London: The Biography

The scheme for transport under London had been broached in the 1840s and 1850s, but had met with serious objections. It was feared that the weight of traffic overhead (which an underground system was meant to relieve) would crush any tunnels beneath, and that the houses above the proposed routes would shiver and fall from the vibrations. Eventually in 1860 one scheme was accepted. The Metropolitan Railway was constructed from Paddington to Farringdon Street within three years, by means of the “cut and cover” method, and immediately proved a great success. The enterprise represented a triumph of mid-Victorian energy and ingenuity; there is an engraving of the “Trial Trip on the Underground Railway, 1863” in which the open carriages are filled with men waving their stove-pipe hats in the air as they pass beneath a tunnel. On opening day “the crowd at the Farringdon Street station was as great as at the doors of a theatre on the first night of some popular performer,” and in fact the sheer vivacity and theatricality of the undertaking were a large part of its popularity; the spectacle of steam trains disappearing under the ground, like demons in a pantomime, satisfied the London appetite for sensation.

By the early twentieth century the shape of the contemporary underground “network” was beginning to emerge. The City and South London Railway opened in 1890, for example; because the route from King William Street to Stockwell was created by means of tunnelling rather than the older “cut and cover” method, it has the distinction of being the first named “the tube.” It had the further distinction of being the first electrically operated underground system in the world, after years of steam; the carriages had no windows, on the understandable principle that there was nothing particular to see, and the luxurious furnishings gave them the nickname of “padded cells.”

The tube was followed by the Central Line in 1900, the Bakerloo and the Piccadilly in 1906, and the Hampstead (or Northern) line in 1907. It had ceased to be a spectacular or even surprising innovation, and had become an inalienable part of London’s quotidian life. By slow degrees, too, it acquired the familiar characteristics and aspects of the city. Or perhaps it is the case that the city above ground has made a replica of itself below. The Underground has its streets and avenues which the pedestrians quickly recognise and follow. It has its short cuts, its crossroads, its particular features (no escalators at Queensway, deep lifts in Hampstead, long escalators at the Angel) and, just like the city itself, areas of bright lights and bustle are surrounded by areas of darkness and disuse. The rhythms of the city are endlessly mimicked beneath the city, as well as its patterns of activity and habitation.

Like the great city, too, the thoroughfares of the Underground have their own particular associations and connections. The Northern Line is intense and somehow desperate; the Central Line is energetic, while the Circle is adventurous and breezy. The Bakerloo Line, however, is flat and despairing. The gloom of Lancaster Gate sits between the bustle of Bond Street and the brightness of Notting Hill Gate. Where disasters have occurred, such as Moorgate and Bethnal Green, the air is still desolate. But there are stations, like Baker Street and Gloucester Road, which lift the spirit. The air itself becomes quite different as the passengers travel towards the oldest sections of London in the City. As the Circle Line moves from Edgware Road and Great Portland Street towards the ancient centre, it travels through ever deeper levels of anonymity and oblivion. On one stretch of that line G.K. Chesterton noticed that the names of St. James’s Park, Westminster, Charing Cross, Temple, 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.”

These images are entirely appropriate for an enterprise which, in its operations, has descended so deeply that it has reached the levels of the old primeval swamp which once was London; beneath Victoria Underground Station some fossils, fifty million years old, were uncovered. These ancient depths may indeed account for the peculiar sensation and atmosphere which the Underground evokes. There are accounts of ghosts, or presences, in the subterranean depths. Certainly there are “ghost stations” with long-forgotten platforms, some of them still retaining their faded hoardings and posters. There are some forty of them remaining-British Museum, City Road, South Kentish Town, York Road, Marlborough Road and King William Street among them-silent and generally invisible.