serve. Today a brass plaque marked ‘The Heart of the City’ stands at the eastern end of Poultry, EC2. It declares, almost boastfully, ‘This is the part of London where over 350,000 people work by day, where there are a mere 5,000 residents and caretakers by night.’ It had become what Peter Ackroyd calls, in London: The Biography, ‘a mere counting house’. The biggest counting house in the world, mind you. As Mark Twain wrote in 1896, ‘One little wee bunch of houses in London, one little wee spot, is the centre of the globe, the heart of the globe, and the machinery that moves the world is located there. It is called the City.’

  On its arrival at Bank, incidentally, the City & South London’s directors had threatened to demolish the church of St Mary Woolnoth, but after a public outcry the company built its station in the crypt of the church, the bodies being transferred to the City of London cemetery at Ilford. Therefore St Mary Woolnoth doesn’t have a crypt. Or you could say that its crypt is Bank station. Bank station would be rebuilt with the arrival of the Central Line, but it would remain entangled with the underneath of the church, and in the 1980s a photographer friend of mine took a photograph of a blackboard in one of the station passageways, indicating ‘EXIT’ with a hand-drawn arrow. It points into a very medieval-looking aperture, a way out leading through an unreconstructed part of the old crypt.

  Bank station was hewn by the City & South London Railway out of what had been the crypt of St Mary Woolnoth church. In the late-Eighties, some of the exits were still pretty sepulchral.

  The conjunction is almost too good, or bad, to be true, given the connections that have been made between the commuting life and a living death. These famous lines from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot –

  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

  I had not thought death had undone so many.

  Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled

  And each one fixed his eyes before his feet.

  Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

  To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

  With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

  – form practically a history of the City & South London Railway, which was fated (or perhaps I should say ‘doomed’) to become the Bank branch of the Northern Line and which we leave for the moment, before it starts its creep northwards towards Euston (which it would reach in 1907) and south to Morden (1926).

  CHAPTER SIX

  THREE MORE TUBES

  THE DRAIN (THE WATERLOO & CITY RAILWAY)

  The apparent success of the City & South London triggered an avalanche of bills for Tube railways, and in 1892 a Joint Select Committee of Parliament set out some ground rules. It was recommended that tunnels should have a minimum diameter of 11 foot 6; also that free way leave under public streets be granted, providing the service should include ‘a sufficient number of cheap and convenient trains’. If a railway went under private property, the company should ‘be allowed to acquire a way leave, instead of purchasing the freehold of the land’, subject to compensation for damage. But the early Tubes still tended to follow the public streets in order to save money, hence some tortuous curves.

  One of the first of those applicants to be authorised in 1892 was the Waterloo & City Railway. Whereas the history of the London Underground is generally very fiddly, the history of the Waterloo & City is blessedly self-contained and simple. It is today what it always was – a line from Waterloo to Bank whose extreme functionality is reflected in the nickname by which it has always been known: the Drain.

  The Drain was built by the London & South Western Railway for a very simple reason: its London terminus, Waterloo, was too far from the City. It was much cheaper to build than the City & South London, being much shorter. It is by far the shortest Tube line, at 1½ miles long, and it has the equally elemental characteristic of being the only one entirely underground. (The Victoria Line is almost entirely underground, except for an overground depot.) How did they get the trains down there? By means of a lift. Just south of Waterloo station, you will see the hole in the ground (normally covered by a grating) where Waterloo & City carriages are raised and lowered before and after being removed by lorry for servicing. Bad weather, therefore, cannot disrupt the metronomic existence of its regular users, but river water does come in, both from the Thames and from its tributary the Walbrook. I have a trainspotter-ish DVD about the line with the usual nasally, number-crunching commentary, but when one of the line engineers shows the presenter the amount of seepage coming in, someone off screen (the cameraman, perhaps) exclaims ‘Jesus Christ!’ and this hasn’t quite been cut out.

  This may be why the line is nicknamed ‘The Drain’, but more likely is the fact that it was built when Tube railways were still a disturbing novelty. In the National Archives at Kew there is a memorandum relating to the opening of the line on which an official of the London & South Western has scrawled, ‘Will passengers consent to be squirted through a drainpipe?’ Having been so squirted towards Bank, they then had to walk up a long incline to reach the surface. This was created because the Corporation of London wouldn’t allow the construction of the building that a lift would have required, and such a building at this spot would have been prohibitively expensive anyway. The slope was always resented, especially on Monday morning, and it was supplemented by the installation of the Underground’s first Trav-o-lator – or moving walkway – in 1960.

  The Waterloo & City offers the commuting experience distilled to its essence. It goes from the quintessential overground commuter station, Waterloo – the only large terminus in the city with no hotel, such is its dedication to sending people home for the night – to the quintessential Underground commuter’s station, Bank: the ‘apex of the Underground railway’, according to Sigurd Frosterus in his book London Rhapsody (1903). There are only those two stations, so that the name of the railway is no longer than a complete list of its destinations, a pleasing state of affairs that would be spoilt if the station at Blackfriars that has occasionally been mooted were ever to be built. At those times when absolutely no commuting occurs – Saturday evening and all Sunday – the line shuts, which is why there is an ominous little dagger next to it on the pocket Tube maps, warning you to ‘Check before you travel’.

  It is so easy to appear eccentric when using the Waterloo & City. For example, you could try going the opposite way to everyone else. In other words, Bank to Waterloo in the morning peak, Waterloo to Bank in the evening. (Or, when everyone gets off the train at Bank, you could stay on, and go back to Waterloo.) It might be an idea to set yourself up with a flat near Bank and a job near Waterloo. You would more or less always have the train to yourself. But be warned, both sides of the Trav-o-lator, or moving walkway, at Bank run in the same direction – out of the station and into the street – in the morning peak. So if you were so mad as to want to descend towards – as opposed to ascend from – the Waterloo & City platforms
at Bank in the morning, you would have to use the long slope. I once asked a ticket platform guard at Bank why both tracks of the Travel-o-lator didn’t run towards the Drain platforms in the evening peak (because they don’t; they run alternately then). He said, ‘Because there’d be an almighty bloody pile-up at the barriers, wouldn’t there?’

  In spite of its being ‘The Drain’, the tunnels of the line were wider than those of the City & South London. The first trains – which were still in service forty years later – were painted a pretty chocolate and salmon, and had proper windows in spite of there being nothing to see. The carriages had transverse seats, which makes for a narrower gangway and slower loading and unloading; this was perhaps because they were built by a main-line railway company, transverse being the norm on the main-lines. The most significant thing about the trains is that they were a primitive form of Electrical Multiple Unit – an early British use of a type of train becoming common in America, and those on the Drain would be of American make.

  The Oxford Companion to British Railway History says:

  Diesel- or electric-powered vehicles are said to be able to operate as multiple units when they can be coupled to others for operation from one driving position as a single train. The driver then has control of power and breaking throughout, so permitting the other driving positions to be left unmanned.

  To put it another way, a multiple unit is a set of vehicles that include driving cabs, motors or control units connected to motors, and each of these vehicles also includes passenger seats. Essentially, multiple units – which can be electrical or diesel-powered – are trains consisting of motorised carriages. There is no locomotive. It is therefore hard to tell which is the front until they start moving. (When my son, aged three, first saw a Tube train he said, ‘It has no face.’) Multiple units look unheroic, and their rise has been blamed for the decline of trainspotting. The ones that run below ground are particularly hard to love. They are deliberately un-aerodynamic, their flat front being designed to push air through the tunnels as an aid to ventilation. In The Subterranean Railway Christian Wolmar suggests that the Underground lost out to the main-line railways after the Second World War because its ‘clean electric powered trains’ elicited no sympathy, as opposed to ‘the grimy dirty steam engines that were still to be seen throughout the rail network’. The functionality of multiple units might have a subtly lowering effect on the spirits of London commuters, and yet whether on the Underground or on the main-lines coming into the southern termini, they are the pistons that have powered London for over a hundred years.