Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London

by Suggs

  So what about those original horse-drawn omnibuses? The first service, introduced by George Shillibeer, ran between Paddington Green and ‘the Bank’, the Bank being the Bank of England. It was launched on 4 July 1829 and offered Londoners their first taste of public transport across the metropolis.

  Looking at old engravings, passengers travelled in what resembles a box on wheels pulled by three horses. The box had a rear entrance, which was where the conductor stood, just like on the classic Routemaster. Passengers sat facing each other on long benches. The first services offered by Shillibeer carried middle-class Londoners into the city from the leafy suburbs, and they were quite pricey. But the idea quickly caught on and competition brought the fares down. Sitting on top of a double-decker was, according to Gladstone, four-times British Prime Minister during Victoria’s reign, the only way to see London. A sentiment which certainly gets my vote. There aren’t many finer ways to enjoy the city than from the front seat on the top deck on a ride down the Strand and Fleet Street.

  Aside from his love of bus travel, Gladstone was pretty famous for his devotion to helping the prostitutes of London. By the time Gladstone was spotting fallen women to save from the top of his horse-drawn double-decker, there were a number of different companies touting for business. For instance, if you lived in Putney and worked in the City you might travel to Liverpool Street on a service run by the London General Omnibus Company, which was, according to Gordon, journalist and the fount of all horse wisdom, ‘the greatest user of living horse power in London. They have, in round numbers, ten thousand horses, working a thousand omnibuses, travelling twenty million miles in a year, and carrying one hundred and ten million passengers.’ I wouldn’t have fancied being the crossing-sweeper cleaning up after that lot.

  By 1900, the number of London horse-drawn buses had reached 3,736, most of which were double-deckers pulled by two horses, rather than the original three: good news for the accountants, but less so for the horses themselves, I should imagine. They were also bringing in revenue through the medium of advertising for things like good old Sapolio Black Lead.

  Mr Gordon takes delight in describing one vast omnibus yard out in the sticks at Farm Lane, Fulham, now, of course, a very desirable area of London and blessed by proximity to London’s premier football team.

  Farm Lane housed double-decker stables for 700 horses set around a courtyard. Gordon says:At Farm Lane, Fulham, the Road Car Company has the finest omnibus yard in Britain. At half-past seven in the morning when the first car comes out, and indeed at any time, it is one of the sights of London. In the central court are over sixty cars which have been washed and examined during the night, the cleaning of each seven being one man’s night’s work. Around the quadrangle are the stables, on two storeys, and in them are 700 horses. Four of the floors have each about fourteen studs of eleven in a long double line standing in peat, the gas jets down the middle alight in the fading darkness flickering on the double set of harness for each stud, which gleams black and shiny on the posts that make the long lines look longer, while the growing daylight streams in from the high windows on the inner wall and from the ventilators overhead.

  It must have been quite a sight and smell, but sadly, unlike the stable yards in Camden, no traces remain of this major depot and the best guess is that it is now probably the site of a trading estate, home to architects, caterers and couriers (the last is, I suppose, at least related to getting something from A to B).

  However, one of the ideas pioneered by those early omnibus owners has survived. They wanted to make it easy for the paying public, many of whom were illiterate, to identify the route of the bus. Eventually, they fixed on numbers as the best way of doing it, but before that they used a colour-coding system, keeping the sides of the omnibuses clear for adverts but painting the route colour on the carriage. For example, if you were travelling with the General Omnibus Company between Putney and Liverpool Street, you’d be on the white line. If you were travelling out of Victoria northwards, you’d use the ‘royal blues’. As Gordon says, ‘The wheels of a car are a means of its identification. By the colour of the body you tell the line the vehicle travels; by the colour of the wheels you tell the company to which it belongs.’ This brilliantly simple idea of using colours to show the route a bus was taking and its destination was ultimately copied by London Underground and showed off to beautiful effect in Harry Beck’s London Underground map.

  Those old horse-drawn double-deckers also have a direct descendant which itself has almost disappeared completely from London’s streets, and that’s the old Routemaster bus, which was designed for London Transport. I say ‘almost’ because the number 9 from the Royal Albert Hall to the Aldwych and the number 15 from Trafalgar Square to Tower Hill were reprieved as ‘heritage routes’, and you can still hire others for private events. The Routemaster, in particular route 29 (Wood Green to Trafalgar Square via Camden), played an important part in the early life of Madness. It was how we got to rehearsals and how we got around London. It gave us a perspective on the city, and what we saw from the top deck of that bus, and others, then featured in our songs.

  These old-style buses had other glories too. I’m sure it was not only me and my friends who enjoyed the occasional ride without a fare on these old wagons. ‘Get on a red bus and not pay the fare, get on the red bus and go anywhere,’ as I sang in ‘Somewhere in London’.

  The other delight I associate with the old Routemaster is cigarette smoke, because there was a time when smoking in a public place was not a crime but rather a sign of a convivial atmosphere. When I couldn’t afford my own fags, an added pleasure of the bus ride was to go to the top deck - the smoking saloon - and just inhale other people’s smoke. And when I did have the cash to buy my own, there was no better feeling as a kid than to sit like a lord at the top of the double-decker with my feet warming on the heater and a smoke on the go. The only time I remember it raining on this particular parade was when once, soon after lighting up, I made the mistake of asking the conductor for a half-fare ticket. As he fixed me with his steely eye, I immediately realised the difficult choice I’d forced upon myself. Either to stub out my fag in acknowledgement that I was still a child (under 14) or carry on puffing manfully and stump up the full adult fare. Economics was the winner on this occasion and the fag was duly extinguished.

  The bus will always get my vote ahead of the tube, because I like to see where I’m going and what’s going on around me. But since it’s such a major part of London’s transport story, it seems churlish not to give the Underground a bit of elbow room in my jaunt through London’s transport past, though I have to say that’s more than it ever seems to give me.

  The London Underground is owned by Transport for London, which is part of the Greater London Authority, and was set up to look after the capital’s buses, tubes, trains and cabs. But it started life in 1863 as a money-making commercial enterprise, with the same kind of competition for passengers as existed between the rival omnibus companies. It was the Great Western Railway who started the carriages rolling when they opened an underground rail link between their terminus at Paddington and Farringdon Station in the City. It caught on quickly, but I wouldn’t have been keen. I’m not sure what would be worse: having your face pressed against some sweaty armpit or inhaling carcinogenic soot blowing back from a steam engine. But, despite these deterrents, the concept obviously appealed to Londoners and as passenger numbers increased, so did the competition between different operators.

  One of the consequences of competition was that the different railway companies wanted to take their customers to the same areas of the city. Often they would forge alliances with competitors and integrate stations to accommodate more than one line. But it didn’t always work out like that, and in some popular parts of central London different stations would spring up cheek-by-jowl to compete for business. An example of this was a station called British Museum operated by the Central London Railway Company, located about 100 yards from Holb
orn Station, which was operated by the Great Northern Piccadilly and Brompton Railway Company (you can see why London Underground eventually shortened that mouthful to ‘Piccadilly’). It was not a great surprise that when finally the network was combined under one management board in the 1930s, one of the stations had to go, and on this occasion it was the British Museum station that got the axe.

  Sadly, the lovely British Museum station building was demolished. It had the typical red-glazed tiles and arched entrance that echoed the tunnels below ground. I can’t help wishing they’d retained its facade, just as they did the former station at Aldwych, which still promises passengers a ride on the defunct Piccadilly Railway and provides, in my opinion, a kind of poetic adornment to the street.

  But while you can knock down the building and remove the station from the tube map itself, the task of removing the evidence below ground level is a different matter altogether. Which is why, if you should travel on the Central line between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road, I urge you to look up from your copy of the Evening Standard for a moment and stare out of the window really hard, remembering, of course, to avoid any eye-contact with fellow travellers during this risky procedure. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch sight of the abandoned station, a ghostly glimpse of a vanished world which flits past the window in the blink of an eye. I wouldn’t make a special trip for the purpose, as there’s not an awful lot left to see - there’s no platform and the ‘roundel’ station sign has been taken from the wall - but if you’re passing through this way it’s certainly worth a moment of your time. At which point, I feel we should return to ground level for some fresh air before I venture too far down the track which leads to trainspotterdom and unsightly anoraks.

  Not too far away from the ghost station of the British Museum is one of the more surprising relics of London’s transport system. Travelling south on the top deck of the bus, I’ve often passed an odd slipway extending under the road at Kingsway and have wondered idly what it is. Finally, in an attempt to solve the question once and for all, I consulted my battered A-Z and noticed a series of funny dashes marked along Kingsway and round Aldwych which remain mysteriously unexplained on the key. The mind boggled: what could these curious markings - a long series of morse code ‘O’s - actually represent? I asked my mum - a long-time London resident who’s pretty familiar with that neck of the woods - and it was she who suggested they were probably there to mark the spot where the tram used to run. It turned out she was right. That mysterious opening on Kingsway is the entrance to a purpose-built Edwardian tramway tunnel.

  These days the Kingsway Tunnel, as it’s called by those in the know, is padlocked and off limits to the casual visitor. But I got a glimpse of what lies behind the gates by hooking up with a chap called Nick Catford, a lover of all things subterranean and a man who seems to have the knack of persuading the powers that be to let him have a nose around all sorts of places that are no-go areas for the rest of us.

  With Nick as my companion, we walk down the slope that takes you from street level at Kingsway and into the gloom of the tunnel itself. The noise of traffic recedes and it feels as though you’re entering a secret slice of London. The old tram tracks are still visible on the ground in front of us, guiding us forward all the way to the remnants of the former tram station itself, a couple of hundred yards further down the tunnel. Down here the walls are lined with white-glazed bricks and there are even the tattered remains of advertising posters on the walls. We notice the outline mark that had been made by a long-removed London Transport roundel sign, which would have reminded passengers on the top floor of the tram that they’d reached their stop. Light floods down from a flight of steps covered with autumn leaves and the odd crisp packet. That would have been the route taken by prospective passengers from the pavement above to catch the last tram that ran through here more than 50 years ago. As I look around, it occurs to me that it wouldn’t take much to return this place to its former glory.

  The Kingsway Tunnel was built for what most of us would regard as traditional trams, but there was also such a thing as horse-drawn trams although they didn’t operate in the centre of town. Apparently the clatter of hooves combined with the ratcheting noise of the metal wheel which kept the tram attached to the rails was too painful for the sensitive ears of the residents in these parts, who lobbied successfully to keep them out. As a result, horse-drawn trams were confined to the suburbs, plying routes from Brixton to Kennington in the south-west and Blackheath to New Cross in the south-east.

  The tunnel at Holborn was the sole preserve of electrified trams, which took off (not literally, I hasten to add) at the beginning of the twentieth century and were quicker, cleaner and quieter than the horse-drawn variety, not to mention cheaper to run. When the tunnel opened in 1906, a fleet of single-deck tram cars was purchased for the astronomical sum of £750 pounds each, to carry passengers on a route from Angel in Islington south through the tunnel, all the way to its exit on the Embankment at Waterloo Bridge. It was a pretty quick ride, taking only 12 minutes, so no wonder it was so popular.

  The route proved such a hit that by the 1930s, this was one of the busiest stations in the capital, and the single-deckers were replaced by two-tier trams - which meant the tunnel roof had to be raised. After the Second World War the popularity of trams went into decline, as the bus became the new boss on London’s streets. The Kingsway Tunnel station finally closed in July 1952, after a week of nostalgic farewell celebrations across the capital. Photos from the time show Londoners queuing round the block to secure their seat on the last trams to criss-cross the capital. I can’t quite imagine us throwing a similar kind of party for the bendy bus.

  After the trams were retired and the tunnel closed, it was used as a storage garage for decommissioned buses that were held in reserve for the Coronation and as a flood control centre. It even starred in a film, when it played the role of a train tunnel in Bhowani Junction opposite the lovely Ava Gardner. I am not sure the director George Cukor really did the Kingsway Tunnel justice, and the Kingsway’s agent couldn’t have been great because the film work dried up. I guess there just aren’t that many good roles for tram and train tunnels. Now it is a storage depot for great lengths of pipe, paving slabs and cobbles: a rather gloomy municipal B&Q slowly decaying beneath the streets of Holborn.

  I don’t think the trams at Holborn took the Oyster card - Londoners’ current passport for public transport - but there are other elements of the modern-day system which would have struck a chord with travellers transported forward in time from an earlier age. In the early part of the nineteenth century, for example, there were different travel zones within the city. The drivers of the original horse-drawn Hackney carriages, the ancestors of today’s black-cab drivers, had a monopoly on picking up and dropping off customers in the central area of the capital. Alarmed by the threat to their livelihoods posed by the new horse-drawn omnibuses, which offered Londoners a cheaper, if less comfortable, way of getting from A to B, the Hackney carriage drivers lobbied successfully to keep the omnibuses from making stops to pick up and drop off in central London. So a kind of central zone operated in the city for a few years. But you can’t stop progress and the buses represented a bit of a transport revolution. The cabbies couldn’t stop buses challenging their supremacy, but they did retain their monopoly on picking up fares from the kerbside, which they still jealously guard.

  There are some reminders of these original London cabbies and their horses which still survive on the streets of the city today - thanks largely to the efforts of their modern-day counterparts, London’s black-cab drivers. They’re called cabmen’s shelters and in case you’re wondering, no, they aren’t homes for distressed cab drivers who’ve lost ‘the Knowledge’. To find out more about these mysterious green huts which adorn several street corners around the capital, I hailed a taxi and took my seat behind a man who’s done more than his share to keep them going. As Peter Raymond weaved his way expertly through the west London traffic to
wards Warwick Avenue, he wasn’t taking me to the tube station made famous by Duffy, and I wasn’t worrying about being chucked by my girlfriend, I was heading for the site of one of the surviving huts.

  Peter filled me in on the history of these places. It was not long before a familiar story began to emerge of a worthy philanthropic impulse which concealed a far more sinister agenda: to keep London’s cabbies out of the pubs.

  The story begins with a gentleman called Captain Armstrong. He’d noticed that whenever the weather was bad - a rare occurrence in London admittedly, but still an occasional hazard - it was almost impossible to find a cab driver (no change there then). Investigating this problem further, he discovered that the elusive cabbies were often to be found taking shelter in cafes and pubs. When they finally emerged into the daylight, they often displayed the inevitable consequences of whiling away the long rainy hours in a licensed premises, and were in no fit state to steer a coach and horses from the Coach and Horses and through the streets of the city. Along with like-minded souls, including Lord Shaftesbury, who you’ll recall was one of the driving forces behind the drinking-fountain-and-water-trough movement, Armstrong decided to offer cabbies a place of refuge which would be dry in both senses of the word, a series of havens in the shape of sheds scattered around the city, where they could shelter from the storm and enjoy ‘good and wholesome refreshments at moderate prices’.