London Under

by Peter Ackroyd

  If in 5,000 or 10,000 years’ time the map of the Underground is uncovered, its purpose and meaning might be irrecoverable. There will be debate over the precise significance of “white city” and “seven sisters,” “gospel oak” and “elephant and castle,” but the principle of the red and blue and green lines may be lost upon our remote descendants. It is not really a map at all, and is described by the social historian Eric Hobsbawm as “the most original work of avant-garde art in Britain between the wars.” An abstract created by an Underground employee, Henry Beck, in 1931, it reminds some of Mondrian, and others of a diagram for electrical wiring. Beck himself did work in the signalling department, where he devised circuits for the current. Yet his design is simple, clear and memorable; it gives an air of rationality to what is in reality a haphazard and chaotic system. The city itself is identified as a series of horizontals, verticals and diagonals with the greatest emphasis upon central London. “If you’re going underground,” he said, “why bother with geography?” So he presents a utopian vision of the capital.

  People waiting for the lifts at the Bank underground station on the Central Line in 1901 (illustration credit Ill.31)

  The architecture of the Underground has also had a significant history. The first stations resembled vast basilicas with arches and alcoves fitfully lit by gaslight. In its early days the ticket office of Bank station was located in the crypt of St. Mary Woolnoth, thus contributing to the sense of sacred space. Baker Street station itself was described as having “a gloomy, catacomb-like appearance.” Some people were awed, and some frightened, by the journey into these smoking caverns beneath the earth. The walls of the stations were plastered with advertisements for Nestlé’s Milk, Bovril, and other commodities. Above ground these early stations were built of white brick with slate roofs and stone dressings. Other stations were given a Moorish, or a Gothic, tone. The City and South London Railway preferred to construct great domes to house the workings of the lift shaft, complete with cupola and weather vane. They are still to be seen, as at Clapham Common.

  The cupola of Clapham Common station, 1930s (illustration credit Ill.32)

  The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, at the beginning of the twentieth century, erected single-storey stations faced and decorated with moulded terracotta blocks of red, known as “ox-blood”; the shining tiles can still be seen in stations such as Gloucester Road and the now disused Strand. The association between the underworld and animal sacrifice has been maintained. A wall of these blood-red tiles can be found off the Brompton Road beside the Oratory; it marks the spot where the Brompton Road station once stood. These ox-blood bricks are in sharp contrast with the light brickwork of the District Line stations, erected in the same period. Within the station itself the motif changed to one of bottle-green tiles, with the upper walls of white plaster.

  In the 1920s the Hampstead Line developed a style that became known as “suburban classical,” with the stations graced by coupled Doric columns carved out of Portland stone. The pitched roof, of pyramidal shape, was covered with red Italian tiles so that the stations resembled Roman villas of an earlier date. They provided what one pamphlet described as an “inviting doorway” into the world beneath the ground. The City and South London Railway, in the same period, preferred stark cubic forms of Portland stone that resembled Aztec temples. They can still be seen at Hounslow West and at Tooting Broadway. Within the ticket hall of Hounslow West are laid elaborate tile friezes which conjure up an air of geometrical frenzy; the total effect resembles that of a sarcophagus. Such stations can still provoke a sense of unease.

  When in 1930 the Piccadilly Line began to stretch northwards towards Cockfosters, twenty-two tunnelling shields were mustered for the underground work. In the process some of the most memorable underground stations were built under the influence of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus movement; the bold cylindrical or rectangular shapes, as, for example, at Arnos Grove and Sudbury Town, became instantly recognisable as portals to the underworld. Interior lighting was subtly modified to introduce a warmer mood into the otherwise bleak surroundings. Opal glass shades, and reflectors, cast a more even glow. They were believed to promote the concept of “night architecture,” being as visible in the darkness as in the light. They were the last of the truly innovative stations of the twentieth century, but they were perhaps no more welcoming than their predecessors.

  The art of the Underground has an honourable place in the culture of London. The traveller descends slowly into an animated world of signs and posters. Some of the advertisements along the escalator are now moving films, bold and garish. The colourful and sometimes strident posters on the walls of the stations continue a tradition as old as the Underground itself. The passenger is surrounded by vibrant line and colour. The murals of David Gentleman at Charing Cross display the stages by which the masons and craftsmen of the late thirteenth century created the Eleanor Cross beyond the station. (In fact the cross is a replica, and is in the wrong place.) The head of Sherlock Holmes adorns the tiled walls of Baker Street station. The mosaics of Eduardo Paolozzi decorate the walls of Tottenham Court Road station.

  The gateways to the underworld have also been embellished with striking images. A statue of an archer surmounts East Finchley station, conceived in a style strongly reminiscent of ancient South American civilisations. His bow is aimed directly down the length of the tunnel. Griffins were carved into the walls of Aldgate East, St. Paul’s, and other stations; the griffins were the monsters that protected gold mines and buried treasure, and thus suitable creatures to guard the Underground. A figure of Mercury is to be found over an entrance to Bank station, and a cherub once stood above Oxford Circus.

  David Gentleman’s murals on the Northern Line platforms at Charing Cross, 1979, showing the building of the Eleanor Cross (illustration credit Ill.33)

  The latest extensions of the Jubilee Line, south of the river, have been rendered memorable by some of the most striking architecture in contemporary London. Canary Wharf and North Greenwich, designed by Norman Foster and Will Alsop respectively, are triumphs of postmodern engineering. They are the dramatic portals into the underworld, and at the time of completion were described as secular cathedrals. With their vast canopies of glass and underground caverns of steel, they represent the force of the collective will and the great general drama of the human spirit. It is the spirit of the Underground itself.

  You may experience what has been called the fear and madness of crowds. Once you are immersed in this other-land, removed from the familiar world, you may suffer from inexplicable terrors.

  It is a solitary experience, even though you are never alone. There is nothing joyful about the proximity to a hundred or a thousand individuals estranged one from another. The Underground is a deep pool of individual solitudes. Somehow “I” is now indistinguishable from “them.” It is a profoundly egalitarian, or flattening, process.

  Among “them” may be drunks, or beggars, or the mad; even the busker, strumming his or her guitar, may seem to be a threat. That is why most travellers are hurried in the Underground; they wish to arrive at their destination as soon as possible. The Tube system is devoted to finding the shortest route possible between two locations. It is not really a place at all. It is a process of movement and expectation.

  Experienced travellers know the contours of each station, just as a traveller on the surface knows a short cut or a convenient crossroads. They take pleasure in their speed and agility; they know where to stand in order to gain immediate access to the train; they know which carriage stops nearest to an exit. The journey therefore becomes habitual, a part of the traveller’s mental as well as physical history. It becomes a ritual. The wonder and excitement, experienced by nineteenth-century travellers, have gone.

  The Underground is in many respects a symbol of collective will. It is both solitary and communal, representing the paradox embedded in any society or culture. It eases the passage of individual lives, but it is also a communal f
orce with its own public codes and demands. It can therefore be seen as an oppressive system, part of the worktime nexus of contemporary capitalism. It is an ideological, as well as a sociological, construct. The commuter of the morning “rush hour” is part of a system of constraint and obligation. “We do not ride on the railroad,” Thoreau once said of the new railway system in America, “it rides upon us.”

  Poster by Alfred France, 1911 (illustration credit Ill.34)

  The Underground is also a place of collective memory. The names of the stations prompt historical associations. Tower. St. Paul’s. Bank. Victoria. Waterloo. G. K. Chesterton noted that St. James’s Park, Westminster, Charing Cross, Temple and Blackfriars “are really the foundation stones of London, and it is right that they should (as it were) be underground” since “all bear witness to an ancient religion.” The passenger travels within the origin of the city. It is a curious fact that the further the train moves from the centre of the city, the more anonymous it becomes. The journey becomes less intense. It becomes less intimate. It loses its mystery.

  Yet every line, and every station, has its own particular identity. The Northern Line is intense and moody, while the Central Line is filled with purpose and energy. The Circle Line is adventurous and breezy, while the Bakerloo Line is disconsolate and brooding. The sorrows of Lancaster Gate are preceded by the liveliness of Notting Hill Gate, while the comfort of Sloane Square is followed by the brisk anonymity of Victoria. Underground trains have a different tone, and atmosphere, at distinct times of day. In the afternoon, for example, when “everyone else” is at work they become more seductive and luxuriant places redolent of ease or even indolence. In the late evening they become more sinister, a haven for the drunk or the mad.

  The Underground can also be the haunt of furtive desires. It can be a place of chance encounters and of secret meetings, with all the pressure of the old earth lending more fervour to the scene. In the twentieth century Lancaster Gate was known as an assignation place for homosexuals. An incoming train might be described as a wheel of fortune for those in search of partners. To be alone is to become an adventurer, or a predator.

  In The Soul of London (1905) Ford Madox Ford wrote that “I have known a man, dying a long way from London, sigh queerly for a sight of the gush of smoke that, on a platform of the Underground, one may see, escaping in great woolly clots up a circular opening, by a grimy, rusted, iron shield, into the dim upper light.” He is like a prisoner dreaming once more of his confinement. Yet the smoke has a familiar and reassuring smell.

  The Underground itself has a faintly sour, faintly singed, odour. It resembles the smell of hair cut with electric blades. There is also the taint of dust, largely comprised of human skin. If electricity had an odour it would be this. John Betjeman, in Summoned By Bells (1960), recalled that in the 1920s the Central Line had the odour of ozone; but it was not a natural smell emanating from the sea or from the seaweed. It was not of the ocean. It smelled of a chemical manufactured in Birmingham.

  His memory was very accurate. The administrators of the Underground had decided to pump ozone onto the platforms to counteract the sour smell of the tunnels. It was a bizarre attempt to make the world beneath the surface smell of the sea from which it had once emerged. It made commuters slightly ill. Betjeman, on another occasion, recalled “the pleasant smell of wet earth and graveyards that used to hang about the City and South London Tube railway.”

  The sights, and sounds, of the Underground are unique and identifiable. A sudden wind announces the imminent arrival of a train, accompanied by the subdued roar of the approach. A clatter of footsteps echoes in the corridors of white tile, together with the subdued jolting rhythm of the escalator. Yet what if there is no sound? What then? A silent station is a disquieting and even a cursed place. The forty-four disused and forgotten stations of the system are known as “dead stations.” The earth is the place for the dead, is it not?

  A traveller, going west just past Holborn station, may catch a glimpse of tiled walls. They are the last vestiges of a station once known as British Museum. The tiles of Down Street station can also still be seen as you journey underground between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner; above the ground, in Down Street itself, the ox-blood tiles of terracotta mark the spot of the long-forgotten station. King William Street station, abandoned in 1900, still has posters on its walls. Mark Lane can still be seen between Monument and Tower Hill; North End, the deepest of all stations, can be glimpsed as if in reverie between Hampstead and Golders Green. The platforms of Brompton Road, however, have been closed off and shielded from the gaze of passing travellers.

  A station once stood between Camden Town and Kentish Town, named South Kentish Town. It is said that an unwary traveller alighted here when his train was stopped by a signal. He found himself alone on a dark and abandoned platform, where he was marooned for a week. He was only rescued when he caught the attention of a passing driver by burning some advertising posters. It is an unlikely story, but it captures the fear of being trapped in a system from which there is no obvious escape.

  Dead stations are also known as “ghost stations,” and of course one or two of them have been credited with wraiths and apparitions. Ghosts are quite at home in the underworld. The shadows of the dead have always been supposed to walk beneath the surface of the earth. The Underground system passes through many burial grounds and plague pits. Deaths have occurred in the course of its construction. Murders, and suicides, have occurred on the various lines.

  So the ghosts are supposed to walk. A phantom of a man has been seen by various station officials on the platforms of Covent Garden; he is described as “a slim oval-faced man wearing a light grey suit and white glasses.” The sound of running steps has often been heard at Elephant and Castle, with the additional claim that the steps always seem to be running towards those who hear them. Certain drivers have complained about the “loop” between Kennington and Charing Cross; it is said that it has a disconcerting atmosphere. When Vauxhall station was being built on the Victoria Line, in 1968, a number of workers saw a man approximately 7 feet in height wearing brown overalls and a cloth cap. He was never identified. The passengers of the Bakerloo Line are particularly liable to see unannounced visitors. There have often been reports of the reflection of a face in the window, when no one is sitting in the opposite seats.

  This has also been the theme of ghost stories set on the Underground. In one of them, R. Chetwynd-Hayes’s Non-Paying Passengers (1974), the protagonist sees the reflection of the face of his dead wife. In Bad Company (1956) Walter de la Mare invokes the presence of a ghost in one of London’s “many subterranean railway stations.” On the platform “the glare and glitter, the noise, the very air one breathes, affects nerves and spirits. One expects vaguely strange meetings in such surroundings. On this occasion, the expectation was justified.”

  Unlucky stations can be found. Moorgate, the site of a train disaster in 1975 in which fifty-six people died, has always been the object of rumours about hauntings. In the autumn of 1940 many people were caught in a fire at the same station, after a bombing raid, when the heat was so intense that the glass and aluminium doors had dissolved. In the winter of 1974 a gang of engineers reported that they had seen a figure in blue overalls approaching them; as he came closer they saw that he had an expression of abject horror. He then disappeared. The driver of the fatal train in February 1975, approaching platform nine, was described as “sitting bolt upright in his cabin, hands on the controls, staring straight ahead.” He simply drove into the wall of a dead-end tunnel.

  Suicides prefer to die beneath the earth. It is estimated that there are three attempts each week, one being successful. More deaths occur in underground than in overground stations. The favourite time of day is 11:00 a.m., and the most popular venues are King’s Cross and Victoria. Deep pits are built beneath the rails, known as “catch pits” or “suicide pits,” to contain and save the people if they fall through. The suicides are known as “ju
mpers” and, after each such attempt, an announcement comes over the loudspeakers calling for an “Inspector Sands” to investigate an “incident.” The roar of the train entering the station may be construed as an invitation to leap.

  A general air of depression seeps through the walls of the Underground. In a memoir of one erstwhile Underground worker, Christopher Ross’s Tunnel Visions (2001), there is an account of the “very low morale” among those who work beneath the earth; the atmosphere is “negative.” The spirits of some workers may not noticeably be raised by the fact that they are not needed; the Central and Victoria Lines are fully automatic, so that the drivers sit in front of the trains as some kind of theatrical prop to instil confidence in the travelling public.

  The literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has often embodied what was once known as the “romance” of the Underground. In Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot (1923), two young people indulge in the pleasure of going around and around the Circle Line as if it were a circus wheel. “Two penny fares. Down the stairs into the delicious, romantic, cool valley.… Oh joy! Sing for the circle completed, the new circle begun.” In Helen de Witt’s The Last Samurai (2000) mother and young son also revolve around the Circle Line for the sake of its warmth; they take with them piles of books, including The Odyssey and The House at Pooh Corner.

  For some writers the Underground was the locale for otherwise buried passion. The hero of H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) takes a young lady on “the underground railway” and in an otherwise empty carriage kisses her on the lips. Such behaviour was only permissible under the earth. To fornicate is to behave as people do in the vaults, known as fornices in Latin. A more discreet version of this experience is recounted in Henry James’s novel A London Life (1889), when a young man and an American woman agree to walking in “a romantic, Bohemian manner … and taking the mysterious underground railway” from Victoria. “No, no,” the American lady says, “this is very exceptional; if we were both English—and both what we are, otherwise—we wouldn’t do this.” A journey of the sexes beneath the ground somehow constitutes an alien experience.