Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  Ken Livingstone was elected to the GLC in 1973, representing Norwood in south London. He opposed the ringways and was perhaps elected because of the plan to build them. As he writes in his memoir, If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It (1988): ‘My own campaign in Norwood was greatly helped when the Tory GLC member made the mistake of voting in favour of a last-minute change in the motorway plans, which would have re-routed them through the middle of the constituency he was asking to return him to County Hall.’ In allying himself against the road-builders, his even more left-wing colleague ‘Red’ Ted Knight suggested to Livingstone that he was consorting with ‘middle-class environmentalists’, but then ‘Red Ted’ attended a number of meetings with ‘Red Ken’, and he saw the popularity of the anti-car cause. In 1977 they would both disrupt the inquiry into the plans for widening the Archway Road, a proposal strongly opposed by Red Ted, who had become Parliamentary candidate for Hornsey.

  You can’t win votes on a road-building platform in London. Too many houses have to be knocked down. In the late Seventies it was clear that, as Stephen Joseph says, ‘the focus had to go back to public transport’, and it would do so when Labour won the GLC again in 1981 and Livingstone replaced Horace Cutler as its leader.

  Livingstone introduced the policy on which Labour had campaigned: ‘Fares Fair’. Bus and Tube fares were cut by a third, with the aim of increasing the use of public transport from its static level, and of counteracting the fares increases of previous years. It was partly paid for by an increase in the surcharge levied by the GLC on the London boroughs, but the Conservative-controlled borough of Bromley, where there was no Tube station (Bromley-by-Bow on the District Line is not in Bromley), objected all the way to the House of Lords, which ruled in their favour. In March 1982 the GLC was obliged to double fares, and whereas the reduction had increased use of buses and Tubes by half a million, the fare increase reduced it by a million. In 1982 a compromise was reached, resulting in a net fare reduction of 25 per cent, and this together with the emergence of the economy from recession and London’s increasing attractiveness as a tourist destination marks the point at which Tube use ceased gently declining and became a steeply rising curve.

  London Underground managers were wary of another part of the Livingstone package: the system of zoning that would allow the introduction of the Travelcard for use on bus, tube and main line – a ‘coarsening’ as they saw it, of the existing and more numerous fare gradations, and one that would simply lead to a reduction in revenue. They were wrong. According to Stephen Joseph, ‘The argument that simplification drives growth was not accepted by the Underground people, and when Livingstone was proved right, he became sceptical of transport models that extrapolated past trends into the future.’ In other words, Livingstone’s tremendous boldness – his cockiness, you might say – comes from that victory. Are we to blame Livingstone for Tube overcrowding? In part, yes, but as Sir John Eliot had observed in 1955, while Chairman of the London Transport Executive: ‘They’re not crammed in. They cram themselves in.’

  The system of zoning would lead logically to the introduction of the modern ticket barriers from 1987 (the Underground Ticketing System, or UTS), in that it allowed the software in the ticket gates to be relatively simple. Although the widespread introduction of automatic barriers was an innovation, Underground stations have always been screened off by some sort of gate where tickets are checked. You have never been able to just saunter onto the platforms and look at the trains, or meet someone off a train. That’s a shame, but at least the determining logic is infallible: you can’t check passengers’ tickets on an Underground train. But now barriers are being introduced on main-line inter-city stations, and Richard Malins, a consultant in railway revenue protection, campaigns against this. ‘It is extending an urban railway principle into inter-urban railways, and it’s not necessary,’ he says. Automatic barriers are not civilised, and there is always a moment of tension when you approach, although if you push the paddles (as the ticket gates are called) they will open as easily as a curtain.

  To continue with barriers for a moment … at first, the ones on the Underground were only in Zone 1, where most journeys start or end. Gradually they spread to those places where manual ticket checks were being evaded, and if you found ticket barriers in your local suburban station soon after 1987, then, yes, an aspersion was being cast on your area. The barriers were in turn a necessary precondition of electronic payment; in other words the Oyster Card, which was introduced in 2003, when my son was nine. He immediately insisted I start using the Oyster, but I didn’t trust it. With typical boldness, however, Livingstone bullied middle-aged technophobes like me into using Oysters by making the cash fares sometimes twice as expensive, with the result that Oysters are now used on 85 per cent of public transport journeys in the capital.

  Fares Fair was a popular policy with Londoners, but Livingstone barely had time to take a bow before Mrs Thatcher brought the curtain down on him. She had fought the General Election of 1983 promising to abolish the GLC – in other words, to abolish Ken Livingstone – and she duly won, whereupon the functions of the GLC were distributed across a range of obscure and undemocratic bodies. In 1984 something called London Regional Transport was established as a quango, with something called London Underground Limited a quango within it. As a result of the policies of Livingstone, passenger numbers continued to rise, paradoxically enabling reforms more to the liking of a Conservative mindset. Staffing levels were reduced, through the extension of one-man operation of trains and the contracting out of aspects of the business. The next set of modifications were caused by disaster.

  On 18 November 1987 a fire that started underneath an escalator at King’s Cross killed thirty-one people. It was caused by a dropped match, probably by someone gasping for a fag, having endured the penance of not being able to smoke on any of the trains, and many of the platforms. (I have often wondered whether the person who dropped that match knew that they had dropped it.) After the fire, the smoking ban was made total. The wood was stripped from escalators, and wooden fixtures generally were taken out of the system. Where they survive, as with the wooden benches on the otherwise charmless Victoria Line platforms, they seem like a touch of old world luxury. The management structure was also rationalised – it has been said that the Underground had been run by ‘baronies of engineers’ – and a culture of ‘safety first’ was implemented. The frequently heard and ungrammatical mantra reporting that any given station is closed ‘because of the London Fire Brigade in attendance’ is a legacy of the King’s Cross fire. In previous years any suspicious smouldering would have been investigated by station staff. Another legacy of the fire.

  Between the late Eighties and the late Nineties the Underground received fitful bursts of proper funding from the government, in part to make the changes required by the Fennell Report into the King’s Cross fire. Meanwhile rising passenger numbers and increasing traffic congestion made the Underground a deserving case for sustained investment, preferably from the private sector. And so the scene was set for another of Livingstone’s wars. But first the story of a line whose Extension represented an early idea of what private money might do for the Tube …

  THE JUBILEE LINE

  The Jubilee is, to adapt the footballer’s phrase, a line of two halves. The first part opened in 1979, comprising the route it inherited from the Bakerloo: Baker Street to Stanmore. There was also a new tunnel from Baker Street to Charing Cross. The second part comprises the extension to Stratford, opened in 1999. The line is like a man who wears a scruffy tweed jacket, but with expensive trousers and shoes by Armani, because the Extension is determinedly glitzy. It was well funded and ran through an area where there was room to build, so the stations are ‘future-proofed’: that is to say, big.

  The older half has its charms, mainly left over from the 1930s: the lovely, lambent station at St John’s Wood, with its cosy, recessed wooden benches, and the forest of uplighters on the escalators. (It was
not designed by Holden, but is in the manner of Holden.) Beyond Finchley Road there’s a pleasant sleepiness about it: the creepers growing over the backs of the houses at Dollis Hill, the overgrown embankments leading up to Kingsbury, the cottage-like charm of the stations at Stanmore and Queensbury.

  Baker Street and Green Park feature experimental decoration characteristic of the late Seventies and early Eighties, in which some stations were given motifs reflecting their particular locations: at Baker Street, scenes from the Sherlock Holmes stories appear; Green Park has vivid orange tiles on which black leaves are superimposed. Charing Cross Jubilee platform had images of Nelson’s Column. I say ‘had’ because when the Jubilee was extended, Charing Cross was not invited. The new line would run directly from Green Park to Westminster, before proceeding to Waterloo and points east. When it became clear in the late Nineties that this would happen, I received anxious letters to my ‘Tube Talk’ column from Charing Cross Jubilee users, and I raised the matter with a press officer. ‘It’s not possible to run new tunnels between Charing Cross and Waterloo,’ she said. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘There’s just too much stuff below the ground,’ she replied, not completely convincingly. So the Jubilee Line platforms at Charing Cross were closed to passengers and opened to film-makers, including those responsible for the above-mentioned horror film Creep, in which a lot of blood is spilled on those platforms, a very fitting metaphor. Christian Wolmar has described the abandonment of the Jubilee Charing Cross as ‘a shocking waste of money’, given that it had been opened only a decade before.

  The opening of the Jubilee Line in 1979 coincided with a rather indeterminate, or experimental, period in Underground station decoration. The coming of the line to Baker Street was celebrated with a Sherlock Holmes theme at the station. The tiling here is actually from a Bakerloo platform, but it photographs better than the wispy (if charming) illustrations from the Holmes stories that feature on the Jubilee platforms themselves. The author suggests (tentatively) that nowhere in the stories are Holmes and Watson described as arriving at or departing from Baker Street station.

  It had long been acknowledged that south-east London was badly served by public transport, and it was always the idea that the Jubilee should head in that direction. The particular route it ended up taking – through Docklands – was a result of the fact that the regeneration of that area by private capital was a major project of Thatcherism. Olympia & York, the developers of Canary Wharf, did contribute to the costs of building the line, but not nearly as much as had been envisaged. British Gas also contributed towards the building of North Greenwich station, which would serve their aim of redeveloping the land on which the East Greenwich Gasworks had stood. North Greenwich is today the station for the O2 Centre, a fact announced on every train passing through. But in 1999 the O2 was the emerging Millennium Dome, that vast symbol of … something or other that became the second magnet for the extension after the Canary Wharf development had been completed. And by now Tony Blair’s ego was on the line (so to speak) just as Margaret Thatcher’s had been.

  It was essential that the guests at the opening of the Dome be taken there by Tube, and so it was also essential the line be completed by the end of 1999, which it was (just), the effort adding considerably to the expense of construction. The extension opened along its entire length on 22 December 1999, at a cost of £3.5 billion pounds, £2 billion over-budget.

  I rode the extension in its first week, carrying an Underground press release so emboldened by the positive reviews of the station architecture that it was headed ‘What’s Your Favourite Station?’ I interviewed some passengers, and a man at Canada Water said, ‘Why all this grey? What’s wrong with a bit of colour … Some red here and there? Tell you what,’ he added confidentially, ‘a bit of green wouldn’t go amiss.’ At Canning Town a woman whispered, awestruck, ‘It’s so clean, isn’t it?’ The line remains pristine, and the scale of the stations is still striking; the passengers within, riding the banks of escalators, descending through the multi-levels, resemble the numerous extras in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. You could fit the whole of Canary Wharf Tower into Canary Wharf station; you almost need a Tube train to get from one end of it to the other. But North Greenwich is even bigger. You could fit the QE2 into that … And North Greenwich is not grey. There the moulded concrete and polished steel that characterises the extension gives way to giant ovoid pillars clad in mosaic tiles of dark blue, the melancholic but reassuring shade of an old-fashioned police lamp.

  The ride comes above ground after North Greenwich. Next comes sprawling West Ham station, followed by even more sprawling Stratford, where the Jubilee, the Central, the Dockland Light Railway, London Overground and two national railway lines coincide beneath an over-sailing glass roof. This is the Olympic station, and the last time I was there, when I wanted to have a look at the new stadium, I found myself directed towards it by signs leading me through part of that reverberating hangar the Westfield Stratford City Shipping Centre, and I didn’t approve. Not that anyone gives a stuff because I am just another of the extras on the set, but I mean … talk about ‘exit through the gift shop’.

  Compare the other end of the Jubilee. In the small but pretty ticket hall at Stanmore local information is displayed behind glass panels, and it has been the same local information for years, if not decades. Alongside notices about Stanmore Choral Society and Stanmore Bowls Club is the following: ‘The Bird Walk of Canons Park meets during autumn, winter and spring on the first Sunday of every month at the Donnefield Avenue entrance to Canons Park. The walk is led by Robin, an RSPB member who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of ornithology.’

  The Jubilee Line extension has played its part – albeit slowly – in making Canary Wharf an easterly rival to the City. Whereas its working population was only 15,000 when the extension opened, it is now 90,000, and predicted to double by 2020. At the time of writing, the Jubilee is receiving a bad press because of the disruption caused by the implementation of ‘moving block’ signalling. But all of that will be forgotten about when the system is fully working. Then again, the sheer inaccessibility of south-east London before the extension was built may also be forgotten about. During the opening week it was still fresh in the memory of one woman I spoke to at Canary Wharf. She said, ‘I love this station.’ I asked why, and she said, ‘Do you know how many buses it used to take me to get to the West End? Four.’

  LIVINGSTONE RETURNS

  Ken Livingstone became the MP for Brent East in 1987 and set about irritating the Labour leadership just as he had irritated Mrs Thatcher. He had no time for the triangulations of Tony Blair, and didn’t care for Blair’s idea of returning a limited measure of local democracy to London by means of a mere ‘strategic’ body (it would set policy and run services through proxies, not directly), to be called the Greater London Authority. It would be mainly concerned with policing and transport, something called Transport for London (with that ingratiating lower-case f in ‘for’) replacing London Regional Transport. But there was a vacancy for a star, since the Authority would be headed by an elected mayor, who would be rather lightly overseen by an elected twenty-five-member Greater London Assembly. Livingstone wanted the job, to the annoyance of Blair, whose idea of a London mayor was a benign elder statesman who had outgrown political squabbling.

  Frank Dobson was selected as the official Labour candidate for mayor, but in the election of 2000 Livingstone stood against him as an independent, and won. Here he was in charge of transport again. He had the power to set fares and to introduce road pricing for London, and this he did, by his introduction of the central London Congestion Charge, with the money raised going into public transport. The Tube being ‘at capacity’, he improved the bus network so as to accommodate as many as possible of the motorists who would now leave their cars at home. (London buses now provide a de luxe service – they’re regular and well maintained – and almost half the people using them pay nothing to do so, being under eighteen or of pensionable age. So the
buses are not as cheap to operate as they once were, and they no longer subsidise the Underground.)

  Livingstone was empowered to appoint a Commissioner for Transport to run TfL (of which London Underground Limited was a wholly owned subsidiary), and he chose an American, which ought not to surprise us by now: Robert Kiley, a man with a tough-guy persona who’d revitalised the New York Subway, the money raised by the issue of bonds backed by the guaranteed fare income of the system. Bond issues have long been favoured by Livingstone as the cheapest method of raising funds for the Underground, and a transport expert recently suggested to me that, because of its ‘rock solid’ fare income, London Underground had a better credit-worthiness than most European governments. But built in to the legislation that had created the Greater London Authority Act of 1999 was a new scheme of funding that took the principle of contracting out to bizarre lengths of complication: the Public Private Partnership (or PPP).

  The PPP was not privatisation, which the Conservatives had been proposing, but it was the next best, or worst, thing. London Underground would operate the lines, but two consortia of engineers, or ‘infracos’ – Metronet and Tube Lines – would be contracted to maintain them over a period of thirty years, during which an Upgrade would be implemented that would compensate for the thirty years of neglect after the war.

  The infracos would be financially rewarded or penalised, according to extremely abstruse mathematical formulae that were supposed to characterise good or bad customer experience. In essence – and I am not disguising the desperation with which I reach for that phrase – the consortia won or lost according to how much time they saved the customers. One problem was that the contracts did not sufficiently motivate the consortia to make improvements; another was the cost of creating a contract for every Underground relationship. What had been an organic entity became a stiffly working machine built by lawyers charging hundreds of pounds an hour. Another problem was the demoralisation of Underground managers, caused by the implied statement ‘Only the private sector can be trusted to modernise the Tube.’ Oh, and the PPP was never meant to fund the entire Upgrade; it would provide only about a quarter of the money, and the rest would come from government. Livingstone and Kiley fought the plan all the way to its implementation in 2003.