London Under

by Peter Ackroyd

  Poster by Charles Sharland, 1912 (illustration credit Ill.35)

  In A Word Child (1975) Iris Murdoch described the buffet on the west platform of Sloane Square, known as “The Hole in the Wall,” where alcohol was served. It was one of three or four such places. “Drinking there between six and seven in the shifting crowd of rush-hour travellers,” she wrote, “one could feel on one’s shoulders as a curiously soothing yoke the weariness of toiling London.” She experienced the weight of the multitude in the bowels of the earth, soothing because it is shared by all equally. These bars were for her “the source of a dark excitement, places of profound communication with London, with the sources of life.” They were the watering holes of Pluto’s kingdom.

  When in the spring of 1897 The Idler published a weekly serial featuring a murderer on the loose in the trains under the earth, the number of Underground travellers dropped markedly. The adventures had hit upon a nerve of real fear. In Baroness Orczy’s The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway (1908) a woman is killed in a carriage of the Metropolitan Railway at Aldgate station. The murderer cannot be found, an emblem of the essential anonymity of the Underground that was confirmed in the unsolved real killing of Countess Teresa Lubienska who was stabbed to death at Gloucester Road station in 1957. In an underworld where everyone’s identity is in large part concealed, how will a suspect ever be captured?

  In The Mysteries of Modern London (1906) George Sims speculates on the identity of a passenger who “travelled to Whitechapel by the underground railway, often late at night. Probably on several occasions he had but one fellow passenger in the compartment with him, and that may have been a woman. Imagine what the feelings of those travellers would have been had they known that they were alone in the dark tunnels of the Underground with Jack the Ripper?” There are no individuals in the Underground; there is only a crowd. In John Galsworthy’s Man of Property (1906) Soames Forsyte enters the Tube at Sloane Square and notices that “these shadowy figures, wrapped each in his own little shroud of fog, took no notice of each other.”

  The police find the body of Catherine Eddowes in a Whitechapel cellar, murdered by Jack the Ripper in 1888 (illustration credit Ill.36)

  A project known as “Alight Here,” established in 2010, has been established to collect any poems inspired by London’s Underground stations. It is indeed the proper material of poetry. Seamus Heaney’s “The Underground,” for example, employs the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the context of vaulted tunnels and lamplit stations.

  There are films, too, that speculate upon the shadows cast by the world underground. In Death Line (1972) (distributed as Raw Meat in the United States) a troglodytic race preys upon unwary travellers; this is an enduring fantasy of the Underground, and has taken many forms. It exploits the fear that many disturbed or dangerous people prefer to live beneath the earth. In The Mysterious Planet (a 1986 serial in the Doctor Who dramas) set in the remote future, a race of humans lives among the ruins of Marble Arch station. In Quatermass and the Pit (1967) an alien spacecraft is found buried deep in an Underground station named Hobbs End; this is a genuinely disturbing film in which all the associations of the underworld, with death and with the devil, are fully exploited.

  Anthony Asquith’s Underground, a silent film made in 1928, is an invaluable record of the Tube system at a relatively early date. The hero is a young official of the Underground, and the villain is an employee at Lots Road Power Station; the two aspects of the Tube, the congregation of people and the raw power of the system, are subtly aligned. The film also emphasises the extent to which the Underground introduces itself into the mental and emotional life of its passengers. It becomes as much a protagonist as the characters themselves.

  There is now a literature on the Underground, as well as of the Underground. “Poems on the Underground,” a project launched at Aldwych station in January 1986, has now been imitated by many cities and countries. The chosen lyric is placed in the carriages alongside the usual advertisements; it has often been confirmed that passengers will read and memorise the chosen poem as a memorial of their journey. The words of the poem are enshrined in the carriage and seem to float above the passengers’ heads. So poets as diverse as William Blake and Lewis Carroll, William Shakespeare and Arthur Symons sing in concert beneath the ground. Ah sunflower … your hair is exceedingly white … Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines … as a windmill turns in the wind on an empty sky.

  I understand how the Underground can become an essential part of the personality. My dreams and memories have always been associated with the Central Line. I was brought up in East Acton, and educated at a school in Ealing Broadway. At various points of my early life I lived at Shepherd’s Bush, Queensway and Notting Hill Gate. When I worked in an office I alighted from the train at Tottenham Court Road and then, at a later date, at Holborn or Chancery Lane. The Central Line was one of the boundaries or lines of my life. Now that I am beyond its reach, I feel free.

  Yet, like the escaped prisoner yearning for his dungeon, I often dream of the Underground. I dream of lines going to improbable destinations all over the world. I dream of strange encounters on platforms with people I seem to know. I dream of coming up for air and being confronted by a transformed cityscape. I dream of running down passages in search of a platform. I dream of gliding down vast escalators. I dream of crossing the live rails from platform to platform. I dream of standing unsteadily in a carriage as it rattles along. And, yes, I dream of the Central Line.

  The notion of hidden treasure is a pervasive one. The London Silver Vaults are below the ground of Chancery Lane, and the Crown Jewels were until recently kept in a bunker beneath the Tower.

  The temptation to bury precious objects is very strong, especially in times of danger. Criminal fraternities may bury their gains for many months before retrieving them. Jewels, coins, gold and silver plate, will still lie under the ground. If they could be unearthed, they would dazzle the city. A hoard of Roman gold coins, placed within a purse and then within a box, has been found in the City of London. During the Great Fire of 1666 Samuel Pepys buried his Parmesan cheese and wine in his London garden. His was an ancient instinct. The underworld, however, is not always safe. In the same conflagration the booksellers of St. Paul’s Churchyard put all their stock into the parish church of St. Faith’s, in the crypt of the cathedral, but the collapsed roof of the cathedral broke through. When the booksellers opened the vault the rush of air made the paper leap into flames and the books burned for a week. Charles Dickens exhibited a proper London fascination for underground places when he declared in an essay, “The City of the Absent” (1861), that “the deserted wine-merchants’ cellars are fine subjects for consideration; but the deserted money cellars of the bankers, and their plate cellars, and their jewel cellars, what subterranean regions of the Wonderful Lamp are these!”

  The Jewel House in the Tower of London, 1841 (illustration credit Ill.37)

  The lamp still burns brightly. As the price of gold rises ever higher many London banks are building larger and deeper vaults to accommodate the precious metal; they are great caverns of treasure. It is estimated that 250 million ounces of gold are concealed beneath the ground. But no London cellar is more wonderful than the vaults of the Bank of England. They contain the second biggest hoard of gold bullion on the planet. A network of tunnels, radiating out from the bank, runs beneath the City streets. Several thousand bars of 24-carat gold, each one weighing 28 pounds, are stored within them. They may be said to light up the bowels of the earth.

  You would not know, on walking along High Holborn or Whitehall, that there is a secret world beneath your feet. There is no echo, no sign or token, of corridors and chambers below the surface. You would pass its gateways without giving them a second glance. Everything is contrived to seem as normal as possible. It is only when you understand the nature of underground London that you come to realise that everything is in fact something else. So the contagion of secrecy spreads.
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br />   In the centre of the capital, where the government agencies are situated, an underground world has been created. It is made up of tunnels, exchanges, bunkers, cubicles and larger command spaces. Many of them were created in the period before and during the Second World War; others were constructed at the time of nuclear threat from the Soviet Union. Yet despite the passing of these immediate dangers, some of them are still in use for purpose or purposes unknown.

  The arrival of the ingots, 1930 (illustration credit Ill.38)

  In 1939 a tunnel was constructed from the south side of Trafalgar Square to the Cenotaph, but this was only the first stage in what became a large underground network. The original tunnel was soon extended to what purported to be a telephone exchange in Craig’s Court at the top of Whitehall; the exchange is still there, and remains almost completely unnoticed. The tunnels were then deepened and widened to take in Parliament Square, Great Smith Street, Pall Mall, Marsham Street, Horseferry Road, with an emergency exit in the basement of the old Westminster Hospital. It is an extensive network of underground life connected with the workings of the government.

  A door can be found at the bottom of the Duke of York Steps that lead down from Carlton House Terrace into the Mall; a very large extractor fan is fastened to an adjacent wall. The door itself is barely visible. Another portal is to be found on the opposite side of the road, within the great ivy-covered bunker on the edge of Horse Guards Parade known as the Citadel. There were once four such “citadels,” the portals to subterranean London. Of more open access are the Cabinet War Rooms buried beneath the Treasury. But other rooms and tunnels connected to it are not available for public inspection, for the simple reason that they are connected to the same complex beneath Whitehall.

  In 1942 a vast and elaborate underground structure was built 100 feet beneath High Holborn, extending from Furnival Street and Chancery Lane to Red Lion Street in the north. It was designed to contain a deep bunker and a telephone exchange. An entrance can be found at 39 Furnival Street, and another at 31 High Holborn. They are both easy to miss, and are deliberately designed to be as unmemorable and as unobtrusive as possible. In Furnival Street are two black double doors that might lead to a warehouse; above them is a large iron pulley, for moving freight, and an air vent. Ventilation shafts are also visible in the adjacent Took’s Court.

  The designers of the Cabinet War Room under Whitehall, L.C. Hollis and L.F. Burgis, in April 1946 (illustration credit Ill.39)

  The portal at High Holborn is, at the moment of writing, covered by scaffolding. But if you peer through the glass doorway, you can see what looks to be a derelict lift. This is the lift that takes you eight floors down into the underworld. Two half-mile tunnels lie there, South Street and Second Avenue, as well as other tunnels constructed in the early 1950s. There is room for eighty people, with dining rooms and communal living areas as well as private cubicles. A six-month store of food was once kept here.

  The Whitehall tunnels and the Holborn tunnels were then connected by a further tunnel beneath Covent Garden and extending south into Trafalgar Square. It comprised a miniature city beneath the surface. A journalist from the New Statesman, Duncan Campbell, penetrated this network of underground passages more than thirty years ago. He revealed that there were over thirty access shafts that “connect these catacombs with the surface, most of them emerging unobtrusively in government buildings or telephone exchanges.” He found his own portal on a traffic island in Bethnal Green Road, as neglected and invisible an entrance as you could hope for. He descended 100 feet, complete with bicycle, and then began his ride under the ground. He described the air as “fusty.”

  He passed through the tunnel beneath St. Martin-le-Grand, close to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and then journeyed west to Holborn by way of Fleet Street. He then went on to Whitehall, all the while guided by signs pointing to the various destinations. Among them were Whitehall, the Mall, Leicester Square, Waterloo and Lord’s Cricket Ground—all of them connected by a system of deep-level tunnels. He estimated the principal tunnel to be some 20 feet in width, with subsidiary tunnels of 9 feet. He found a red signal in one of them warning “Danger”; this tunnel “is unventilated and has no air in it.” But “implausibly disguised as a touring cyclist I have often visited these tunnels.”

  He re-emerged in the bowels of the Holborn Telephone Exchange. Campbell has published some photographs of his journey. The tunnels are eerie and somehow unsettling, like pictures of the deep ocean floor or the craters upon Mars. It was an astonishing journey, worthy to be recorded alongside other London pilgrimages. It can never be made again, however; after Campbell published the account of his escapade, in the New Statesman of 16 December 1980, all entrances to the system were carefully secured. This may be viewed as secrecy for the sake of secrecy, pointless and farcical, but it is testimony to the fascination that the underworld still exerts.

  Other hidden passages run beneath Whitehall, some of them dug 200 feet below the surface. In one of them is situated the emergency strategy group known as COBRA. A newspaper report has described it as “an air-pressurised network of low-ceilinged corridors leading to a large and dimly lit room.” Tunnels weave beneath New Oxford Street, and also in the area between the Strand and the Embankment. Various government departments of Westminster were placed in alignment, so that an underground refuge could be provided for hundreds or thousands of civil servants in the event of an attack; this was known as the “black move.” A huge bunker is supposed to have been built beneath Parliament Square.

  It is believed that a tunnel under the Thames joins the MI6 building at Vauxhall with the MI5 headquarters at Millbank; the Victoria Line between Pimlico and Vauxhall shadows its course. The Victoria Line does in fact pass beneath many notable buildings, and comes very close to Buckingham Palace. It has often been suggested that, at a time of grave national peril, it could be used to take senior ministers and members of the royal family out of London. A deep underground line was built to connect Elephant and Castle with Camberwell Green; it was supposed to be part of the Bakerloo Line, but in the 1950s its opening was “deferred.” The tunnels still exist, but no trains run along them.

  Wherever you look, underground London offers an echo or double image of the world above. Beneath the 7 acres of Lincoln’s Inn Fields is an underground network that in 1939 was designed to harbour 1,300 people. There were, or are, underground trenches beneath Eaton Square, Vincent Square and Golden Square; refuges were also built beneath Hyde Park, Green Park and St. James’s Park. Smaller trench systems were constructed beneath eighteen other London landmarks, from Shepherd’s Bush Common to the gardens of the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch; they are now unknown and unseen. The tram subway running through Kingsway became for a while a subterranean flood-control centre kept away from the public gaze. It now lies empty and disused. But perhaps it is not altogether empty. One subterranean voyager, Michael Harrison, ended his account of secret tunnels in London Beneath the Pavement (1961) with a terse epigraph. He dedicated the book “DIS MANIBUS.” To the gods of the underworld.

  The people of prehistory took refuge in caves, reserving the innermost recesses for sacred activity. At times of warfare in the twentieth century, when death came from the sky, many Londoners sought instinctively for safety beneath the earth.

  In the First World War hundreds of thousands of people went down into the Underground system in order to escape the depredations of the Zeppelin airships. This was unofficial activity, not supervised or controlled, and no government shelters were ever provided. It was agreed that people could take refuge on the platforms if an air raid was actually under way, but not in anticipation of an attack. In other circumstances a ticket was always required before entrance was permitted. Some passengers bought the cheapest ticket, and then continued around and around the Circle Line until the likely danger had passed. At the time of most danger, in February 1918, the number of shelterers reached one-third of a million. There were some famous underground refugees. Georg
e V and the senior members of the royal family were, at the times of Zeppelin raids, taken into the tunnels near Buckingham Palace.

  The experience of the First World War was enough to alert the authorities of a later conflict to the danger of a mass descent into the tunnels and platforms. It was assumed that the underground refugees in the Second World War would hinder the movement of trains carrying the dead away from central London to communal graves. More significantly, it was feared by officials from the Home Office and the Ministry of Health that Londoners might develop what was known as a “deep shelter mentality” and refuse to come to the surface. It was believed, and stated, that the civilian population was likely to suffer “a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis” as a result of prolonged and intense bombing. Experts in the psychology of crowds suggested that “people would regress to an earlier level of needs and desires.”

  That “earlier level” was of course enshrined in the Underground system itself, whereby people would descend into deep levels of the past. A spiritual, as well as chronological, dimension can be found in this flight beneath the earth. The citizens would become children again and “would demand, with the all or nothing vehemence of infants, the security, food and warmth which the mother used to give in the past.” So many of them wished to return to the depths of Mother Earth.