London: The Biography

“We ought not to encourage a permanent day and night population underground,” Herbert Morrison stated in the autumn of 1944. “If that spirit gets abroad we are defeated.” The prospect of defeatism was not the only concern. It was also noticed that the experience of living underground encouraged an anti-authoritarian and egalitarian spirit, as if the conditions above the ground could be reversed. Here, out of sight, radicalism might flourish; one newsletter which circulated among the subterraneans denounced the wartime authorities for “indifference amounting almost to callousness, neglect, soulless contempt for elementary human decencies.” So those under the ground instilled an element of fear in those who remained above it; it resembles the ancient superstitious fear of the miner, as an emblem of the dark world in which he works. It is the fear of the depths.

That is why the figure of the underground man is so potent, known over the centuries as the fermor, the raker and the flusher, whose employment it was to clean out the sewers and clear them of obstruction. There were sewer-hunters as well, also known as toshers, who wandered through the sewers looking for articles which they could sell. “Many wondrous tales are still told among the people,” Henry Mayhew wrote, “of men having lost their way in the sewers, and of having wandered among the filthy passages-their lights extinguished by the noisome vapours-till, faint and overpowered, they dropped down and died on the spot. Other stories are told of sewer-hunters beset by myriads of enormous rats … in a few days afterwards their skeletons were discovered picked to the very bones.” These alarming stories testify to the fear associated with the underground passages of London, and there were indeed real dangers in this enterprise of converting rubbish-iron, copper, rope, bone-into money. The brickwork was often rotten and liable to crumble or to fall, the air was noxious, and the tides of the nineteenth-century Thames swept through the sewers leaving some victims “quite dead, battered and disfigured in a dreadful manner.” They worked silently and stealthily, closing off their bull’s-eye lanterns whenever they passed beneath a street-grating “for otherwise a crowd might collect overhead.” They wore greasy velveteen coats with capacious pockets, and trousers of dirty canvas. They were, in the words of one Londoner not meaning to make a pun, “the lowest of the low.”

There are more recent accounts of the honest flushers and gangers who are gainfully employed to clear the sewers of soft mud and grit. A newspaper account of 1960 reports, of a Piccadilly sewer which drained into the Tyburn, that “it was like crossing the Styx. The fog had followed us down from the streets and swirled above the discoloured and strong-smelling river like the stream of Hades.” So the descent conjures up mythological imagery. Eric Newby descended into the sewer of the Fleet and “seen fitfully by the light of miners’ lanterns and special lamps, it was like one of the prisons designed by Piranesi.” Again the imagery of the prison emerges. One sewerman told an interested guest below: “You should see some of ’em under the City. They’re medieval. They don’t show ’em to visitors.” In that medieval spirit we read then of a “cavernous chamber … with pillars, arches, and buttresses, like a cathedral undercroft.” It is a strange city beneath the ground, perhaps best exemplified by worn manhole covers which, instead of reading SELF LOCKING, spell out ELF KING.

No account of underground London, however, could be complete without the Underground itself. It is a great subterranean metropolis covering an area of 620 square miles, 254 miles of railway connecting this extraordinary profusion of tunnels and stations with their mysterious names such as Gospel Oak, White City, Angel and Seven Sisters.