London Under

by Peter Ackroyd

  At the end of January 1860 the first shafts descended at Euston Square and Paddington. “In a day and a night,” one journalist wrote, “a few hundred yards of roadway are enclosed, and a strange quiet reigns for a time, in consequence of the carriage traffic being diverted.” The omnibuses were diverted down alleys and back streets, where the outside passengers had to dodge street signs and barbers’ poles. But then the navvies arrived with their steam engines and horses. “The sound of pickaxes, spades and hammers, puffing of steam, and murmur of voices begin; never to cease day and night.” The method was that of “cut and cover,” by means of which an area was excavated before being once more covered by the road surface. London was in a ferment of fundamental change.

  The path of the underground working was clear enough. It would run from Paddington to the Edgware Road before going under Marylebone Road and Euston Road; it would then use the valley of the Fleet in order to reach the City at Farringdon. The passenger to Farringdon still follows the same route as the travellers in Ben Jonson’s “Famous Voyage” of 1612. The ancient Fleet river, however, was not to be wholly ignored; in June 1862 it was reported that after heavy rain “the black hole of the Fleet sewer, like a broken artery, poured out a thick rapid stream which found its way out fiercely … into the railway cutting.” The great brick walls of the tunnels rose upward with the force of the water.

  The underground scheme itself was a force for destruction as well as improvement. The excavation of the valley of the Fleet destroyed a thousand homes and displaced 12,000 people who did not receive any compensation. They left their infested and infected tenements for a life of squalor elsewhere. That pattern of evicting the powerless and the poor continued throughout the construction of the underground railway in the nineteenth century. A magazine, The Working Man, made its own comment in 1860. “Where are they gone, sir? Why, some’s gone down Whitechapel way; some’s gone in the Dials; some’s gone to Kentish Town; and some’s gone to the Work’us.”

  By the autumn of 1861 the underground line was partially complete, and in the spring of 1862 a group of interested observers were drawn in wagons from Paddington to Euston Square. Gladstone and his wife were among the party. They were invited to inspect the newly completed tunnels, and were apparently much impressed by their novel and in many respects incredible journey “under London.” It was worthy of a narrative by Jules Verne. It offered the perfect union of science, drama and romance.

  On 9 January 1863, the Metropolitan Underground Railway was formally unveiled. Pearson himself died a few weeks before the event. He had been born in the same month as Marie-Antoinette had perished on the guillotine, but he had inaugurated a service still in use in the twenty-first century. At the opening ceremony 700 dignitaries gathered at Paddington and were driven through the tunnels in a succession of trains; an engraving of The Trial Trip on the Underground Railway shows the open carriages filled with men waving their stove-pipe hats into the air as they are about to pass into a tunnel. When they eventually emerged into the terminus at Farringdon Street, they were greeted by police bands.

  On the following day the line was opened to the public. The crowds, waiting for their first journey beneath the surface of the earth, were immense; the trains were filled immediately with the cry of “No room! No room!” echoing through the underground halls. A few casualties were perhaps inevitable; the ventilation at Gower Street station was not sufficient, and two people were taken to hospital. A journalist wrote that “it can be compared to nothing else than the crush at the doors of a theatre on the first night of a pantomime.” It was the first underground railway in the world, a wonder and a spectacle to rival anything upon the stage. Something of its appeal can still be seen on platform five of Baker Street, now restored to its pristine condition.

  The Metropolitan Line was a considerable success, and carried approximately 30,000 passengers each day. So the trains were lengthened, and the intervals between them were reduced; they stopped for twenty seconds at each station before continuing their journey. They were driven by compact steam engines and accommodated three classes of carriage, the first class containing mirrors and carpets. They looked exactly like surface trains suddenly transported into the depths. Some complaints were of course made about the smoke and smell in the tunnels. The guards and porters sent a petition to the company, requesting that they be given permission to grow beards as a protection against sulphurous deposits. The locomotives themselves were given the names of tyrants—Czar, Kaiser and Mogul—or of voracious insects such as Locust, Hornet and Mosquito. This was a tribute to their power. One of them was named Pluto, the god of the underworld.

  The first fatality occurred in the autumn of 1864. A railway guard at Portland Road station noticed a couple at the top of the stairs. He told them to hurry as the train was approaching. “Come on, Kate,” the man said. The couple hurried down the steps. A short while later the body of the dying woman was found on the rails. She had been drinking with her companion, and had apparently fallen onto the line.

  The success of the Metropolitan encouraged other projectors and financiers to adopt similar schemes. London was consumed with underground fever. Fifty-three projects were put forward. The Great Western and Great Northern and Great Eastern railway companies were eager to move into the capital, while the Metropolitan itself was gradually extended in all directions from Swiss Cottage to South Kensington and Hammersmith. The District Line began constructing its own portion of what became the Inner Circle. “The engineering world,” the City Press reported in 1864, “is literally frenzied with excitement about new railway schemes. We would as soon enter a lunatic asylum as attend a meeting of the Institute of Civic Engineers.”

  Gustave Doré’s engraving of “the worker’s train,” the Metropolitan Line, from London: A Pilgrimage, 1872 (illustration credit Ill.27)

  Endless internal battles were fought between the underground companies, over such matters as routes and the width of tracks, but the enterprise of tunnelling beneath London went on. In 1865 Henry Mayhew travelled on an underground train in order to interview the passengers. A labourer told him that he used to walk 6 miles each day, to and from his place of work; now he was spared the inconvenience. He lived in Notting Hill, “almost in open country,” and thereby saved himself two shillings a week in rent.

  The first tunnels to be literally bored beneath the earth, without using the “cut and cover” method, ran from King William Street in the City to Stockwell in South London. The line opened in 1890, and since the journey was conducted entirely underground, the need for windows was deemed to be minimal. Only tiny slits were placed high on the sides. It was also feared that the passengers might panic at the sight of the walls of the tunnel rushing past them. The seats were quilted. So the carriages were known as “padded cells.” A guard stood at the end of each carriage, and announced the names of the stations en route; he also called out warnings. “Beware of card sharks on this train!” “It is forbidden to ride on the roof!” The novel insertion of tunnels into the London clay led to the notion of “the tubes” under the earth; soon enough they became known as the Tube, a name that has persisted ever since. When the Central Line was inaugurated in the summer of 1900 it became known as “the Twopenny Tube” because of the flat price of the tickets.

  The building of these tunnels deep beneath the earth had dangers of its own; by the early years of the twentieth century they were bored by a rotary excavator that had knives at its front digging out the earth and depositing it onto a conveyor belt. Yet the atmospheric pressure at these depths was very high, and a report written in 1908 informed the Institution of Civil Engineers that “a great deal of illness resulted among the men, but there were not many fatal cases.” The workmen were suffering from the disorder known to deep-sea divers as “the bends.” On one occasion the air escaped through the bed of the Thames and boiled 3 feet high above the surface, overturning a boat.

  Inside the “padded cell” of the City and South London Railway (
illustration credit Ill.28)

  The Fleet floods destroy the underground workings at Farringdon, 1862 (illustration credit Ill.29)

  The trains on the Stockwell Line of 1890 were the first to be powered by electricity, and thus it became the first underground electric railway in the world. It also provided another innovation. There were no first classes or second classes in this new world. All tickets were charged at the same rate, and all of the carriages were identical. It caused outrage in some quarters, and the Railway Times complained that lords and ladies would now be travelling with Billingsgate fishwives and Smithfield porters. Yet, as a reading of Dante would have suggested, all are equal in the underworld.

  In the summer of 1867 a woman had dropped dead at Bishop’s Road station on the Metropolitan Line, and an inquest resolved that she had died “by natural causes, accelerated by the suffocating atmosphere of the Underground Railway.” By 1898, 550 trains were passing beneath the surface of London every day. A driver told a parliamentary commission that “very seldom” was the smoke thick enough to obscure the tunnels. One chronicler of the city recorded in his diary for 23 June 1887 that “I had my first experience of Hades today.” He was travelling between Baker Street and Moorgate, but the windows of the carriage were closed to lessen the effect of the smoke and sulphur in the tunnels. He added, however, that “the compartment in which I sat was filled with passengers who were smoking pipes, as is the English habit”; as a result he was “near dead from asphyxiation and heat.” In 1897 one passenger was almost overcome with the fumes, and was escorted up to the street and a nearby chemist’s. The chemist looked at him for a moment. “Oh I see,” he said, “Metropolitan Railway.” He poured out a glass of some remedial mixture. The passenger asked him if he had many such cases. “Why bless you, sir,” he replied. “We often have twenty cases a day.” A proposal was made to place evergreen shrubs on the station platforms, to reduce the effect of carbonic acid, but it was not accepted.

  Some claims were made that the atmosphere of the Underground had benign effects, just as the sewer workers of the period believed that their labours rendered them healthier. The underworld may be seen as a source of strength. The fumes were so beneficial that Great Portland Street station was “used as a sanatorium for men who had been afflicted with asthma and bronchial complaints.” Acid gas was said to cure tonsillitis. It was also reported that an anorexic suddenly developed a ravenous appetite after a single journey on the Twopenny Tube. It was something to do with the temperature of the tunnels.

  The effect of the smoke, however, was to accelerate demands for electric traction that had proved so successful on the Stockwell Line. In 1905 the Inner Circle was converted for the use of electrical trains, and soon enough other lines were electrified. The days of the underground steam engine were over. Comfort could be purchased at a price. By 1910 a sixpenny ticket allowed the traveller access to the first-class carriages of the Metropolitan Railway’s Pullman cars; the carriages contained morocco armchairs set in the replica of a drawing room with mahogany walls. Electric lamps were placed on side-tables, and blinds of green silk covered the windows. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were served.

  In 1911 the first escalator was introduced at Earls Court station, to unite the platforms of the District and Piccadilly Lines. The promotional literature promised that the passenger “can step on to the stairlift at once, and be gently carried to his train. A boon that the mere man will also appreciate is the fact that he will not be prohibited from smoking, as in the lift, for the stairlift is made entirely of fireproof material.”

  A porter was employed to shout out, through a device known as a stentorphone, “This way to the moving staircase! The only one of its kind in London! NOW running! The world’s wonder!” Some travellers screamed at the prospect of alighting from the moving steps, and placards invited them to “step off with the left foot.” A man with a wooden leg was employed to ride up and down the escalator to instil confidence in the nervous passengers. It was, according to a contemporary report, “as good as a joy-wheel.” An experimental spiral escalator was installed at Holloway Road tube station by an American company, but it was never used. Yet this was an extraordinary new world beneath the surface of the capital.

  So the lines grew and grew. The Inner Circle was complete, and in the first years of the twentieth century it took seventy minutes to journey around the circuit by steam train; a hundred years later, the trains are only twenty minutes faster. By 1907 the Baker Street and Waterloo Line had reached Edgware Road, and was known as the “Bakerloo”; the name was considered to be vulgar and a “gutter title.” The line between Holborn to the Strand was opened in the same year, and was eventually named the Piccadilly Line; the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead railways were merged into one large company called the Metropolitan District Electric Traction Company. This conglomerate had already begun to build its own power station at Lots Road, by the Thames at Chelsea, in order to provide power for the newly electrified service.

  Like the city above, the Underground grew haphazardly and pragmatically; it was not planned logically or as a whole. Many levels were in place, many lines converging and diverging, with corridors and stairways, lifts and escalators comprising the pieces of an infernal or divine machine. Tunnels were built ever deeper. New stations were erected, and older stations abandoned. It was guided by the imperatives of money and of power, rather than the interests of the citizens. In the first instance it was administered by capitalist financiers of dubious reputation. That is the London story.

  In 1908 a meeting of the various subterranean companies was convened to find a common name for their enterprise. The choice was between “Tube” and “Electric” and “Underground”; the last was chosen. This was the time when the “bull’s-eye” device was first used as a symbol for the service.

  At work in the “Shield,” Great Northern and City Railway, 1920s (illustration credit Ill.30)

  The system was in place, and remained largely unaltered until the 1960s when the Victoria Line was constructed. It was the first new line across central London in fifty years and acted as a service network, with each of its stations connecting to another line or to a surface terminus. In the course of its construction fossils buried fifty million years before were discovered. They now reside in the Natural History Museum. Their discovery is another indication of the depth at which the tunnels were laid; the lowest depth of the Underground system lies 221 feet beneath Hampstead Heath, where the Northern Line runs. At Westminster station the Jubilee Line, the most recent to be built, lies 104 feet beneath sea level. At this point the clay surrounding the tunnels absorbs the heat and stores it, gradually becoming hotter and hotter; temperatures of 65° Fahrenheit (18.3° Celsius) have been recorded in the adjacent earth. So ventilators were required to keep the temperature at an average of 70° Fahrenheit (21° Celsius); but in the recent years of expansion the heat within the earth has risen once more, and the average temperature of the deep level tubes is now 86° Fahrenheit (30° Celsius). Underground is 10° warmer than overground.

  The Victoria Line was succeeded by the Jubilee Line, originally to be called the Fleet Line since its route followed the path of the ancient river. But in 1999 it was directed towards parts of South London that the underground had not previously reached; it now reaches its quietus, having passed through its southern stretch, at its eastern terminus in Stratford. In the course of its excavation it traversed the ground beneath the oldest parts of London. The line travelled back 5,000 years. In the depths of the new system were uncovered pieces of Neolithic pottery and Roman tiles, a twelfth-century quay, a thirteenth-century gatehouse and a fourteenth-century wool market. Mosaic floors, and painted walls, have also been identified. When the Jubilee was taken beneath Southwark High Street it found an older street, dating from AD 60, lined with houses of clay or timber; ruts were observed in the street, made by carts and chariot wheels. Now the commuter, or passenger, passes over them at a different speed. When the line went ou
t to Stratford it unearthed an Iron Age settlement and a Cistercian monastery of the twelfth century. “It’s chaotic down there,” the architect of the Jubilee Line extension said, “you can’t believe what’s going on.”

  The Tube is still in large part an old place. It is Victorian. Abandoned tunnels run nowhere, known as “dead tunnels,” snaking their way through the living system; they are sometimes damp, and sometimes dusty, with the patina of past time along their walls and floors. The tunnels beneath the Thames have a layer of moss that has somehow grown across the sheets of metal panels. The danger of flooding is still great; many hundreds of pumps discharge 6,600 gallons of water each day in order to preserve the system.

  The Underground curves and swerves beneath the surface, some tunnels in a constant state of movement. The tunnels beneath the City of London still follow the medieval street plan in order to curb the risk to ancient buildings. They are also a vast reservoir of mortality, with large amounts of human hair and skin to be removed each night between 1:00 and 5:00 in the morning. These are the only hours when the Underground rests. Metal staircases, and chambers, and abandoned shafts, lie beneath the ground; there are brick arches, of the same construction as the nineteenth-century sewers. The Underground might therefore be seen as a sewer, through which people are sluiced. That is why, at the beginning of the enterprise, The Times doubted that Londoners would ever wish “to be driven amid palpable darkness through the foul sub-soil of London.” The Waterloo and City Line, opened in 1898, was known as “the Drain.”

  Yet the Tube system, 150 years old, is ever renewed. It resembles London itself in its capacity for growth and change. Baker Street was opened in 1863, and is still crowded with travellers. In 2007 the whole system carried 1 billion passengers. It is bewildering, but it has been reduced to order in the now famous “Tube map” that has become an emblem of the city itself.