Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  The first controversy was over the effect the line would have on Hampstead Heath, which it passed beneath on its way from Hampstead to Golders Green. Even though the tunnels were to be 200 feet below ground, the Hampstead Heath Protection Society predicted they would loosen tree roots and suck away moisture. The Borough of Hampstead eventually gave permission for the line, providing a station were built between Hampstead and Golders Green, so the railway might serve the Heath by bringing visitors to it. This was Bull & Bush, which, as we have seen, was built but never opened.

  The Hampstead Tube had also come up against the social reformer and philanthropist Henrietta Barnett, owner of a weekend cottage on the Heath, and the great matriarch of ‘Not in My Backyard’. She counteracted the development of Golders Green by raising funds to buy 80 acres of land to the east of the proposed station, and here the Hampstead Heath Extension was created. On a further 250 acres of land she founded Hampstead Garden Suburb, the rationale being that if the countryside of north London were to be developed, then it would be developed in the right way. ‘The Suburb’, as it is known to its residents, was a spin-off from the Garden City movement. It was meant to provide homes for all classes – a vision most emphatically not fulfilled, as anyone who tried to open, say, a pub within its boundaries would quickly discover. The Arts and Crafts houses, divided by hedges and not walls, are populated exclusively by the upper middle classes.

  It was an anti-Underground development, and indeed most of its houses are a long walk from Golders Green tube station. It seems odd therefore that Frank Pick should have bought a house in the Suburb, except when you recall that his own doctrine of ‘Fitness for Purpose’ had its roots in the Arts and Crafts Movement. (He lived on Wildwood Road, where there is a blue plaque, but he is not listed among the notable residents on the Wikipedia page about the suburb, whereas Vanessa Feltz, for example, is.)

  Meanwhile, Golders Green was growing fast. Whereas there had been precisely one house – a farmhouse – when the Tube arrived, by the time of the First World War there were 500. In the 1920s Golders Green was promoted by the Underground Group posters – ‘A Place of Delightful Prospects’ – as looking more like Hampstead Garden Suburb than it actually did. It was a dilute version of the Suburb, with smaller, less cottage-y houses, fewer trees and narrower roads. The trains running from there were always packed, even though there was no option of taking a Bank branch train from Golders Green, because the two components of the Northern Line were not yet integrated. You always had to change at Euston if you wanted to go to the City from Golders Green. That was about to be rectified, and not to help people who needed to get to work, so much as to help people who didn’t have a job at all.

  In 1921 unemployment rose sharply. This prompted the coalition government of Lloyd George to pass the Trade Facilities Act, by which the Treasury was enabled to provide loans at preferential rates (‘cheap money’) to subsidise job creation. It was the start of an era of heavy government investment in the Underground, much of it lobbied for by that skilled networker Lord Ashfield, who had made useful contacts while President of the Board of Trade during the First World War.

  The first project for which he obtained finance was the joining of the Hampstead Tube to the City & South London, the first connection being made by the burrowing of a line between Camden (bifurcation point of the former) and Euston, terminus of the latter. This junction could be thought of as a pair of scissors opened out. It was designed to enable ease of flow from two northern lines to two southern ones, or vice versa. That sounds (relatively) simple, but if you look at a diagram of the tunnels … it’s like an Escher drawing. Follow any one tunnel with your eye, and it immediately goes somewhere you didn’t expect, and this over-ambitious entanglement is the reason your train almost always has to wait before entering Camden. The link was opened in April 1924, the too narrow tunnels of the City & South London having been widened to facilitate it.

  In 1924 the line to Golders Green was extended to Edgware. In fact, Edgware was already served by a main-line railway – the Great Northern – but it was the coming of the Underground that promoted it from village to suburb (all right then, ‘Garden Village’). The extension caused fury in Hampstead, where southbound trains began to arrive fully loaded with the hoi polloi of rapidly growing Edgware, Burnt Oak, Colindale, Hendon, Brent and Golders Green. On the journey to work dignity could not necessarily be maintained. In 1915 Ashfield had declared overcrowding to be ‘a permanent feature of the rush hour operation of trains’. It was the price to be paid for the alleviation of congestion on the streets. At the time of writing, overcrowding is worse than ever in the peak hours as a result of the rapidly rising population of the city, and it has been a common feature of the off-peak since the introduction of the Travelcard in 1983.

  In 1926 the two parts of the nascent Northern Line were also nipped together to the south, compounding the operation complexity. This was done by means of a link from Charing Cross (now Embankment station) on the Hampstead Tube to Kennington on the City & South London, with a new station – Waterloo – incorporated on the way. An under-river loop had originally been created at Charing Cross-now-Embankment so that it could function as the southern end of the railway. Trains coming into the station would go round this U-bend and head north again. Now the loop became superfluous, but part of it was retained for through-running: hence the extreme curvature of the northbound Northern Line platforms at Embankment. (The abandoned, under-river part of the loop was breached by bombs that fell on the bed of the Thames in the Second World War, but floodgates activated during air raids to protect the Tubes running under the river had come into play, and the line was not flooded.)

  In conjunction with these works, the new joint line was extended south beyond Clapham Common to the village (but not for long) of Morden, with six new stations created on the way. (Whereas the stations on the northern extension were in homely, bucolic style so as to fit in with the garden village fantasy, the ones to the south were more distinguished, and we will be meeting their architect, Charles Holden, shortly.)

  The extension north beyond Golders Green was above ground except for a tunnel between Hendon and Colindale; the southerly one was below ground. Here was a deep-level Tube reaching far into the south London suburbs, and the tunnel between East Finchley and Morden via Bank – that being the long way round – was the longest in the world at 17½ miles, and remained so until the opening of the Channel Tunnel. Why deep-level? Because it ran through territory already built up. Why was it already built up? Because it was served by the main line Southern Railway, which had agreed to the Morden extension as a quid pro quo for the District not proceeding from Wimbledon to Sutton.

  In The Man Who Built London Transport, Christian Barman writes that, ‘The prospect of having to work a double train service starting on a single joint line to diverge on to a pair of lines, and then re-uniting on the other side of London to run on a single line again, was not received with much enthusiasm by the operating men.’ There would have to be a great deal of ‘weaving in and out of trains’, partly because those going to the City would take ninety seconds longer to reach Camden Town than those via the West End. A friend who works for the Paris Metro tells me that the signallers on that thoroughly rational system, involving lines that in almost every case start from point A and finish at point B, with no divergences to points C and D, are in awe of the men who signal the Northern Line. They would appreciate taking on such a challenge themselves, but only for an afternoon or so, by way of a short intellectual game. They wouldn’t care to do it day in, day out, for decades. A man who worked for the Underground once told me that if anyone complained persistently about the line, they would be invited to come to the control room at Coburg Street to watch the signallers at work. ‘They expect to see a lot of blokes lounging around drinking coffees and having a laugh. When they see the intensity of concentration involved, they usually shut up.’

  The joining of the two lines might have been desig
ned to create operating difficulties, and in the Eighties and Nineties, this together with other problems caused by an ageing train fleet caused Dick Murray, transport correspondent of the Evening Standard, to begin referring to the Northern as the ‘Misery Line’, a name that stuck.

  The south-pointing extension was, like the developments at the northern end, funded by a Trade Facilities grant designed to counteract unemployment and economic depression, a fact poignantly attested to by the creation of what are commonly called ‘suicide pits’ beneath the tracks in its stations. Officially, they are called ‘anti-suicide pits’, which sounds less like an inducement to kill yourself, but then again, the pessimistic purpose of these trenches between the running rails was to facilitate the removal of dead bodies rather than the saving of lives. Yes, you might fall directly into the pit, the incoming train going above you, but you’d almost certainly encounter one of the two electrified rails on the way. The Morden pits were 1 foot 4 inches deep. The ones that spread across the network in the 1930s were 2 foot deep. They do not exist on the cut-and-cover lines, where the under-frame of the trains is supposed to provide ‘greater clearance’.

  After an inquest into an Underground suicide in 1921, the Westminster Coroner observed, ‘There was something about the roar and rush of the Tube train which was terribly fascinating to a person if he were alone on the platform.’ Alone-ness may be an important consideration. Two hundred people try to kill themselves under Tube trains every year, of whom half are successful. The number has not risen commensurate with the great increase in Tube usage of recent years, and my friend Stuart, who works on the Underground, says this is ‘because people are embarrassed about doing it in front of a crowd’. He added, hauntingly, ‘On a Sunday night back in the late Sixties, it was only you and the driver anywhere east of King’s Cross.’ In-house at the Underground, they are known as ‘one-unders’ or ‘jumpers’. But in her novel King Solomon’s Carpet Barbara Vine writes: ‘Even those who cannot dive, who would not dream of diving into water, dive, not jump, in front of the oncoming train.’ I cannot say whether this is true.

  The new, joined-up line we are dealing with continued to be known by its two earlier names, although it was billed as a double act to the extent that posters would advertise ‘Charing Cross – For Pleasure; Bank – For Business’. Portmanteau names were suggested: Mordenware, Medgway, Edgmorden, Edgmor. Whichever Railway Magazine journalist had described ‘Bakerloo’ as a ‘gutter title’ would have been spinning in his grave – providing he were dead, that is. ‘Northern Line’ was settled on in 1937, when it was being further extended, this time once again in a northerly direction (from Archway).

  THE PICCADILLY LINE (OR THE PICK-ADILLY LINE)

  If the extensions to the Northern Line were the work of Ashfield, the roughly contemporaneous extensions to the Piccadilly were driven through by Frank Pick.

  The spur to action was the blockage at Finsbury Park, which – it will be remembered – was the northern terminus of the Big Tube and the Piccadilly Line. It was also a station of the Great Northern main line, and any passenger wanting to proceed north from Finsbury Park had to either go by bus or tram – causing a rush-hour scrimmage every day as thousands of commuters changed mode – or use the Great Northern’s trains. The company had made sure of this by an Act of Parliament in 1902 banning Underground extensions beyond Finsbury Park. By 1923 Frank Pick had risen to Assistant Managing Director of the Underground Group; the Great Northern was part of the London & North Eastern Railway; and there was a public campaign against its Finsbury Park veto. Pick arranged for photographs of the rush-hour scrimmages to be distributed to the press, and in 1925 the LNER caved in.

  Pick began lobbying for an extension of the Piccadilly, and the funding for this would come not from the Trade Facilities Act but from equally dour-sounding legislation providing cheap money for job creation schemes: the Development (Loan Guarantees and Grants) Act was passed by the government of Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, in response to another spike in employment. It might be objected that most of the unemployment was in the north of England, but unemployed industrial workers did migrate to London to work on the extensions, which required tunnel rings, cabling and concrete produced in the north.

  Pick’s final plan for the Piccadilly involved an extension northwards to Cockfosters and westwards from Hammersmith beside the overcrowded District Line stretch towards Hounslow and Uxbridge, the Piccadilly trains running as expresses between Hammersmith and Acton Town. The plan would also involve the rebuilding of fifteen Piccadilly stations in central London.

  Twenty-two tunnelling shields were used in the construction of the northern extension, which took just three years to build: between 1930 and 1933. It stands in relation to the two suburban branches of the London & North Eastern Railway (to Welwyn and to Hertford) like the middle stump of a cricket wicket, and Pick made the case that it would not therefore steal passengers from those branches. Rather, it would create its own passengers in an area where there was ‘an entire absence of development’. The two branch lines are still there (operated by First Capital Connect and National Express East Anglia), and the Piccadilly still runs between them. If you step out of, say, Arnos Grove station and walk about, you can see the Edwardian villas that the big railway brought, and the Thirties semis the Tube brought, although according to the man at the ticket barrier, ‘It still felt rural up here until the 1960s. There were lots of gaps between the houses. It was a great place to grow up because you still had bits of fields and trees, and then there were the marshalling yards and goods depots of the railway – I liked all that.’ Today the big railway lacks all glamour. New Southgate station is a hellish bunker. The adjacent Victorian Gothic building that used to be the railway hotel now has buddleia growing out of it, and a sign proclaims ‘Cars Bought for Cash’ … Whereas Arnos Grove Underground station, with its circular ticket hall, remains elegant, and contains a shrine to the man who designed it, whom we will be meeting in a minute. But first, a verdict on the Piccadilly Line as a railway.

  The Pick plan combined expansion with the complete closure of three stations: Brompton Road, Down Street and York Road. Down Street is in Mayfair, and the locals were too posh for the Tube. At York Road, located in the fly-blown territory north of King’s Cross, the opposite was the case. All human life is on the Piccadilly; the line is too cluttered with stations, having originated from three railways serving the congested area of central London, and having then been extended. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that it should be the line that since 1977 has served Heathrow. When the British Airports Authority first proposed its Heathrow Express service from Paddington in 1988, London Transport responded with its own plan to run Tube trains express to the airport, partly using District Line tracks, which would have provided the fastest access by Underground. This ambitious and expensive proposal did not stop the Heathrow Express, which I refuse to use because of the television screen that blares at you the whole way. I stick with the Tube, and, being a north Londoner, any Heathrow flight I take is always preceded by – and often exceeded by – an hour and half on the Piccadilly.

  HOLDEN

  Arnos Grove station was designed by Charles Holden, and a portrait photograph of him is placed behind a window in a now disused ticket booth of the station. The booth was of the type called a passimeter. These stood like islands in the concourses of the inter-war Tube stations, and tickets could be dispensed through windows on either side. The early ones were connected to turnstiles, and a device – the actual passimeter – would count the number of passengers going through. Where they survive, they are not in use for selling tickets because (an indictment of modern London, this) they cannot be made bulletproof. Their function was to speed ‘passenger flow’ in the efficient and logical stations designed by the man in the photograph.

  You can see why Charles Holden appealed to Frank Pick, who as Assistant Managing Director of the Underground group had broadened his artistic interest to include station architectu
re, and it’s for the very same reason you wouldn’t have wanted to attempt a night on the town with either of them. Holden, like Pick, was from the north – Bolton in his case, although he’d moved to Welwyn Garden City, the model for Hampstead Garden Suburb, where Pick resided. Like Pick, he was a teetotaller from a nonconformist family. They had met in 1915, at the inaugural meeting of the Design and Industries Association, which promoted the doctrine of elegant utility: ‘fitness for purpose’.

  Arnos Grove station, designed by Charles Holden, with all the geometrical purity that characterised his work on the inter-war Piccadilly and Northern Line extensions. This station contains a small shrine to Holden, including a photograph showing a forbiddingly puritanical-looking man with small glasses and a red goatee beard. But he always put the passenger first, and his stations are the most beautiful buildings in the suburbs in which they occur.

  Christian Barman’s description of Holden suggests another unworldly figure after the fashion of the calligrapher Johnston. He evokes

  a man of short stature with a calm, earnest face enlivened by the reflections from the round-rimmed gold spectacles he was never seen without. From each side of a lofty forehead, the forehead of a great chemist or mathematician, the hair hung down almost vertically; the little beard, meticulously trimmed, suggested an unimpressive chin.

  Holden ‘spoke little, in a soft, colourless voice’. The picture at Arnos Grove, being in black and white, spares the viewer the colour of that goatee beard: bright red. The fact that Holden’s architectural practice had specialised in spartan and light-filled hospital interiors makes him seem more rather than less forbidding, but when it came to his work for the Underground, he always put the passenger first.