London: The Biography

An eighteenth-century German traveller observed that “one third of the inhabitants of London live under ground.” We may date this inclination to the Bronze Age, when underground tunnels were built a little to the west of where the Greenwich Observatory is now situated. (It has been suggested that the wells or pits which ventilate them were themselves early forms of stellar observation, which may once more suggest that continuity for which London is notable.) The German traveller was in fact remarking upon the curious basements or “cellar dwellings” of eighteenth-century London, which had already been a feature of the city for two hundred years. They were let to the very poor who “entered by steps from the street down a well which was supposed to be closed at nightfall by a flap.” In the transcripts of the poor we have some brief glimpses of this subterranean life-“I am a cobbler. I live in a cellar … I am a shoemaker. I keep a kitchen [basement dwelling] in Monmouth Street … I do not know the landlady’s name, I pay my money every Monday.” But these traps of dampness and darkness also had more nefarious uses. “I keep a public cellar” seems to have meant that vagrants or drunks or debauchees had access to a buried life.

This tendency to seek refuge beneath the city became most noticeable in the twentieth century. It has been estimated that during the First World War, one-third of a million Londoners went underground in February 1918, to shelter in the tube stations which extended below the capital. They became accustomed to their buried life, and even began to savour it. Indeed, according to Philip Ziegler in London at War, one of the principal fears of the authorities was that a “‘deep shelter’ mentality might grow up and result in paralysis of will among those who succumbed to it.” It was also suggested that the underground Londoners “would grow hysterical with fear and would never surface to perform their duties.”

In the autumn of 1940 Londoners were once more buried. They flocked to underground shelters or the crypts of churches, and certain people “lived underground, and saw less of the sky than any miner.” In each of the deep shelters more than a thousand people might congregate “lying closer together than the dead in any graveyard” while those in the crypts “sought shelter amongst the dead.” This is a constant image in descriptions of the subterranean life. It is like being dead, buried alive beneath the great city. The most famous of these caverns under the ground was the “Tilbury” beneath Commercial Road and Cable Street where thousands of East Enders sheltered from the bombs.

The tube stations were the most obvious locations of safety. Henry Moore wandered among their new inhabitants, and made preliminary notes for his drawings. “Dramatic, dismal lit, masses of reclining figures fading foreground. Chains hanging from old cranes … Mud and rubbish and chaotic untidiness everywhere.” The stench of urine was noticeable, as well as fetid human smells: this is a picture of London in almost primeval state, as if in the journey under ground the citizens had gone back centuries. “I had never seen so many reclining figures and even the train tunnels seemed to be like the holes in my sculpture. And amid the grim tension, I noticed groups of strangers forming together in intimate groups and children asleep within feet of the passing trains.” He compared it to “the hold of a slave ship” except that its passengers were sailing nowhere. Once again, as in the previous episodes of wartime bombing in London, the vision of a subterranean population alarmed the authorities. In Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, a late twentieth-century hymn to the city, the narrator had once “sought the safety of the tubes” during the Blitz, and had since that time become obsessed with “lost tube lines” and the whole world under the surface of the city. “I discovered evidence that London was interlaced with connecting tunnels, home of a troglodytic race that had gone underground at the time of the Great Fire … Others had hinted of a London under London in a variety of texts as far back as Chaucer.” It is a wonderful fantasy, but in the early 1940s there was a genuine fear that these “subterraneans” would become a reality.